June 27 in Houston is more than a cultural holiday. It’s also become more than DeMo Sherman’s birthday. It is a tipping point, a date synonymous with a 35-minute freestyle that turned out Galveston before it turned out the world. And it may not have happened had it not been DeMo’s birthday at all.
According to DJ Screw biographer Lance Scott Walker and others, June 27th is the biggest-selling Screw tape of all time, with its monumental freestyle packaged around songs including Bone Thugs-N-Harmony’s “Crossroad,” (not their chart-topping smash “Tha Crossroads”), 2Pac’s “All About U,” and the instrumental to Above The Law’s “100 Spokes Wit Shoutz.”
“No other tape was gonna top ‘June 27th’, no matter who was on it,” DeMo told Donnie Houston during a 2022 reunion of the men who rapped on the freestyle. “If my mama wouldn’t have had me, we wouldn’t have no ‘June 27th.’ It might have been something else, but it wouldn’t be ‘June 27th.'”…