Ol' Dirty Bastard

Russell Tyrone Jones was born on the fifteenth of November 1968 in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn, New York City, to Cherry and William Jones, one of several children raised in the borough that shaped his voice. He came of age steeped in music and in the company of two cousins, Robert Diggs and Gary Grice, who would join him in a shared devotion to hip-hop.

In 1992 those bonds became a movement. With Diggs (RZA) and Grice (GZA), Jones was a founding member of the Wu-Tang Clan, taking the name Ol' Dirty Bastard. Across the group's landmark work he supplied its most untethered voice — an outrageous, free-associative delivery, half-rapped and half-sung, that belonged to no one else and that Method Man immortalized with the line that there was "no father to his style."

He carried that singularity into a solo career. His 1995 debut, Return to the 36 Chambers: The Dirty Version, yielded "Brooklyn Zoo" and "Shimmy Shimmy Ya," and his 1999 album Nigga Please brought the worldwide hit "Got Your Money." His public life was shadowed by legal troubles and struggle, yet his artistry never lost its startling originality.

On the thirteenth of November 2004, two days short of his thirty-sixth birthday, Russell Jones died in New York of an accidental overdose. His mother remembered him as the kindest and most generous soul on earth. Uncontainable and wholly himself, he left hip-hop a voice it had never heard before and has never replaced.