J.B. Moore, an advertising man from suburban Long Island who wrote the lyrics to one of rap’s first hits — Kurtis Blow’s 1979 novelty song, “Christmas Rappin’” — and with a partner, Robert Ford, produced that rapper’s albums as he became a breakout star in the early 1980s, died on March 13 in Manhattan. He was 81.
His friend Seth Glassman said the cause of his death, in a nursing home, was pancreatic cancer.
Mr. Moore and Mr. Ford, known as Rocky, were unlikely music impresarios. They met at Billboard magazine in the 1970s, where Mr. Moore was an advertising salesman who wrote occasional jazz reviews, and where Mr. Ford was a reporter and critic and one of the first journalists at a mainstream publication to expose the musical fusion created by DJs and MCs that was then emerging from New York City block parties and Black discos.
Mr. Ford “was a Black guy from the middle of Hollis, Queens,” Mr. Moore recalled in a 2001 oral history for the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle. “I was a white guy from the North Shore of Long Island.” Still, he said, “our record collections were virtually identical.”
The two friends’ careers took a turn in the late summer of 1979, when Mr. Ford, who had a child on the way, told Mr. Moore of his idea to try to scrape up money with a Christmas song. He was inspired by a Billboard colleague who had written a holiday tune for Perry Como decades earlier and was still getting paid for it.
Mr. Moore liked the idea. “Christmas records are perennials, and therefore you get royalties ad infinitum on them,” he said in the oral history.
He was no musical novice. An experienced guitarist, bassist and songwriter, he had been in bands throughout his youth and had aspired to a career as solo artist or a producer.
That night, he went back to his apartment in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan and scribbled out lyrics parodying the Clement Clarke Moore poem “A Visit From St. Nicolas,” better known as “The Night Before Christmas.”
“We didn’t think a major label would understand a rap record,” Mr. Moore recalled, “but they would understand a parody.”
Mr. Moore also agreed to finance the song, ponying up the $10,000 (about $42,000 in today’s dollars) that he had saved to write a novel about his Army days in Vietnam (he never completed it). Through Mr. Ford’s contacts in the rap subculture, they eventually secured the services of Kurtis Blow, an ambitious young Harlem native, born Kurtis Walker, who was unknown to the wider world.
Mr. Blow said he initially found Mr. Moore’s lyrics quirky but charming, with lines like “He was rolly, he was poly, and I said, ‘Holy moly!/You gotta lotta whiskers on your chinny-chin-chin.’”
“That’s a totally different meter from the way we rapped then,” Mr. Blow said in a 2019 interview with the music journalist and hip-hop historian Bill Adler for Smithsonian Magazine. “But it was so witty, and I welcomed the opportunity to do it.”
He tacked on some of his own lyrics about Santa joining a raucous party and, with a handful of musicians, banged out the record in one night.
More than 20 labels rejected the song before Mercury finally released it in December. It reached the Top 30 in Britain and, although it failed to chart in the United States, became a go-to party jam long after the holidays. It went on to sell more than 350,000 copies.
With the help of those two producers, Mr. Blow became the first rap artist to sign with a major label and find commercial success. His debut album, released by Mercury in 1980 and simply called “Kurtis Blow,” contained the single “The Breaks,” an absurdist litany of life’s misfortunes, which soared to No. 4 on the Billboard R&B chart, showing a skeptical record industry that rap records could be more than novelties.
At more than seven minutes, this anthem of “progressive disco-funk,” as Mr. Blow described his sound, was the first rap song to be certified gold, a designation reserved for albums or singles that sell more than 500,000 copies. (The Sugarhill Gang’s seminal hit, “Rapper’s Delight,” released the previous year, probably sold more copies. But the group’s label, Sugar Hill Records, did not submit the song for auditing by the Recording Industry Association of America.)
“Moore was a key figure in the early commercialization of Hip Hop,” Mr. Blow wrote in a recent social media post. With Mr. Ford, he added, “his productions helped bridge the gap between Hip Hop and mainstream audiences in the late ’70s and early ’80s.”
James Biggs Moore III was born on Nov. 4, 1943, in Cleveland, the elder of two sons of James Biggs Moore Jr., who worked in the defense industry, and Lois (Foster) Moore. The family later settled in Plandome, a village on Long Island.
After serving in Vietnam, he attended American University in Washington and later landed a job at Billboard.
No immediate family members survive.
Mr. Moore and Mr. Ford continued to work with Mr. Blow through his 1984 album, “Ego Trip,” which contained his enduring single “Basketball.” After that, the rapper took over producing duties himself.
The duo also produced three albums by the Brooklyn electro-R&B group Full Force, as well as the novelty songs “Rappin’ Rodney” (1983), by Rodney Dangerfield, and “City of Crime,” a comic tie-in to the 1987 film “Dragnet,” rapped by Tom Hanks and Dan Aykroyd.
Mr. Moore later looked back on his first taste of success in the rap world, recalling the day that a musician friend “called up and said, ‘Here,’ and put the phone up. ‘You know what that is?’”
“And I heard this terrible version of ‘The Breaks,’” Mr. Moore said in the 2001 oral history. “It was a bar mitzvah band doing it. We had arrived.”