DJ Kool Herc

He used the recreation room of their building, 1520 Sedgwick Avenue.

Herc's first sound system consisted of two turntables connected to two amplifiers and a Shure "Vocal Master" PA system with two speaker columns, on which he played records such as James Brown's "Give It Up or Turnit a Loose", Jimmy Castor's "It's Just Begun" and Booker T. & the M.G.'s' "Melting Pot".

With Bronx clubs struggling with street gangs, uptown DJs catering to an older disco crowd with different aspirations, and commercial radio also catering to a demographic distinct from teenagers in the Bronx, Herc's parties, organized and promoted by his sister Cindy, had a ready-made audience.

DJ Kool Herc developed the style that was used as one of the additions to the blueprints for hip hop music.

Herc used the record to focus on a short, heavily percussive part in it: the "break".

Since this part of the record was the one the dancers liked best, Herc isolated the break and prolonged it by changing between two record players.

As one record reached the end of the break, he cued a second record back to the beginning of the break, which allowed him to extend a relatively short section of music into a "five-minute loop of fury".

This innovation had its roots in what Herc called "The Merry-Go-Round", a technique by which the deejay switched from break to break at the height of the party.

This technique is specifically called "The Merry-Go-Round" because according to Herc, it takes one "back and forth with no slack."

Clive Campbell (born April 16, 1955), better known by his stage name DJ Kool Herc, is a Jamaican American DJ who is credited with being one of the founders of hip hop music in the Bronx, New York City, in 1973.

Nicknamed the Father of Hip-Hop, Campbell began playing hard funk records of the sort typified by James Brown.

Campbell began to isolate the instrumental portion of the record which emphasized the drum beat—the "break"—and switch from one break to another.

Using the same two-turntable set-up of disco DJs, he used two copies of the same record to elongate the break.

This breakbeat DJing, using funky drum solos, formed the basis of hip hop music.

Campbell's announcements and exhortations to dancers helped lead to the syncopated, rhythmically spoken accompaniment now known as rapping.

He called the dancers "break-boys" and "break-girls", or simply b-boys and b-girls, terms that continue to be used fifty years later in the sport of breaking.

Campbell's DJ style was quickly taken up by figures such as Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash.

Unlike them, he never made the move into commercially recorded hip hop in its earliest years.

On November 3, 2023, Campbell was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in the Musical Influence Award category.

Clive Campbell was the first of six children born to Keith and Nettie Campbell in Kingston, Jamaica.

While growing up, he saw and heard the sound systems of neighborhood parties called dance halls, and the accompanying speech of their DJs, known as toasting.

He emigrated with his family at the age of 12 to The Bronx, New York City in November 1967, where they lived at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue.

Campbell attended the Alfred E. Smith Career and Technical Education High School in the Bronx, where his height, frame, and demeanor on the basketball court prompted the other kids to nickname him "Hercules".

After being involved in a physical altercation with school bullies, the Five Percenters came to Herc's aid, befriended him and as Herc put it, helped "Americanize" him with an education in New York City street culture.

He began running with a graffiti crew called the Ex-Vandals, taking the name Kool Herc.

Herc recalls persuading his father to buy him a copy of "Sex Machine" by James Brown, a record that not a lot of his friends had, and which they would come to him to hear.

Herc stated that he first introduced the Merry-Go-Round into his sets in 1973.

The earliest known Merry-Go-Round involved playing James Brown's "Give It Up or Turnit a Loose" (with its refrain, "Now clap your hands! Stomp your feet!"), then switching from that record's break into the break from a second record, "Bongo Rock" by The Incredible Bongo Band.

From the "Bongo Rock"'s break, Herc used a third record to switch to the break on "The Mexican" by the English rock band Babe Ruth.

Kool Herc also contributed to developing the rhyming style of hip hop by punctuating the recorded music with slang phrases, announcing: "Rock on, my mellow!"

"B-boys, b-girls, are you ready? keep on rock steady" "This is the joint! Herc beat on the point" "To the beat, y'all!"

"You don't stop!"

For his contributions, Time nicknamed Herc the "Founding Father of Hip Hop", called him "nascent cultural hero", and an integral part of the beginnings of hip hop.

On August 11, 1973, DJ Kool Herc was a disc jockey and emcee at a party hosted by himself and his younger sister Cindy at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue.

She wanted to earn extra cash for back-to-school clothes, so she decided to throw a party where her older brother, then just 18 years old, would play music for the neighborhood in their apartment building.

She promoted the event with flyers and organized the party.

She also styled her brother's clothes for the party.

Specifically, DJ Kool Herc:

"extended an instrumental beat (breaking or scratching) to let people dance longer (break dancing) and began MC'ing (rapping) during the extended breakdancing. ... [This] helped lay the foundation for a cultural revolution."

According to music journalist Steven Ivory, in 1973, Herc placed on the turntables two copies of Brown's 1970 Sex Machine album and ran "an extended cut 'n' mix of the percussion breakdown" from "Give It Up or Turnit a Loose", signaling the birth of hip hop.