Alyssa Michelle Stevens sauntered across the stage like she owned the joint. It was close to midnight in Miami and the 24-year-old rapper known to her growing legion of followers as Latto was ringing in 2023 with her smash “Big Energy” on Miley Cyrus’ “New Year’s Eve Party.” “I’m a bad chick and I could be your fantasy,” proclaimed the Atlanta rhymer, immaculately attired in a bejeweled green-velvet bodysuit.

“Big Energy’s” instantly recognizable sample—from the Tom Tom Club’s 1981 classic “Genius of Love”—was burnished by a guitarist, bassist, keyboardist, drummer, percussionist, horn section, backup singers and a DJ. Latto had officially crossed over, sharing the bill with no less than Dolly Parton and David Byrne, among others.

It was a far cry from her early days as a contestant on the 2016 reality series The Rap Game, when she was known as Miss Mulatto (the biracial lyricist changed her stage name in 2021 after some backlash over what many critics saw as the throwback term’s racially derogatory meaning).

After winning the Jermaine Dupri/Queen Latifah-produced MC competition, Latto turned down a So So Def recording contract. The brazen move ended up paying off; since then, she’s inked with RCA; dropped two platinum singles (2019’s “Bitch From da Souf” and the 2020 Gucci Mane team-up “Muwop”); scored one of the biggest records of 2022 with the aforementioned “Big Energy” (double platinum with 220m+ worldwide streams on Spotify alone); recorded a “Big Energy” remix with Mariah Carey (who’d previously mined “Genius of Love” for platinum with 1995’s “Fantasy”); picked up a 2023 Grammy nod for Best New Artist; and become the opening act for Lizzo’s sold-out arena trek The Special Tour.

“I was the first solo female rapper from Atlanta to go gold… Now I’m the first solo female rapper from Atlanta to go platinum,” Latto boasted in a 2021 interview on REVOLT’s rap-video countdown show Off Top when asked what prompted her to name her debut album Queen of da Souf, which was met by raised eyebrows by some fans, fellow artists and critics who saw the move as presumptuous. Latto stood her ground. “Sometimes you gotta take your flowers,” she insisted. “Motherfuckers ain’t going to give it to you.”

Yet even before her “Big Energy” glow-up, Latto turned heads with a series of freestyles, most notably her March 2022 appearance on New York station Hot 97’s influential Funkmaster Flex show. “Y’all ain’t never heard a verse from me that I ain’t fucking wrote/ Never ducking smoke/ Like my bank account I’m blowing O’s/ Can’t be pigeon because none of these bitches going toe to toe,” fired off a cocky Latto.

For rap legend Monie Love, who first entered the hip-hop nation’s consciousness with a memorable guest verse on Queen Latifah’s celebrated 1989 Black feminist anthem “Ladies First,” Latto’s stardom comes as no surprise.

“Every piece of her success makes perfect sense to me,” says the Grammy-nominated MC, member of the storied Native Tongues rap crew and on-air personality at Atlanta’s KISS 104.1. “I’ve watched Latto since she was a kid on TV trying to be the next rap star. She didn’t just get to her spot. It wasn’t a finger snap. I’ve seen her plight. She’s earned her stripes, which is why she’s so clear in terms of what she represents and how she’s honed her craft as a lyricist.”

Today Latto is in an elite group of women rappers from the South soaring high on the charts and beyond, often outperforming their male peers.

There’s seemingly unstoppable Houston megastar and budding Black feminist icon Megan Thee Stallion, a consistent hitmaker and three-time Grammy winner.

Rising 23-year-old Memphis rap phenom GloRilla, nominated for a 2023 Best Rap Performance Grammy, last year dropped what were arguably the summer’s two biggest bangers, the unabashedly ratchet anthem “F.N.F. (Let’s Go)” and the gold remix “Tomorrow 2” featuring Cardi B.

Since making their 2018 introduction with the two-fisted album Girl Code, meanwhile, Miami tandem and social-media faves City Girls have racked up north of 7m in activity between features and their own singles.

There is a genuine sisterhood among these acts. Latto has recorded with and publicly supported Megan, City Girls’ JT and Yung Miami and, most recently, GloRilla, who guested on Latto’s bass-heavy, hell-raising 2022 track “FTCU,” which also features late Memphis rap queen and Three 6 Mafia stalwart Gangsta Boo, an influential figure who died in January 2023.

Boo’s friend Echo Hattix is an industry vet who’s helped guide the careers of E-40, Snoop Dogg, Gnarls Barkley, Big Boi and Boo herself. She says that Latto’s reaching out to collaborate with the Grind City legend and other Southern female rappers sends a powerful message. “Latto pulling in Boo on the remix showed respect and honored her legacy,” Hattix notes. “Gangsta Boo recognized the authenticity of this new wave of female rappers and how savvy they are. She was beyond excited about how they unapologetically know and own their worth.”

The lineage shared by these women is vast and diverse. Consider the socially conscious North Carolina spitter and three-time Grammy nominee Rapsody; Diamond and Princess, the breakout stars of the Atlanta rap group Crime Mob, whose 2004 hit “Knuck If You Buck” remains one of the Dirty South’s most celebrated club anthems; and Miami’s “baddest chick,” Trina, the city’s first platinum female rapper. No Limit Records standout Mia X remains New Orleans’ first lady of hip-hop. And acclaimed Virginia MC, songwriter, producer, arranger, video innovator and all-around music-industry change agent Missy Elliott is arguably the most influential artist of the late ’90s and early aughts, with smashes like “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly),” “Get Ur Freak On” and “Work It.”

Yet many of the women who opened doors for Latto and her Southern female rap predecessors remain unsung, their stories largely obscured by the fog of hip-hop’s rise to cultural and commercial dominance.

