Chapter 1Smithville

Foreword

The canon I was raised in was a canon of speed. I came up in New York rooms where a rapper was measured by density — words per bar, syllables per breath, the internal rhyme buried three layers deep — and a DJ was measured by the sharpness of the cut, the transform scratch, the blend so quick you only caught it going by. That was the aesthetic I learned to hear and then learned to defend in print, and for most of my career it functioned less like a taste than like a physics: this is how the music works, this is what excellence sounds like, everything else is a regional accent. The first Screw tape I ever heard arrived sideways, the way they always did outside Houston — a dub of a dub, no tracklist, more hiss than treble — and I did what my training told me to do. I decided the tape was broken. Then I decided the deck was broken. It took me an embarrassingly long time to consider the third possibility, which was that my ear was.

That is the personal stake, and I want to be honest about it. This book is partly an act of restitution. The magazines I wrote for spent the 1990s adjudicating New York and Los Angeles while a man in a wood-paneled room on Houston's south side was producing, at the rate of roughly a tape a week, one of the largest and strangest bodies of work in the history of American music — and we did not cover it, because it did not arrive through any of the doors we were watching. No label serviced it. No publicist pitched it. It was sold for ten dollars a copy out of a front door on Greenstone Street, hand-labeled, with the artist's own phone number written on the shell. A critic lives his whole life inside the apparatus — the charts, the advances, the release schedule. Robert Earl Davis Jr. built a complete musical economy with no apparatus at all, and the apparatus responded the way apparatuses do. It pretended he wasn't there.

I expected, going in, to write a book about a technique. Chopped and screwed is easy to describe and I could have described it in a paragraph: two copies of the same record, a pitch control pushed down, a crossfader doubling the phrases. What I found instead was a book about time — about a man from the post-oak belt of central Texas who understood, apparently from childhood, that tempo is not a characteristic of music but a dimension of it, and who spent his short life insisting on a pace the industry did not recognize because his community lived at that pace and deserved to hear itself at full scale.

I also expected, if I am being fully honest, to write a cautionary tale. The outline was sitting there: the codeine, the warehouse, dead at twenty-nine. What the record actually shows is discipline of a kind I have rarely encountered in any genre. One tape a week for the better part of a decade. Each one mixed live, in a single pass, a hundred minutes at a stretch, the mistakes left in because the tape was a document of a night and not a product to be polished. The death is in this book, because it happened and because the reasons it happened are part of the story the south side has been made to carry. But the death is not the story. The work is the story. The death is only where the work stopped.

The record I worked from is unusual for a biography, and the reader should know its shape. There are the published interviews, the press archive such as it is, the oral histories and remembrances that family and collaborators have given over the years, the scholarship that followed. And then there is the archive Screw made himself: more than three hundred gray Maxell cassettes — no one can say exactly how many, and the uncertainty is part of the point — each one a hundred-minute recording of a specific night in a specific room, the voices of a community documenting itself in real time. No journalist covered that scene while it was happening. It turned out no journalist was needed. The man at the turntables was keeping better records than any of us would have.

Why is he worth a book? Open any streaming service and count the tracks labeled slowed and reverb — hundreds of thousands of them, an entire mainstream aesthetic running on an idea a Black kid from Smithville, Texas, discovered on his mother's turntable and refined in a room where the door was never locked. The idea conquered the culture; the name mostly did not travel with it. A biography, at its most useful, reattaches a name to the idea that carries it. That is what this one attempts.

He made music that asks you to slow down and stay a while. I have tried to write about him at the tempo he taught me. What follows is the life of a quiet man, told as unhurriedly as I could manage, which is the only way he would have told it himself.

— Jamal Whitestone, Brooklyn

Chapter 1 · Smithville

The town sat in the post-oak belt of central Texas, where the land flattened between the Bastrop pines and the blackland prairie and the sky took up more space than anything built by human hands. Smithville, Texas. Population a few thousand, depending on who was counting and whether they included the families who lived outside the city limits on roads that didn't have names, just numbers. Farm-to-Market 153. County Road 423. The bureaucratic taxonomy of a state with more land than it knew what to do with.

