When the Beat Was Born

A John Steptoe New Talent Award Winner Before there was hip hop, there was DJ Kool Herc. On a hot day at the end of summer in 1973 Cindy Campbell threw a back-to-school party at a park in the South Bronx. Her brother, Clive Campbell, spun the records. He had a new way of playing the music to make the breaks-the musical interludes between verses-longer for dancing. He called himself DJ Kool Herc and this is When the Beat Was Born. From his childhood in Jamaica to his youth in the Bronx, Laban Carrick Hill's book tells how Kool Herc came to be a DJ, how kids in gangs stopped fighting in order to breakdance, and how the music he invented went on to define a culture and transform the world.

Laban Carrick Hill is the author of America Dreaming: How Youth Changed America in the 60s, Harlem Stomp!: A Cultural History of the Harlem Renaissance, which was a National Book Award finalist, and Dave the Potter, a Caldecott Honor book, illustrated by Bryan Collier. He lives in Burlington, Vermont.