Grandmaster Flowers (born Jonathon Cameron Flowers) was a DJ from

Brooklyn Brooklyn () is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Kings County, in the U.S. state of New York. Kings County is the most populous county in the State of New York, and the second-most densely populated county in the United States, be ...

New York New York most commonly refers to: * New York City, the most populous city in the United States, located in the state of New York * New York (state), a state in the northeastern United States New York may also refer to: Film and television * '' ...

. One of the earliest DJs to mix records together in sequence,Browne, P “The guide to United States popular culture” Popular Press, 2001. p.386 Flowers was one of the earliest pioneers of

disco Disco is a genre of dance music and a subculture that emerged in the 1970s from the United States' urban nightlife scene. Its sound is typified by four-on-the-floor beats, syncopated basslines, string sections, brass and horns, electric pia ...

. Flowers was involved in the hip hop and

funk Funk is a music genre that originated in African American communities in the mid-1960s when musicians created a rhythmic, danceable new form of music through a mixture of various music genres that were popular among African Americans in the m ...

scene and had a "formative influence" on hip hop DJsShapiro, P “Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco” Macmillan, 2006 such as

Grandmaster Flash Joseph Saddler (born January 1, 1958), popularly known by his stage name Grandmaster Flash, is an American DJ and rapper. He is considered to be one of the pioneers of Hip Hop DJing, cutting, scratching and mixing. Grandmaster Flash and the Fur ...

Price, E.G “Hip hop culture” ABC-CLIO, 2006. pp.25 and

Afrika Bambaataa Lance Taylor (born on April 17, 1957), also known as Afrika Bambaataa (), is an American DJ, rapper, and producer from the South Bronx, New York. He is notable for releasing a series of genre-defining electro tracks in the 1980s that influenc ...

in the mid-1970s. Although respected by those he influenced, Flowers himself never attained the heights of his successors. As he found his career fading due in part to competition from the younger up-and-coming DJs at the end of the 1970s, Flowers struggled with a drug dependancy. Flowers died in 1992.

References

{{reflist African-American DJs Musicians from New York City