9th Wonder

He crafted the beat for "Threat" in approximately 25 minutes on a laptop, in a borrowed studio in New York, for an artist who had just handed him a sample and walked out of the room. That's the 9th Wonder origin story — not a slow climb, but a single session that put his name on Jay-Z's *The Black Album* and announced a producer from Winston-Salem to everyone paying attention.

Patrick Denard Douthit was born here on January 15, 1975, the youngest of four children, and he carries the city with him in ways both literal and earned. He graduated from Robert B. Glenn High School in Kernersville. He met his Little Brother collaborators Phonte Coleman and Rapper Big Pooh at North Carolina Central University, where he was moving into a dormitory when Coleman asked to borrow a copy of *The Source*. The group's 2003 debut, *The Listening*, drew critical acclaim and led to a deal with Atlantic Records. From there, the work widened — production for Jay-Z, Destiny's Child, Erykah Badu, Kendrick Lamar, Mary J. Blige, Drake, and dozens more, a sound built on vintage soul and jazz samples laid over hard drum patterns.

The music is one thing. The institutional work is another. He taught hip-hop history and production at North Carolina Central University, Duke University, Wake Forest University, and the University of Pennsylvania. He received a fellowship at Harvard. In 2014, he joined the Executive Board for Hip-Hop at the National Museum of African American History and Culture at the Smithsonian. He serves as the NAACP's National Ambassador for Hip Hop Relations and Popular Culture.

In July 2023, a grayscale mural by artist Scott Nurkin went up at the corner of 6th Street and Liberty Street in downtown Winston-Salem — part of Nurkin's North Carolina Musician Murals Project. Go find it. Winston-Salem has a way of producing people who leave and keep coming back. Douthit is one of them.