Amplify @ Furman featuring 9th Wonder

As the closing event of the Amplify@Furman Speakers Series, the Council on Equity & Inclusion in Music is honored to host hip-hop mega-producer, rapper, lecturer, and record label executive Patrick Douthit, a.k.a. 9th Wonder, in a 45-minute interview and a 15-minute Question & Answer period with the audience.

9th Wonder is a super-producer, CEO, DJ, and lecturer from Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He began his career as the main producer for the group Little Brother, and has also worked with Jay-Z, Kendrick Lamar, Destiny’s Child, Mary J Blige, Jean Grae, Wale, Murs, Drake, Buckshot, Chris Brown, Rapsody, Erykah Badu, Jill Scott, Big Boi of Outkast, Ludacris, Mac Miller, and David Banner to name a few.

9th Wonder entered the world of academia in 2007 at North Carolina Central University, where he currently is Artist in Residence, lecturing a class titled Hip-Hop History. His role as a music professor continued to expand where in 2010 it was announced that he would co-teach a class titled “Sampling Soul” with Dr. Mark Anthony Neal at Duke University. Most recently, he was accepted to Harvard University under the Nasir Jones Fellowship where he lectured and is currently researching at the Hip-Hop Archive in the W.E.B. Dubois Institute, under the direction of Dr. Marcy Morgan and Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. 9th Wonder is currently working on a research project in conjunction with the Loeb Library at Harvard University, chronicling the top 200 hip-hop albums of all time. 9th Wonder has also served as Artist in Residence at The University of Pennsylvania and The University of Virginia, while also guest lecturing at The University of Michigan, Cornell University, Columbia College, Florida Southern, Winston-Salem State University, The College of Charleston, Fayetteville State University, The University of Denver, and several others.

In 2008, 9th Wonder produced the first single “Honey” by legendary soul singer Erykah Badu. In 2010, 9th Wonder started his independent label Jamla Records in Raleigh, NC, which fostered the career of rising star Rapsody, an emcee hailing from Snow Hill, NC, who after numerous mixtapes landed her first breakthrough on Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly, also earning him a Grammy Nomination for sound engineering on the album. In that same year, 9th Wonder was selected to join the Executive Committee for Hip-Hop and Rap at the National Museum of African American History and Culture at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., where he has an exhibit on the Musical Crossroads floor. In 2016, 9th Wonder signed a partnership with Jay-Z’s Roc Nation imprint establishing Jamla Records as one of the premier independent labels today. In 2017, 9th Wonder produced the song “Duckworth” on Damn, the 4th studio album of Compton MC Kendrick Lamar. In October of 2019, 9th Wonder was inducted into the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame.

9th Wonder continues to produce, teach, inspire, and push the culture of hip-hop forward in the community, industry and the world of academia.