Store Owner In Michigan Discovers Over 7,000 Abandoned Records From J Dilla’s Personal Collection

A record store owner in Royal Oaks, Michigan, has recently unearthed what he believes are over 7,000 records from the late and great Hip-Hop producer J Dilla‘s personal collection.

The Detroit News is reporting that Jeff Bubeck, owner of the Royal Oaks record store UHF, discovered “crates full of records, numbering in the thousands. After digging through their contents, Bubeck learned he’d stumbled upon something special, the personal record collection of late Detroit hip-hop producer J Dilla.”

Bubeck acquired over 7,000 records from “an abandoned storage unit in Clinton Township last month that may have belonged to Dilla.”

“When first digging through the crates, amid the mountains of 94-cent Earth, Wind & Fire LPs, Bubeck noticed a box of cassette tapes, labeled in black marker as “Jaydee Beats.” There were also lyric booklets, along with magazines and pieces of junk mail addressed to James Yancey, as well as to his parents, Beverly and Maureen Yancey. The names didn’t ring a bell with Bubeck. But when he punched Yancey’s name into a Google search on a whim, two and two came together.”

“It was pretty shocking,” saids Bubeck to the Detroit News. “I was like, ‘Are you kidding me?’”

He continued, “Dilla was a notorious crate digger, scooping up albums by the caseload to scour for obscure beats and samples. So while many of the records in the collection are dollar-bin throwaways, there are some, including titles from 1970s Detroit jazz label Tribe Records, that have significant value.”

Once he is able to reach J Dilla’s mother, Maureen “Ma Dukes” Yancey, Bubeck says he planning to share sales proceeds with the J Dilla Foundation, although recent contacts have been “unsuccessful.”

“For now, Bubeck is still combing through the boxes of records, and UHF is putting them on sale several at a time. When Record Store Day was celebrated on Saturday, the first batch of Dilla records hit the shelves, and fans were excited to get their hands on them.”

The records are being sold in Bubeck’s Royal Oaks store and come with “yellow tags that identify them as part of Dilla’s personal stash.” One of the UHF’s owners, Scott Hagen told the Detroit News, “A lot of people were saying, ‘I just want one record that was his.’ They just want to own something that once belonged to Dilla.”