This was Bastrop County. Forty-odd miles southeast of Austin, far enough from Houston to be a different world, close enough that the Gulf's humidity reached you in July, when the air turned into something you wore rather than breathed. The Colorado River wound through the county on its way south, and the land on either side grew pecans and cattle and a particular strain of quiet that city people mistook for emptiness.

It was not empty. It was full of things you had to know how to hear.

Smithville was a railroad town, incorporated in March 1895 after the Katy—the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railway—established its central shops there, a decade after the Taylor, Bastrop and Houston line first laid tracks through the area. The railroad was the spine of the town's economic life for decades, and its physical presence divided the community as surely as any policy could: the tracks ran east-west through the center of town, and the Black community lived on the south side of them, in the neighborhood known as Buntetown, after the Bunte Addition platted in 1895. The designation was not incidental. Houston and Austin were worlds away in culture and complexity, but the organizing grammar of small-town Texas in the mid-twentieth century was the same grammar that had organized it since Reconstruction: Black community on one side of the tracks, white community on the other, with the railroad as the visible, immovable fact between them.

The Deary family, Ida Mae's people, had roots in Bastrop County that went back generations. Ida Mae's mother, Jessie Deary, born in 1915, had lived long enough in the county to watch it change around her without ever quite leaving behind the structures that had always governed it. She was the anchor of the family, the generation that had survived everything that Bastrop County had dealt out, and her house at 401 Walker Street was the center of gravity that drew the family back whenever the world outside stopped making sense. In 1980, when Ida Mae's marriage to Robert Sr. came apart, Walker Street is where she returned with her children.

Robert Earl Davis Jr. was born on July 20, 1971, at a hospital in Bastrop, thirteen miles from where his family lived. His parents were Ida Mae Deary Davis and Robert Earl Davis Sr. They had married in January 1970. Robert was the youngest. His sister Michelle, whom everyone called Red, was a year and a half older. His half-brother Charles Oliver, from his father's side, lived in La Grange with other family. The Davises were not from Smithville proper but from Center Union, a rural Black community northeast of the town.

The family had already tried Houston once. When Robert was still an infant, the Davises moved to an apartment at Collingsworth and Lockwood in Kashmere Gardens, near the Fifth Ward. Robert Sr. drove trucks for Van Waters & Rogers, a chemical distribution company. The city was supposed to be the place where things opened up. Instead, the marriage came apart. In 1980, when Robert was nine, Ida Mae took the children back to Smithville. They moved in with her mother, Jessie Deary, at 401 Walker Street.

Ida Mae was the kind of woman who kept moving when standing still would have been easier. She worked janitorial at the Smithville schools and picked up other jobs where she could find them. She was saving. The children did not know what she was saving for until the day she drove them to an empty lot at the corner of Harris Street and Martin Luther King Boulevard. Contractors were already waiting.

"Okay, Mrs. Davis," one of them said. "Go on ahead and dig your first hole."

Ida Mae put the shovel down. She put her foot on it. "This is our land now."

Her mother Jessie started crying right there in the dirt.

The house she built was 1,200 square feet, brick, three bedrooms and two bathrooms with a carport. It was finished in 1984. Robert Earl got his own room, and in that room Ida Mae let him set up a turntable, a drum set, and a piano. He was thirteen years old, and from the moment he had his own space, the music never stopped.

The music had started with Ida Mae. It always came back to Ida Mae.

She had a record collection that she treated like a private library. Fridays and Saturdays she played her blues, and Robert, even before he could walk, stood up and jumped to the beat. "My son was musically inclined before he could walk," she said later. "Yes sir. Because I'd be playing my blues on Fridays and Saturdays and he'd just stand up and jump to the beat. Before he could walk he could dance."

