DJ Screw

Robert Earl Davis Jr. was born on the twentieth of July 1971 in Bastrop, Texas, the son of Robert Earl Davis Sr., a truck driver, and Ida Mae Deary. As a child he lived for a time in the small town of Smithville, Texas, and for a spell in Los Angeles, before his family settled in Houston — the city whose sound he would come to define.

Drawn to hip-hop in his youth, Davis began working turntables as a teenager. By the early 1990s he had forged the technique that made his name: the "chopped and screwed" style, built by slowing a record's tempo to a heavy, subterranean crawl and "chopping" it with doubled beats and stutters. The nickname "Screw" grew from his practice of taking two records and screwing their tempos down together, and the effect — languid, dreamlike, unmistakably Houston — became a signature of Southern rap.

From his home studio Davis issued a flood of "Screw tapes," numbering in the hundreds, that circulated hand to hand across Houston and beyond. He opened the Screwed Up Records & Tapes shop and gathered around him the Screwed Up Click, a collective of neighborhood rappers, many of whom went on to careers of their own. He turned a regional style into a movement and helped make Houston a mecca for Southern hip-hop.

Robert Earl Davis Jr. died on the sixteenth of November 2000 in Houston, at the age of twenty-nine. Though his widest recognition came after his passing, his slowed, patient sound outlived him and reshaped a generation of music. We honor DJ Screw, the quiet architect of a sound that still moves through the world at his own unhurried tempo.