Mojoe

During the mid-2000s, when screw-styled hip-hop defined by its syrupy textures dominated the sound of Texas rap, Easy Lee and Tre of Mojoe carved out their own variant of hip-hop soul rooted in the Lone Star State. Their debut album Classic.Ghetto.Soul. showcased the bluesy inflections and live instrumentation supplied by the Mojoe Family backing ensemble, revealing a pair capable of fusing soulful singing, expressive rhymes, and spoken word into one seamless entity—an approach that prompted the duo to characterize their style as "the Roots meet OutKast over dinner with Marvin Gaye at D'Angelo's house." Easy Lee, born Charles Peters in New Orleans, first met Tre, born Treson Scipio, while attending high school after relocating to San Antonio, Texas; both had absorbed the same foundational R&B, blues, and jazz recordings and shared a particular regard for Texas’s pivotal place in early jazz and blues history, including guitarist Robert Johnson’s storied sessions in San Antonio. After its initial 2003 release, the independently distributed Classic.Ghetto.Soul. moved more than 2,000 copies through hand-to-hand sales. Despite attracting interest from multiple labels, the pair repeatedly heard A&Rs reject their work on the grounds that it lacked commercial radio potential. Their situation shifted when they performed for Mathew Knowles—father of pop-R&B star Beyoncé and manager of Destiny’s Child—in Houston near Christmas 2005; Knowles halted the audition to offer the San Antonio natives a contract with his Music World Entertainment imprint. The original album subsequently underwent editing, track rearrangement, and remastering before its re-release in September 2006.