Ida Mae did more than listen. She made tapes. She had a setup in the Houston apartment, a simple dubbing rig, and people came by to buy eight-track copies of the records they loved. "People would come to my house," she remembered. "It started with a girlfriend, Can you make me this tape? He would stand there and watch me."

Robert watched. He watched her hands on the equipment. He watched the process of turning a record into a tape, of making a copy that could travel. He was learning the trade before he knew it was a trade. The trade was not complicated in its mechanics: you placed the record on the player, you pressed record on the tape machine, you waited. What was complicated was the selection, the knowledge of which records to copy, which combinations of songs to put on a single tape, the taste that allowed a person to assemble a sequence that was worth owning as a sequence rather than merely as individual songs. Ida Mae had that taste, and she demonstrated it to Robert in every tape she made, and the demonstration was his first education in what a mix tape was: not a collection but a composition, not songs but a sequence that created something larger than its individual parts.

Her record collection was the curriculum. Tower of Power, the Oakland brass-heavy funk band. Switch, the Motown outfit from Mansfield, Ohio. Blue Magic, the Philadelphia soul group. Teddy Pendergrass, Bobby Womack, Deniece Williams. The sounds of the 1970s Black music diaspora, a world of sound that mapped the emotional range of Black American life in the post-Civil Rights era: love and joy and loss and resilience and the specific melancholy of people who had been promised something and were still waiting for it to arrive. Robert absorbed the curriculum the way children absorb the music around them, without categorizing or analyzing it, just hearing it and feeling it and carrying it forward into everything he would make.

What Ida Mae did not anticipate was what her son would do with her records when she wasn't home. He'd disconnect her stereo, piece by piece, carry the components into his room, hook everything up, and start experimenting. By the time he thought she was coming home, he'd scramble to put it all back.

She caught him, of course. "Boy, what are you doing?" she said. "Plus you scratching up all my records!"

Robert looked at her. "Mama, one day this is gonna make us rich."

"Yeah, son, right," she said. "But lay off my eight-track tapes."

Smithville was a town with a particular relationship to time. Not the abstract time of clocks and schedules but the felt time of a place where nothing moved fast because nothing needed to. The heat slowed things down. The landscape slowed things down. The economy slowed things down, because there was no industry demanding urgency, no commute requiring speed.

The Black community lived on the south side of town, in an area called Buntetown. The railroad divided Smithville north from south. On the south side, everyone knew everyone. The churches had music. The front porches had music. The cars that drove through on Friday and Saturday nights had music coming from their windows, bass hitting the pavement before the melody reached your ears.

Robert was the kind of child who did not announce himself. Quiet, but not shy. Contained. A shy child retreats from attention out of fear. A contained child absorbs the world without feeling the need to broadcast his absorption. Robert watched. He listened. He paid attention to the mechanics of sound before he cared about the songs themselves.

He experimented with the speed selector on the turntable, the switch between 33 and 45 RPM. Every child who has access to a record player does this at some point, slowing the 45s down to hear voices drop into a rumbling bass register. For most children it is a momentary amusement. Robert kept going back. When you slowed a record down, the music did not simply become slower. The bass deepened. The space between the beats expanded until you could hear individual frequencies that were, at normal speed, compressed into a single mass. The vocals dropped below the singer's natural register, into something that came from the chest of the machine rather than the throat of the singer.

He was eight years old, maybe nine. He did not know he was inventing anything. He was playing with a record player in his family's house in Smithville, and what he was discovering was the founding principle of chopped and screwed music: that tempo is not merely a characteristic of music but a dimension of it, and that changing the tempo creates a different experience entirely.

