On Wednesday (Sept. 20), Snoop Dogg shared a video of former Death Row Records artist Danny Boy, who was recently recorded singing while working as a line cook in a restaurant. In the post’s description, the Long Beach legend — who acquired the iconic record label in 2022 — appeared to invite the Chicago vocalist back to the entity that The D.O.C., Dr. Dre, Suge Knight, and Dick Griffey founded in the early ’90s. “Your seat on Death Row awaits you,” Snoop said, to which the recipient quickly replied, “Wow, I’m ready.”
During West Coast hip hop’s golden era, Danny Boy contributed to classic cuts by the likes of MC Hammer, Tupac Shakur, Twista, and Crucial Conflict. In 2010, he liberated his debut LP, aptly titled It’s About Time, a 15-song body of work with contributions from Roger Troutman, Jodeci’s DeVante Swing and JoJo, and DJ Quik, the last of whom handled the bulk of the album’s groovy production. This past Valentine’s Day, Danny Boy returned with the independently released Black Heart.
In an interview with HipHopDX, the veteran talent explained the reasoning behind his eventual Death Row departure.
“I left Death Row when a lot of [federal agents] started parking on my front grass and I was living in a neighborhood where they shouldn’t have been there,” he stated. “I was there to sing, and there was nothing to be searching me for ‘cause I was there to sing. I was in California to sing.”
Danny Boy continued, “I had lost [Knight] to the jail system and a brother that had passed on, which was [Shakur]. So, a lot of things were going on in my mind, so I had to get back to where I was from, where I felt comfortable… I went from living a fabulous life, I can’t complain about the life that I lived.”