When you’re from Snow Hill, North Carolina — population maybe 1,800 — the odds of making it as a successful hip-hop artist are about as remote as winning Powerball. But in the case of Marlanna Evans, better known as Rapsody, when you dedicate your life to defying those odds, developing a reputation for wicked wordplay and singular storytelling along the way, you might find yourself embraced by a Grammy Award–winning producer, trading verses with Kendrick Lamar and on the cusp of being recognized as one of the best rappers in the business.
The 29-year-old wordsmith, one of five children from a lower-middle-class family, was handed a different dream by her hardworking parents. “As a woman in the South, [you’re taught] to graduate high school, go to college, get a good job, get married, have kids and that’s your life,” she says. But Rapsody wasn’t interested in toeing the line. Instead, the 5-foot-3 rapper wanted to play basketball like Kobe Bryant and rhyme like Lauryn Hill.
"THE FACT THAT RAPSODY CAN LYRICALLY OUTSHINE MOST OF HER MALE PEERS MAKES HER A SIMULTANEOUS GIFT AND CURSE TO THE RAP MALE EGO."
While her father worked long hours as a mechanic for DuPont and her mother did the same hand-painting china patterns for Lenox, Rapsody spent hours listening to Nas and A Tribe Called Quest. But MC Lyte’s “Poor Georgie” was the game-changer — a heartbreaking storyline set down by a female rapper more than holding her own in the male hip-hop world.
“That was my first introduction to a woman rhyming and I was just so wrapped into the story of the song,” she says. Still, becoming a successful rapper seemed so intangible that Rapsody stayed focused on basketball while penning poetry and kicking her rhymes into the vacuum hose that doubled as a make-believe microphone.
A star on the Greene Central High School team, she turned down a scholarship to play for Meredith College and enrolled at North Carolina State after her older sister, who lived in Raleigh, told her about the city’s hip-hip culture and Plum Crazy, a nightclub where top-selling rappers performed. Once on campus, Rapsody started a hip-hop club, H20, with a group of friends. As word of her talent spread, the rap collective known as Kooley High came calling — asking her to be their first female member.
While Rapsody was diligently honing her craft, her brother-in-law handed her a CD of beats from his friend Patrick. The name didn’t register, but Patrick was Patrick Douthit, aka 9th Wonder, the Grammy-winning producer on Mary J. Blige’s “Good Woman Down.”
