SMS Music Lessons

Day 7 of Black History in Music, Jamaican Born, and the Bronx bread...DJ Kool Herc!

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DJ Kool Herc (Clive Campbell) was born April 16, 1955 in West Kingston, Jamaica and migrated to the Bronx, New York in 1967. His classmates at Alfred E. Smith High School referred to him as Hercules because of his size and avid trips to the weight room. Herc started out as a graffiti artist in a group called the Ex-Vandals, but was introduced to deejaying when his father bought a PA system and didn’t know how to hook it up.

Inspired by James Brown and Jamaican music’s drum and bass, Herc experimented with records in his bedroom. He would focus on what he referred to as “the get-down part” because it was the portion of the song was that got the dancers excited. Also known as “the break” of a record, Herc would isolate these heavy bass and percussion snippets and used two turntables to switch between two copies of the same record. This technique became known as the “Merry-Go-Round,” and he is now considered the originator of break-beat DJing itself.

16-year-old Herc made his debut as a DJ at his sister’s party in the recreation room at 1520 Sedgwick Ave on August 11, 1973. Many believe this was the night Hip Hop was born, and Herc became known as its “Father” influencing all future DJs and their techniques.

DJ Kool Herc is the originator of break-beat DJing, where the breaks of funk songs—being the most danceable part, often featuring percussion—were isolated and repeated for the purpose of all-night dance parties. Later DJs such as Grandmaster Flash refined and developed the use of breakbeats, including cutting. While growing up in Kingston he saw and heard the sound systems firsthand at neighborhood parties called dancehalls. He moved to the Bronx, New York at the age of 12 and began to throw free neighborhood parties.

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For Day 6 of Black History in Music we would like to acknowledge Ms. Dinah Washington

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Dinah Washington has been called “the most popular black female recording artist of the 1950s.” Her success, at a time when the recording industry wasn’t necessarily friendly to women or Black performers, was astonishing. Her work would pave the way for the pop stardom for future Black female artists.

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Born in Alabama, Ruth Lee Jones grew up in a staunch Baptist family in Chicago, singing and playing the piano in the choir at her local church and quickly becoming adept at gospel’s characteristic off-beat, syncopated rhythms and bent or sliding notes. At the age of fifteen, she performed “I Can’t Face The Music” in a local amateur competition hosted at Chicago’s Regal Theatre, won and was soon performing in Chicago’s nightclubs, such as Dave’s Rhumboogie and the Downbeat Room of the Sherman Hotel.

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For day 4 of Black History in Music I want to bring to your knowledge the creator of the genre that we all enjoy today afrobeat! Mr. Fela Anikulapo-Kuti

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"Born 1938 in Abeokuta, Nigeria, he began his career playing jazz and highlife. He formed his first band in London in 1959 while studying at Trinity College of Music. In the early 1970s, Fela created Afrobeat, which rapidly became the most avidly followed style across West Africa. Afrobeat’s revolutionary politics brought Fela into violent conflict with successive Nigerian military regimes, which made many attempts to suppress him and once sent in the army to burn down his communal home, Kalakuta Republic. Fela refused to be silenced. He rebuilt Kalakuta and at his Lagos club, the Afrika Shrine, continued to make fierce, and always supremely danceable, music until a few weeks before his passing in 1997. Fela’s legacy lives on through his family. His son Femi leads The Positive Force and another son, Seun, leads Egypt 80. His daughter Yeni was the prime mover behind the building of the Kalakuta Museum and the New Afrika Shrine.

Since 2008, the Kuti family has partnered with Knitting Factory Entertainment and Partisan Records to revive and reissue Fela's entire catalog, further broadening the global reach and accessibility of his music and message."---

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✍🏾Fela Anikulapo Kuti]]
📸 Fela Anikulapo Kuti]]

Beyonce may have shed light on this newly discovered genre and made pop culture fall in love. But before there was others who took the time to acknowledge our African roots whether it was in throw back music videos such as "Got til it's gone" (1997) or "loosing you" (2012) artistically genius produced video.

Afrobeat music has ever evolved over the years and we love to see it and hear it!