Tuff City Records is a New York

New York

New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...

-based record label

Record label

In the music industry, a record label is a brand and a trademark associated with the marketing of music recordings and music videos. Most commonly, a record label is the company that manages such brands and trademarks, coordinates the production, manufacture, distribution, marketing and promotion,...

 founded by journalist Aaron Fuchs in 1981. Initially concentrating on hip hop music

Hip hop music

Hip hop music, also called hip-hop, rap music or hip-hop music, is a musical genre consisting of a stylized rhythmic music that commonly accompanies rapping, a rhythmic and rhyming speech that is chanted...

, the label's roster expanded to include doo-wop

Doo-wop

The name Doo-wop is given to a style of vocal-based rhythm and blues music that developed in African American communities in the 1940s and achieved mainstream popularity in the 1950s and early 1960s. It emerged from New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Baltimore, Newark, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati and...

, dancehall

Dancehall

Dancehall is a genre of Jamaican popular music that originated in the late 1970s. Initially dancehall was a more sparse version of reggae than the roots style, which had dominated much of the 1970s. In the mid-1980s, digital instrumentation became more prevalent, changing the sound considerably,...

, and hip hop-jazz fusion, and releases included reissues of music from as far back as the 1940s.

Fuchs was a journalist with Cash Box, and Tuff City was one the earliest hip hop labels, with Fuchs quitting his job to run the label. After the label's first two releases, a distribution deal was signed with CBS Associated Records, although Tuff City severed the link after only a year. The label pioneered the release of albums of break beats—the building blocks for others to use in their recordings. Fuchs also bought the rights to earlier recordings that were sampled by others, bringing money into the label via licensing costs. One of these, "Impeach the President" by the Honey Drippers

The Honey Drippers

The Honey Drippers might refer to*The Honeydrippers, 1980s British-American rock band.*The Honey Drippers , a 1960s and 1970s soul band that had the hit "Impeach the President."...

 was the subject of a court case with Fuchs filing a lawsuit against Sony Music and Def Jam for illegally sampling the track on recordings by LL Cool J

LL Cool J

James Todd Smith , better known as LL Cool J , is an American rapper, entrepreneur, and actor...

 and EPMD

EPMD

EPMD is an American hip hop group from Brentwood, New York. The group's name is a concatenation of the members' name "E" and "PMD" or an acronym for "Erick and Parrish Making Dollars", referencing its members, emcees Erick Sermon and Parrish Smith...

. The case was settled out of court.

In the mid-1990s, Tuff City launched the Ol' Skool Flava sub-label for reissues of classic hip hop material.