Gwendolyn Chisolm, a South Carolina grocery worker who, through a stroke of serendipity, carved out a slice of pop music history at the dawn of the hip-hop era as Blondy, a founding member of the Sequence, the first female rap group to score a hit, died on April 6 in Atlanta. She was 66.
She died in a hospital of septic shock after a recent illness, her sister, Monica Scott, said.
Artists like Salt-N-Pepa, MC Lyte and Queen Latifah are rightly credited with smashing the gender barrier in rugged, male-dominated hip-hop in the mid- to late 1980s, proving that women deserved equal footing as rap stars — and could be just as rugged as men.
The Sequence predated all of them by years. Its members were three women who had been on a high school cheerleading squad together in Columbia, S.C.: Ms. Chisolm (who earned her nickname after dyeing her hair blond as a teenager), Angela Brown (known in the group as Angie B. and later as Angie Stone) and Cheryl Cook (Cheryl the Pearl).
They were scarcely a group when they began recording with the storied rap label Sugar Hill Records in late 1979. This was just months after the label had released the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight,” a feast of witty wordplay that became rap’s first Top 40 hit and helped establish hip-hop as a viable commercial genre.
The Sequence answered almost immediately with “Funk You Up,” a get-off-your-feet single that was one of the first records released by any female rap act and, more notably, was the first to strike gold commercially, rising to No. 15 on the Billboard Hot Soul singles chart. It was only the third rap song to make it into the Top 50.
The achievement was all the more unlikely given that the three women’s only real experience in dishing out rhymes was from the sidelines at C.A. Johnson High School football games. Unlike most cheerleaders, they wrote their own routines, and, as Ms. Chisolm said in a 2017 interview with Rolling Stone, “with cheering, you’re basically rapping right there.”
When the earliest rap singles, like “Rapper’s Delight” and Fatback Band’s “King Tim III (Personality Jock),” hit the airwaves, the three women began cobbling together rhymes, though they had little thought of stardom.
Fate intervened on Ms. Chisolm’s 20th birthday, Oct. 20, 1979, the day of one of the Sugarhill Gang’s first concerts, at the Township Auditorium in Columbia. Her boss at a local Super Saver supermarket had promised her tickets.
At first, the evening seemed like a disaster. Ms. Chisolm arrived with Ms. Brown and Ms. Cook to find no tickets waiting at the box office. Only through a chance encounter with a member of the Sugarhill Gang’s staff, who started flirting with Ms. Brown, did they manage to sneak backstage.
They quickly made their presence felt. “Once we got back there, we started talking,” Ms. Chisolm recalled in a 2007 oral history. “We said we can sing and rap better than the Sugarhill Gang.”
Their boasts fell on deaf ears. Then they heard a woman’s voice: “I’ll listen to y’all.” It was Sylvia Robinson — known as the “mother of hip-hop” — who had founded Sugar Hill Records that year with her husband, Joe Robinson.
As Rolling Stone later recounted, Ms. Robinson summoned a nearby bass player to lay down grooves while the women launched into an impromptu audition. Their first two numbers fell flat, and they were about to leave when, at Ms. Cook’s suggestion, they launched into “Funk You Up,” adapted from one of their old cheers.
“Stop it right there,” Ms. Robinson said, in Ms. Chisolm’s account. “Oh my god, I’m going to make you girls stars. That’s a hit.”
Gwendolyn Yvonne Chisolm was born on Oct. 20, 1959, in Columbia, to Alonzo Chisolm Sr. and Virginia Young (Chisolm) Scott. She grew in a housing project called the Saxon Homes — as did the other Sequence members — with a highly protective mother.
“I was the only girl in the projects that had to talk to her friends through the window,” she recalled in the oral history. Even at 20, Ms. Chisolm had to overcome her mother’s strident objections to attend the Sugarhill Gang concert that changed her life.
It was only a week after the chance audition that Ms. Robinson called and offered to fly her, Ms. Brown and Ms. Cook north to cut a record. Once behind a microphone in Sugar Hill’s Englewood, N.J., studio, a very different Gwendolyn Chisolm emerged.
“I’m five-foot-two/built so fine/36-26-36 dime,” she rapped, adopting a persona brimming with all the sexual swagger of any male M.C. As she later explained: “Blondy was just a character I made up for records. At that point in my life I had never done anything whatsoever.”
After the success of their song, the Sequence kept the momentum going. The group scored two more Top 40 singles on Billboard’s R&B charts: “Funky Sound (Tear the Roof Off),” a 1981 remake of Parliament’s “Tear the Roof Off the Sucker (Give Up the Funk),” as the 1976 single version was titled, and “I Don’t Need Your Love ,” a straight ahead vocal number, from 1982.
Eventually, the group ran aground on age-old industry issues, including tussles with their label over royalties. “We stopped recording because Sylvia and them were not paying us,” Ms. Chisolm later said.
The group disbanded in 1985. Ms. Brown peeled off to become a successful songwriter for stars like Mary J. Blige and Lenny Kravitz. Starting in the late 1990s, as Angie Stone, she was a notable singer in the neo-soul movement, alongside the likes of Erykah Badu and Lauryn Hill. She died from injuries from a car crash last year.
Ms. Chisolm also remained active in the music business, working in concert production and artist management and, later, as Ms. Stone’s personal assistant.
In addition to her sister, she is survived by a brother, Milton Stewart.
The Sequence’s legacy lives on through abundant samples of “Funk You Up” and “Funky Sound” by artists like Dr. Dre, En Vogue and Ice Cube.
Ms. Chisolm hoped for a bit more. “We want people to know that we were before Salt-N-Pepa, Queen Latifah, MC Lyte, Roxanne Shanté and all of them,” she said in the oral history.
“We are,” she added, “the original queens of rap.”
Alex Williams is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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