His best friends were Shorty Mac and Larry B. The three of them were inseparable, called themselves the Z Force Crew, and never fought. They walked to each other's houses after school, stayed up too late, did the things that boys in small towns do when there's nothing to do but invent what comes next. Smithville had a population of roughly three thousand people by the 1980s, and the Black community within that number was smaller still: a few hundred families who knew each other's business, whose children attended the same schools, whose socializing happened at the same churches and on the same front porches. A child growing up in Buntetown was growing up in a place where the network of relationships that sustained the community was visible and intimate in a way that Houston's sprawl could never replicate.

One afternoon, Robert was scratching up records he didn't like with a screw, gouging the vinyl. Shorty Mac watched him for a while.

"Man, who you think you is," Shorty Mac said. "DJ Screw or somethin'?"

Robert started laughing. "But I like that."

Larry B picked up his red binder and wrote it down: dj screw. He went over the letters again and again to make them thicker.

The name stuck. A name given in a joke, accepted with a laugh, written on a school binder by a friend. It would travel further than any of them could imagine from where they stood, in a small room, in a small town, on the south side of the railroad tracks.

The Breakin' movie came to Austin in 1984, and Ida Mae drove Robert and Shorty Mac to see it.

The drive from Smithville to Austin was just over forty miles, under an hour on Highway 71 through the post-oak belt, past the cattle guards and the pecan orchards and the hay bales sitting in the fields like punctuation marks on the land. Ida Mae drove. Robert and Shorty Mac sat in the back, doing what thirteen-year-old boys do in the back of a car: talking about nothing important, talking about everything important, the conversation fueled by anticipation and the particular energy of a movie they had been hearing about for weeks.

Breakin' had been released earlier that year, a film about breakdancing culture in Los Angeles. The marketing had reached Smithville through the channels that connected small Black towns to the larger world: television advertisements, word of mouth, the cultural telegraph that ensured every Black teenager in America knew what was happening in the cities even if the cities did not know what was happening in the small towns. Robert and Shorty Mac knew about breakdancing. They had seen it on television, on Soul Train, in the music videos that MTV was beginning to show. But seeing it on a screen in the living room was not the same as seeing it in a theater, in the dark, with the sound system pushing the bass through the seats.

The theater in Austin was nothing special. A multiplex of the kind that existed in every American city in 1984, carpeted and dim, smelling of popcorn butter and the chemical sweetness of the soft-drink dispensers. Robert and Shorty Mac took their seats. The lights went down.

The breakdancers drew the crowd's attention. They were supposed to. The film's plot, thin as it was, centered on the dancers, on the contests, on the bodies defying gravity on the linoleum floors. The audience watched the dancers. The audience cheered the dancers.

Robert watched the DJ.

Chris "the Glove" Taylor appeared in the film as a working turntablist, a figure whose function was to provide the music the dancers moved to. In the hierarchy of the film, the DJ was support staff. The dancers were the stars. But Robert did not see it that way. He saw a man standing behind two turntables with a mixer between them, his hands on the records, his wrists on the crossfader, controlling the sound that controlled the room. The dancers were responding to what the DJ was doing. The DJ was not supporting the dancers. The DJ was commanding them.

Robert watched the hands. The way the fingers touched the vinyl, the precise contact between skin and record that allowed the DJ to manipulate the speed, the position, the direction of the platter. He watched the wrists on the crossfader, the small horizontal slider that moved between the two turntable channels, blending and cutting. He watched the way the DJ's body moved to the music he was creating, the slight forward lean, the head nod, the physical connection between the man and the machine and the sound that was neither the man nor the machine but something the two of them made together.

The breakdancers spun on their backs. The audience clapped. Robert sat still, his eyes on the turntables, absorbing what he was seeing with the silent intensity that the people who knew him would later recognize as his defining characteristic: the ability to watch something with such completeness that the watching became a kind of learning.

The lights came up. The credits rolled. The audience filed out into the Austin afternoon, blinking in the Texas sun.

Robert talked the whole way home.

"The whole way home, he was sayin', Man, I could do that," Shorty Mac remembered. "I could do that."