This history begins in Columbia, S.C., in the fall of 1979. Gwendolyn “Blondy” Chisolm, Cheryl “The Pearl” Cook and Angie “Angie B” Brown were friends in elementary school who became even tighter as cheerleaders in high school. The girls shared a love of poetry and, like the rest of the country, were smitten by The Sugarhill Gang’s revelatory Top 40 single, “Rapper’s Delight.”

The Gang was set to perform at the local Township Auditorium. By then, Blondy, The Pearl and Angie were writing their own rhymes and singing around town, and called themselves The Sequence. “There was this guy trying to talk to Angie,” recalled Blondy in an interview with Rock the Bells. “He told her he was with Sugar Hill Records and could get her into the show… Angie said, ‘Only if you can get my girls in, too.’ He got us in and got us backstage.” (Years later, Angie B would be known to the world as gold-selling neo-soul artist Angie Stone.)

The Sequence subsequently managed to get themselves an audition with legendary Sugar Hill head Sylvia Robinson, who after seeing a performance of what would become their groundbreaking 1979 debut single, “Funk You Up,” exclaimed, “I’m gonna make you girls stars!”

They became the first Southern female rap act to score a record deal and release a studio recording. Among other exploits, the trio earned a gold plaque, toured with the Sugarhill Gang and provided backup vocals for Spoonie G’s 1980 “Monster Jam.” And though “Funk You Up” has been sampled by Boogie Down Productions and Dr. Dre, among others, The Sequence largely fell through the cracks of rap history.

Hip-hop was still in its infancy. The sound and culture rarely strayed from its Bronx roots until the emergence of the Miami bass scene. In 1986 the 808-fueled genre, influenced by Afrika Bambaataa and the Soulsonic Force’s electro hip-hop masterpiece “Planet Rock,” delivered its first classic with “Throw the D” by the Luther “Uncle Luke” Campbell-led 2 Live Crew.

Bass music was fast (125+ beats per minute), DJ-centered, built on a call-and-response foundation and overtly sexual, sometimes wildly misogynistic. With cuts like “We Want Some Pussy” blasted nonstop at block parties in urban neighborhoods like Miami’s Liberty City, the bass music scene didn’t seem like a terribly safe space for girls. Yet women thrived, establishing the template for future Southern female rap artists.

The year “Throw the D” made its debut, Campbell’s cousin, Anquette Allen, fired back with “Throw the P.” Soon Keia Red and Ray Ray joined Allen to form the bass trio Anquette, which released its first LP, Ghetto Style…, in 1987. The group’s most memorable statement, though, was “Janet Reno,” a 1988 shout-out to Miami’s state attorney [later U.S. attorney general in the Clinton administration], who’d garnered strong support among women voters in Florida with her mid-’80s campaign targeting “deadbeat dads.” Rapped Allen, “When she’s through with you/ You’ll wish you never saw me or the baby or the place where we met.”

“Anquette was the first female bass artist respected alongside the dudes,” recalls Rachel De Rougemont, aka The Lady Tigra, who, with Elena “Bunny D” Cager, formed the Miami bass duo L’Trimm when the two were still in their teens. In 1988 the pair released “Cars With the Boom,” a playful ode to subwoofers that was a mid-level chart hit.

Continues Tigra, “The thing folks don’t realize is that when people talk about misogyny in hip-hop, it didn’t feel that way to us because we had huge female stars in Miami. Every time Luke or somebody came out with a song, the girls would respond. Bunny and I were unapologetically feminine. We were fly girls, but we were still in your face. You had to be in such a male-dominated space.”

Southern hip-hop now had its own sound and identity as Anquette and L’Trimm were soon joined by other genre-shifting women like freestyle dance artist Debbie Deb (“When I Hear Music”) and Missy Mist (“Gettin’ Bass”). By the dawn of the ’90s, the Florida rap genre had expanded to other Southern states, including Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana and Texas, whose Candy Fresh contributed rhymes to Wink D’s 1989 club hit “Get Busy.”

Yet bass was largely dismissed as “booty-shake music” by hip-hop purists. “It was very hard for us in the South to be taken seriously by the New York rap community,” Tigra confirms.

Beyond outliers like Uncle Luke and Houston’s infamous Geto Boys, Southern rap struggled for respect during hip-hop’s Golden Age, led by the likes of Eric B. & Rakim, MC Lyte, Public Enemy, Big Daddy Kane and De La Soul, L.A.’s Godfather of Gangster Rap Ice-T and breakouts like Compton’s self-proclaimed “World’s Most Dangerous Group,” N.W.A. Of course for Southern women rap artists, it was even more difficult to be taken seriously.

In 1990 San Antonio, Texas, native Choice broke ground as the precursor to the sexually charged lyrics of hip-hop icon Lil’ Kim. Her 1990 Rap-a-Lot Records debut, The Big Payback, was bold, empowering, hardcore, lewd and hilarious. “Your boyfriend ate my pussy/ Now he’s kissin’ on you,” Choice cracked on the underground romp “Cat Got Your Tongue.” But Choice couldn’t quite find an audience. After 1992’s Stick-n-Moove, she disappeared.

Two years later, however, both Mia X and Gangsta Boo would make their recording debuts, becoming platinum Southern rap stars. They and the likes of Missy, Trina, Diamond and Princess, Megan Thee Stallion, Latto, City Girls and GloRilla stand on the shoulders of early Southern rap innovators like The Sequence, Anquette, L’Trimm, Candy Fresh and Choice.

“It feels good,” says The Lady Tigra. “We were standing up for all the girls who wanted to say things their way. I remember the first time I heard Gangsta Boo, the first time I heard Missy and Trina. I love those City Girls and I love to see Megan and Latto doing their thing. They are like our little cousins… our nieces, our daughters. They are family.”