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Robert Ford Jr., Hip-Hop Pioneer & Former Billboard Journalist, Dies at 70
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billboard.comKnown as "Rocky" to many of his friends, Ford chronicled New York hip-hop culture for Billboard before helping launch it into the mainstream as a writer-producer.
Writer-producer, hip-hop pioneer and former Billboard reporter Robert “Rocky” Ford Jr. died on May 19 of undisclosed causes, his wife Linda Medley confirmed to Billboard.
He was 70. As a Billboard writer in the late 1970s, Ford penned what has come to be regarded as the first article about the-then budding hip-hop genre in a mainstream publication: “B-Beats Bombarding Bronx: Mobile DJ Starts Something With Oldie R&B Disks,” published on July 1, 1978.
After befriending future mogul Russell Simmons -- then a young music promoter for his younger brother Joseph Simmons, also known
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