Heavy D

Dwight Errington Myers was born on the twenty-fourth of May 1967 at Mandeville, Jamaica, the youngest of nine children of Clifford Myers — a Jamaican mechanical engineer — and Eulahlee Lee Myers, a Jamaican nurse. The Myers family emigrated to the Mount Vernon district of Westchester County, New York, when Dwight was an infant. He was raised in the Black middle-class Caribbean-American Mount Vernon community and attended A. B. Davis Junior High School and Mount Vernon High School. He completed high school in 1985.

He formed the group Heavy D and the Boyz with the Mount Vernon friends Glen Parrish — G-Whiz — Eddie Williams — DJ Eddie F — and Trouble T-Roy — Troy Dixon — in 1985, while still in high school. He took the stage name Heavy D from his weight, which at his late teens was approximately three hundred fifty pounds. The group signed with the new Uptown Records label of Andre Harrell in 1986. The Uptown signing made them the first act on the label that would across the following decade become the principal incubator of the New Jack Swing genre under the production direction of Teddy Riley.

The group released across the following six years the albums Living Large of 1987, Big Tyme of 1989, Peaceful Journey of 1991, and Blue Funk of 1993. The 1989 album Big Tyme sold over a million copies and produced the singles We Got Our Own Thang and Somebody for Me — the recordings that established Heavy D as among the principal New York hip-hop voices of the late 1980s and Heavy D and the Boyz as a leading New Jack Swing act. He provided the title music for the In Living Color sketch-comedy programme of 1990 to 1994.

He was promoted in 1996 to President of Uptown Records under the parent MCA Records — the first hip-hop artist to lead a major American record-label division. He signed across his Uptown presidency the Notorious B.I.G. (placed in this archive), Mary J. Blige, Soul for Real and Heavy D-discovered Sean Combs.

He died of complications of pulmonary embolism at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center on the eighth of November 2011, at forty-four.

He is honored here as the first hip-hop artist to lead a major record label.