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J.B. Moore, Early Hip-Hop Producer & Former Billboard Staffer, Dies at 81

J.B. Moore, the early hip-hop producer and ex-Billboard staffer behind rap hits "The Breaks" and "Christmas Rappin'" for Kurtis Blow, is dead at 81.

Though not well-known today, Moore was instrumental in hip-hop’s early mainstream success in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when he helped produce and write records for Kurtis Blow with Robert “Rocky” Ford Jr., his friend and colleague at Billboard, where Moore worked in ad sales and Ford was a reporter. Moore, who also sometimes wrote jazz reviews for Billboard, is credited as a producer and writer on classic early hip-hop tracks like “ The Breaks,” “ Christmas Rappin’ ” and “ Basketball.” “One of the interesting things about our partnership,” Moore said of Ford in a 2001 oral history for the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle, “is that, as Robert and I got to know each other at Billboard, we realized that he was a black guy from the middle of Hollis, Queens and I was a white guy from the North Shore of Long Island, and our record collections were virtually identical.

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