“He gave you this deeper-than-music kind of touch”: Nearly a year after his death, family and friends remember Young Dolph, the beloved Memphis rapper cut down in his prime.
albums — was releasing new music under the PRE banner to industry acclaim. Dolph was the boisterous bard of South Memphis, constantly spinning adversity into abundance.After beating the odds in two prior shootings, the prolific artist, born Adolph Thornton Jr., was gunned down Nov. 17 while visiting Makeda’s Homemade Butter Cookies on Airways Boulevard in South Memphis, just outside the Castalia Heights neighborhood where he grew up.
BORN IN CHICAGO on July 27, 1985, Dolph moved to Memphis around the age of two and was raised largely by his paternal grandmother, Ida Mae Thornton, alongside his two younger brothers. His parents were in the grips of crack addiction and struggling to care for their five kids, relatives say. As Dolph grew older, money was tight. In his music and in interviews, he recalled sharing a bed with another cousin. In his track “I Survived,” he says Ida Mae became his full-time caretaker once he hit the fourth grade. While his parents had tried to resume raising him, she took him back in after he got in trouble at school for calling his teacher a “ho.” “Where I would be without Ida Mae?/Only Lord knows, God bless her soul,” he rapped.
Ida Mae was a beautician by trade, and when Dolph was 13, he learned how to cut hair, starting with his two younger brothers. “We living with this old lady. I’m looking at her, like, ‘She old. It’s only so much she can do. It’s only so long she gonna be around.’ I’m like, ‘I gotta figure it out,’” he said on the podcastFriends say that Dolph would ride his bicycle around the neighborhood with clippers in his backpack. “He could draw pictures on your head.
Once his first mixtape was under his belt, Dolph could see his future laid out in front of him. It was time to go straight. Armed with everything Ida Mae taught him, and what he learned on the streets, Dolph started self-funding more serious moves. His 2010 projectwas hosted by Atlanta radio personality DJ Scream, and marked the start of a long working relationship with Grammy-winning producer Drumma Boy.
Bradshaw and another friend, Odom Hamm, recall helping Dolph distribute the CDs all over town. “When we’d leave the club, they’d be all of them on the ground. We’d pick them up, put them back in the box, come back to the neighborhood, do it again,” Hamm, 35, says. Now an author who underwrote the Young Dolph tribute mural at the corner of Castalia Street and Boyle Avenue, Hamm says any rejection only motivated Dolph to try harder.
Dolph mentioned the Hollywood shooting again in his 2018 ballad “Black Queen,” rapping “I’m like LeBron, can’t shit stop me/I was by myself, they was eight deep when they shot me.” The line was tucked into what was otherwise an ode to his mother, who plays a grand piano next to her son in the music video.
When he found out Miss Tammy had been diagnosed with cancer in 2019, he “dropped everything” to make sure she was all right, she says. “I was still trying to go to work to pay my bills, and he came by and gave me the money for every bill I owed,” she says, seated next to a framed picture of Dolph hung in her living room. “He was a remarkable person, an angel in disguise.”
But the Covid lockdown in early 2020 ultimately turned into the “greatest blessing in disguise,” she says. Soon, Dolph was skipping preplanned trips to stay home. He would cook breakfast for everyone, make smoothies for the kids, play on the trampoline. Months after Dolph’s death, Jaye still hasn’t removed his clothes from the closet. “Everything is exactly the same. Peaceful,” she says. “I don’t really know the rationale, the psychology behind it, but it’s like, we’ll just keep these the same for some time, you know. That’s just how I’ve been dealing with my grieving process.”
The two men charged with Dolph’s slaying, Justin Johnson, 24, and Cornelius D. Smith, 32, pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder in February. After the arraignment, chief prosecutor Paul Hagerman of the Shelby County District Attorney’s office told the Associated Press he had a sense of what the motive was, but he declined to elaborate. He did not respond to a request for comment fromMemphis Police and the U.S. Marshals Service first named Johnson as a suspect on Jan.
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