Robert Ford Jr., Hip-Hop Pioneer & Former Billboard Journalist, Dies at 70
Writer-producer, hip-hop pioneer and former Billboard reporter Robert “Rocky” Ford Jr. died on May 19 of undisclosed causes, his wife Linda Medley confirmed to Billboard. He was 70. As a Billboard writer in the late 1970s, Ford penned what has come to be regarded as the first article about the-then budding hip-hop genre in a mainstream publ