Shorty Mac listened. He had seen the same movie. He had watched the breakdancers, the way most people watched the breakdancers. He had not watched the DJ. But Robert had, and now, in the back of Ida Mae's car on Highway 71, heading back to Smithville through the post-oak country, Robert was replaying the film in his head, but only the DJ scenes, only the hands on the turntables, only the crossfader work, only the moment when the DJ changed the record and the room changed with it.

He did not yet own turntables. He had his mother's stereo, the components he smuggled into his room and reassembled when Ida Mae was at work, the single turntable connected to the broken boom box. He had no crossfader, no mixer, no second turntable to cut between. He had one platter and one pitch control and the knowledge, now confirmed by a movie in a theater in Austin, that what the DJ did was not accompaniment. It was the center. The DJ was the room.

The car passed through Bastrop and turned south toward Smithville. The highway narrowed. The oaks thickened. Robert was quiet now, the talking finished, the processing begun. Ida Mae drove. Shorty Mac looked out the window. The movie was behind them. The turntable was ahead, waiting in the room at the corner of Harris Street and Martin Luther King Boulevard, where Robert would go as soon as they got home, where he would stand over his mother's stereo and try to do what Chris "the Glove" Taylor had done in the dark of the theater.

He had his mother's stereo, his own small room, and the certainty that what he was hearing when he slowed records down was not a gimmick but a truth. The music was better slow. Not different. Better. More real. Closer to the way the music wanted to sound, if the music had a will of its own.

Robert Sr. was not convinced. He was a strict man, a truck driver and a gambler who played pool with what everyone acknowledged was the meanest stick in any room. He drove for Van Waters & Rogers, a chemical distribution company, hauling materials on routes that crossed Texas in the pre-dawn hours. His worldview was the worldview of a Black man from his generation who had learned that survival came from showing up on time, doing the work, and not trusting things that couldn't be quantified. Pool he understood. Pool had mathematics in it. The geometry of the table, the angle of the cue, the physics of a ball kissed at precisely the right point. He applied the same calculus to his expectations for his son, and turntables did not survive the calculation. He limited who could visit the house. He did not believe in a music career. The distance between father and son was the distance between pragmatism and something that didn't have a name yet.

That reckoning would come later, at a pool table in Houston. But in Smithville, in the mid-1980s, Robert had what he needed: a room, a turntable, a mother who had shown him what a record collection could be, a name given by a friend, and the knowledge that what he heard in the space between the beats was real.

The post-oak belt of central Texas, the ecological zone where Smithville sits, is named for the tree that dominates it: Quercus stellata, a medium-sized hardwood that grows in the sandy soil stretching across a band of central Texas roughly a hundred miles wide. The post oak is not a dramatic tree. It does not have the height of the loblolly pine or the spread of the live oak. It is a functional tree, used for fence posts and firewood and railroad crossties. The wood is dense and slow-growing. A post oak that looks modest may be a hundred years old. The growth is invisible. The strength accumulates in silence.

Robert grew up among those trees, in a town that moved at their pace. He was not nostalgic for Smithville, not in the way that people who leave small towns sometimes pine for the simplicity. He carried Smithville differently. He carried it in his tempo. The pace of the town, the river speed, the heat speed, the speed at which things happened when nothing was rushing them, became the pace of his music. When he slowed a record down, he was not making the music abnormally slow. He was making it Smithville slow.

He loved Spam sandwiches. He would make one, cut the meat thick, put it on bread with a big glass of iced tea, and sit there like it was a gourmet meal. Red remembered this as the purest index of what Smithville had given him: the capacity for deep satisfaction with simple things, a pleasure in the ordinary that survived his eventual fame and money, that never left him. The man who would sell thirty thousand dollars in tapes in a single day at the Los Magnificos car show still ate Lunchables alone in a warehouse at four in the morning and found it sufficient. Smithville had calibrated his hungers. Red remembered this. The small pleasures of a small-town childhood. The taste of the ordinary, which is the only childhood taste that survives into adulthood intact.

