Nicknamed the Father of Hip-Hop, Campbell began playing hard funk records of the sort typified by James Brown.

He called the dancers "break-boys" and "break-girls", or simply b-boys and b-girls, terms that continue to be used fifty years later in the sport of breaking.

While growing up, he saw and heard the sound systems of neighborhood parties called dance halls, and the accompanying speech of their DJs, known as toasting.

Campbell attended the Alfred E. Smith Career and Technical Education High School in the Bronx, where his height, frame, and demeanor on the basketball court prompted the other kids to nickname him "Hercules".

[7] Herc recalls persuading his father to buy him a copy of "Sex Machine" by James Brown, a record that not a lot of his friends had, and which they would come to him to hear.

[7] With Bronx clubs struggling with street gangs, uptown DJs catering to an older disco crowd with different aspirations, and commercial radio also catering to a demographic distinct from teenagers in the Bronx, Herc's parties, organized and promoted by his sister Cindy, had a ready-made audience.

[14] The earliest known Merry-Go-Round involved playing James Brown's "Give It Up or Turnit a Loose" (with its refrain, "Now clap your hands!

[15] Kool Herc also contributed to developing the rhyming style of hip hop by punctuating the recorded music with slang phrases, announcing: "Rock on, my mellow!"

[21][22] On August 11, 1973, DJ Kool Herc was a disc jockey and emcee at a party hosted by himself and his younger sister Cindy at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue.

[23] She wanted to earn extra cash for back-to-school clothes, so she decided to throw a party where her older brother, then just 18 years old, would play music for the neighborhood in their apartment building.

[25] According to music journalist Steven Ivory, in 1973, Herc placed on the turntables two copies of Brown's 1970 Sex Machine album and ran "an extended cut 'n' mix of the percussion breakdown" from "Give It Up or Turnit a Loose", signaling the birth of hip hop.

Herc has noted that "breaking" was also street slang of the time meaning "getting excited", "acting energetically", or "causing a disturbance".

[27] Herc coined the terms "b-boy", "b-girl", and "breaking" which became part of the lexicon of what would be eventually called hip hop culture.

[16]In the early 1980s, the media began to call this style "breakdance", which in 1991 The New York Times wrote was "an art as demanding and inventive as mainstream dance forms like ballet and jazz.

He began to play at nearby clubs including the Hevalo (now Salvation Baptist Church),[30] Twilight Zone,[9] Executive Playhouse, the PAL on 183rd Street,[7] as well as at high schools such as Dodge and Taft.

Venue owners were often nervous of unruly young crowds, however, and soon sent hip hop back to the clubs, community centres and high school gymnasiums of the Bronx.

Bambaataa, at that time a general in the notorious Black Spades gang of the Bronx, obtained his own soundsystem in 1975 and began to DJ in Herc's style, converting his followers to the non-violent Zulu Nation in the process.

Grandmaster Flash suggests that Herc may not have kept pace with developments in techniques of cueing (lining up a record to play at a certain place on it).

Kool Herc appeared in Hollywood's motion picture take on hip hop, Beat Street (Orion, 1984), as himself.

Since 2007, Herc has worked on a campaign to prevent 1520 Sedgwick Avenue from being sold to developers and withdrawn from its status as a Mitchell-Lama affordable housing property.

[41] According to The Source,[42] DJ Kool Herc fell gravely ill in early 2011 and was said to lack health insurance.