# The Hand-Sold Cassettes *A Biography of Dj Screw* — Legendary Biographies No. 002 - **Subject:** Robert Earl Davis Jr. - **Written by:** Jamal Whitestone - **Shelf:** Music / Hip-Hop - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 185 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **Paperback:** $19.99 — 6 × 9 in · 185 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-045-4) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Desmond Vale (ISBN 979-8-90623-192-5) - **Content notes:** substance use; fatal overdose Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/002-the-hand-sold-cassettes.html ## About this book He was born Robert Earl Davis Jr. on July 20, 1971, in Bastrop, Texas, and learned to slow records down at the family turntable when he was twelve. By twenty he was the architect of the chopped-and-screwed sound — two copies of the same record, one a half-step slow, hands cross-faded — that would, for a decade, define Houston rap. He sold the mixtapes from his front yard on Greenstone Street for $10 a copy and recorded under the stage name DJ Screw. He died on November 16, 2000, of a codeine-promethazine overdose at his Houston home recording studio. He was twenty-nine. Jamal Whitestone's biography traces the arc through the Bastrop childhood and the move to Houston's South Park neighborhood, the apprenticeship under DJ Darryl Scott, the founding of the Screwed Up Click and the long membership including Big Moe and Lil' Keke and Z-Ro and Pimp C, the 3 'N the Mornin' (Part Two) of 1996 that brought the Houston style to national attention, the codeine-cough-syrup addiction that the music had consecrated and the music had recorded, and the morning of November 16, 2000, when his cousin found him. What emerges is a portrait of a Houston DJ whose chopped-and-screwed method built a regional aesthetic and whose habit the same aesthetic, in the end, killed. ## Contents 1. Smithville 2. The Records 3. The South Side 4. The Turntables 5. Slowed Down 6. The House on Greenstone 7. The Gray Tapes 8. The Screwed Up Click 9. Fat Pat 10. The Line Around the Block 11. Syrup 12. Freestyle 13. 3 'N the Mornin' 14. The Summer of 2000 15. November 16 16. The Silence After 17. The Sound Travels 18. 60 BPM 19. The Casket Won't Go Down ## Questions **Who is The Hand-Sold Cassettes about?** Robert Earl Davis Jr.. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Hand-Sold Cassettes — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 5,201 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 60,500 words, 19 chapters, 185 pages in the paperback. **What is the printed book like?** 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf. **Does this book carry content warnings?** Yes: substance use; fatal overdose. They are listed before you buy rather than discovered afterwards. The material is handled as evidence, not as spectacle. ## The writer Jamal Whitestone is a Brooklyn-born hip-hop critic whose work for The Source, XXL, and The New Yorker established him as one of the most careful chroniclers of the East Coast rap canon. He spent years interviewing underground tape traders and neighborhood DJs to assemble his debut biography, The Hand-Sold Cassettes. His subsequent books, including The Long Game, The Quad Studios Shooting, The Howard Years, and The Riverdale Block Parties, explore the cultural geography of New York City through its defining musical eras. He avoids grand theories, focusing instead on oral histories and archival police and radio records. He lives in Brooklyn, where he collects vintage vinyl and operates a small community workshop teaching local youth the basics of music journalism.