He couldn't swim. He wore a size 10.5 or 11 shoe. He was born under the sign of Cancer, which is the sign of emotional depth and hard exterior, and the people who knew him best would say the zodiac got it right. He forgave easily. He loved hard. He kept what hurt him behind a face that gave away nothing unless you knew how to read it.

In the summer of 1986, when Robert was fifteen, his father took him to Houston. The plan was to live with Robert Sr., to try the city again. His father's girlfriend Patricia had a house, and Robert shared a room with her sons, including Russell Washington. It was temporary, a teenager's introduction to a city of millions. He moved from Patricia's house to Gulfwood Lane near Monroe Boulevard, in the Gulf Meadows area near Hobby Airport, a neighborhood the locals called Skyscraper Shadows.

The second migration had begun. Smithville had given him the records, the turntable, the slow tempo of the town itself, and the name. Houston would give him everything else.

There is a thesis to be made about the displacement, about what it means that the man who invented the slowest sound in American popular music was born in a small rural town and transplanted to one of the largest, fastest, most relentlessly commercial cities in America. The thesis is not romantic. It is structural. Houston in the late 1980s was a city rebuilding itself after the oil bust of 1986, when the price of crude collapsed and the Houston real estate market took the Texas economy down with it. The south side Robert arrived on was a place that had absorbed the bust's casualties, the laid-off workers and the families that had stretched to buy homes now worth less than the mortgages against them. The Southside ran on informal economies: the gray-tape markets, the corner-store credit, the hair cutting done in kitchens. Speed was the city's aspiration and the south side's enemy. The south side moved at whatever pace the south side could manage, and Robert brought to that pace something from Smithville: a sound that made slowness feel like choice rather than defeat.

When he drove back to Smithville in his royal-blue Impala, family standing on the front porch of the Harris Street house tracking his approach by the escalating volume, the sound traveled with him both ways. He carried Houston's southside back to Buntetown in the bass from his trunk. And he carried Smithville's pace back to Houston in the pitch slider he pushed all the way down.

The house on Harris Street is still there. There is no plaque, no museum, no historical marker noting that this was where DJ Screw first heard what records sounded like when you changed their relationship to time. Smithville does not advertise its connection to DJ Screw the way Memphis advertises Elvis or Minneapolis advertises Prince. The connection is too local, too specific, too rooted in a Black community that does not have the institutional power to turn its history into tourism.

The Buntetown neighborhood, where the Davis family lived, is the part of Smithville's Black history that the town's official narrative has not fully absorbed. It was the documented origin of the Black community's residential settlement on the south side of the railroad tracks, and the community that developed there was the community that produced the Deary family, Ida Mae's people, the people who gave Robert his first relationship to music. The family's story moved from Smithville to Houston and back to Smithville, in the oscillation between the rural and the urban that characterized the experience of millions of Black Americans in the twentieth century: the Great Migration north and west, the family networks that stretched between the city and the hometown, the returns that were sometimes triumphant and sometimes defeated and sometimes just visits, a son coming home with his bass shaking the walls of his mother's house, the family standing on the porch and listening for him to arrive.

Robert was buried in the post-oak country outside Smithville. And Smithville claimed him, in the way that small towns claim their famous dead: through the memory of the people who knew him before he was famous, through the stories of the boy who scratched records with a screw and listened to his mother's blues and drove too slow on Highway 71, through the knowledge that the sound that had traveled the world had started on the south side of the railroad tracks, in a house that Ida Mae had built with money from her janitorial job, on a turntable she had not intended to surrender to her son's experiments.

The record player is gone. The records are gone, or scattered. The only thing that survived Smithville was the idea. The idea that time could be slowed down, that music could move at a pace the industry did not recognize, that a Black kid in a small Texas town could hear something in the space between the beats that no one else had heard, and that the hearing was enough.

The hearing was the beginning of everything.