Librarian Scooter Hayes (center) with young rappers.

Silence is hardly golden at the New Hanover County Public Library in Wilmington, NC, where students gather at its four branches to rhyme and rap at least once a month. “They choose a topic, and a beat, come to the mike and we record them,” says Scooter Hayes, youth services librarian and a 2012 Library Journal Mover & Shaker, who launched Rap Club in the fall of 2012. “I’m the producer behind the scenes, help ghost write, and am on a lot of tracks as well.” Hayes is also the persona behind "Dewey Decimal Rap," created by his bewigged and bespectacled alter ego, Melvil Dewey. Hayes dreamed up the tune to fulfill an assignment about the Dewey Decimal System while attending North Carolina Central University in Durham, NC as a Master of Library Science student. The rap tune has earned more than 1.8 million views on YouTube; some librarians use it to teach the Dewey Decimal System to kids. Known as “Mr. Scooter” to his young patrons, Hayes has packaged 17 of the new Rap Club tracks on an album, Hot! Fresh! Delicious!, which include songs about zombies, superheroes, and anything else students want to rap about. The CD is packaged to look like a pizza box—complete with grease stains—while the disc art looks like a pizza pie with mic-shaped pepperonis. More than 50 students under the age of 12 act as “emcees,” on Hot! Fresh! Delicious!, rapping under monikers from Craze-A to Sizzle Pop. Set to drop June 20, the CD will have a release party on the same day at Kids Music Fest, the library’s music festival for children that kicks off its summer reading program, now in its second year. With a $500 grant from the Friends of the New Hanover Public County Library, Hayes printed 100 physical copies of the CD to sell at Music Fest, with digital copies available in June on on iTunes and CD Baby. He’s also promoting the songs, such as "No Food Allowed in the Library," on YouTube.

The 'Hot! Fresh! Delicious!' disc.

To Ania Welin, whose three children all appear on the album, Rap Club has been a circuitous path to getting her kids to read and write even more. Lending her own beatbox skills to some tracks on the CD, Welin sees rap songs as poems set to music—and writing them as another way for her children to express themselves. “In order to write a good rap, they have to write clearly and think about what they want to say,” she says. “They’re writing rhyming stanzas. But to them, it’s fun.” Her son, Ezra Heinberg, 10, agrees. Although Ezra doesn’t think a career as a rapper is in his future—professional soccer player are his plans for now—he likes writing stories during Rap Club and setting them to music. “My mom helps me with the rap,” he says. “I can make up my own rhymes, but they’re usually really weird.” Hayes/Dewey’s own rap tunes about libraries, also including "Evil Librarian" and "Bookmobile," are collected on two CDs. Hayes still creates his own mixes, stitching literacy and storytelling to rhyming, rhythm, and rap—and he enjoyed bringing his youngest patrons along for the ride. “I didn’t grow up thinking I would be a musician,” says Hayes. “But people want songs about the library.”