Understanding J Dilla: The Soul of Hip Hop

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In 2002, J Dilla had been diagnosed with thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura (TTP), an incurable disease of the blood, while also battling lupus, which had been diagnosed a year previously. According to close friend and fellow producer Karriem Riggins, the impetus for Donuts came during an extended hospital stay in the summer of 2005.

In the December 2006 issue of The Fader, J Dilla's mother, Maureen Yancey, a former opera singer, spoke of watching her son's daily routine during the making of Donuts:

I knew he was working on a series of beat CDs before he came to Los Angeles. Donuts was a special project that he hadn't named yet. This was the tail end of his "Dill Withers" phase, while he was living in Clinton Township, Michigan. You see, musically he went into different phases. He'd start on a project, go back, go buy more records and then go back to working on the project again.

I saw him all day, everyday. I would go there for breakfast, go back to Detroit to check on the daycare business I was running, and then back to his house for lunch and dinner. He was on a special diet and he was a funny eater anyway. He had to take 15 different medications, we would split them up between meals, and every other day we would binge on a brownie sundae from Big Boys. That was his treat.

I didn't know about the actual album Donuts until I came to Los Angeles to stay indefinitely. I got a glimpse of the music during one of the hospital stays, around his 31st birthday, when [friend and producer] House Shoes came out from Detroit to visit him. I would sneak in and listen to the work in progress while he was in dialysis. He got furious when he found out I was listening to his music! He didn't want me to listen to anything until it was a finished product.

He was working in the hospital. He tried to go over each beat and make sure that it was something different and make sure that there was nothing that he wanted to change. "Lightworks", oh yes, that was something! That's one of the special ones. It was so different. It blended classical music (way out there classical), commercial and underground at the same time.

James Dewitt Yancey (February 7, 1974 – February 10, 2006), better known by the stage names J Dilla and Jay Dee, was an American record producer and rapper who emerged in the mid-1990s underground hip hop scene in Detroit, Michigan, as one third of the acclaimed music group Slum Village. He was also a member of the Soulquarians, an influential musical collective active during the late 1990s and early 2000s.

His obituary at NPR stated that he "was one of the music industry's most influential hip-hop artists." He is considered by some as the "godfather of lo-fi hip hop".

James Yancey was born in Detroit, Michigan to New Yorker parents. He was the eldest of four children, including a sister, Martha, and two brothers, Earl and John; John later began making music as Illa J. The family lived in a corner house near McDougall and Nevada, on the east side of Detroit. His parents had musical backgrounds—his mother, Maureen “Ma Dukes” Yancey, is a former opera singer and his father, Beverly Dewitt Yancey, was a jazz bassist, and performed Globetrotters half-time shows for several years. His mother said that he could "match pitch perfect harmony" when he was a pre-verbal infant.

Along with a wide range of other musical genres, Yancey developed a passion for hip hop music. After transferring from Davis Aerospace Technical High School to Pershing High School, he met classmates T3 and Baatin, and became friends with them through their mutual interest in rap battles. The three formed the rap group called Slum Village. He also took up beat-making using a simple tape deck as the center of his studio. During these teenage years he "stayed in the basement alone" in order to train himself to produce beats with his growing record collection.

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