To hear Lovebug Starski tell it, he was there when the phrase “hip-hop” was coined, trading the two words back and forth while improvising lines with Cowboy of the Furious Five at a farewell party for a friend who was headed into the Army.

He incorporated the phrase into the D.J. sets he was playing in the South Bronx, helping to solidify it as lingo of the scene and inadvertently providing the opening line to “Rapper’s Delight,” the 1979 Sugarhill Gang song that would take hip-hop out of parties and onto the radio.

And about that song: To hear Lovebug Starski tell it, he was the inspiration for it.

“Sylvia Robinson will tell you: I was ‘Rapper’s Delight,’ ” he was quoted in the book “Yes Yes Y’all: The Experience Music Project Oral History of Hip-Hop’s First Decade” (2002), referring to the record executive who formed the Sugarhill Gang and released the song. (She died in 2011.)