We Got Next

Deborah, on the other hand, "is our backbone," Cord says. "She's our inspiration. When we see her go to work every day, we're like, 'We gotta make her the one who's laid-back in a mansion.'"

Deborah agreed to invest some of her income from her liquor store salary in the business, provided her boys remained serious.

"When they came to me with the music business, I said to them, 'If this is what you want to do in life, you have to stick to it,'" she says.

Stick to it they did: The passion, talent and dedication were there. But the money was not. Recording music, even on the low-budget side, requires a great deal of investment. CD duplication alone can break the bank, not counting the price of microphones, computers, software, instruments and studio time. The Williams clan and Boddie cobbled together money from odd jobs and contributions from Deborah and started working on Steady Ballin's first project, a full-length CD featuring Cordeezy called Solja Grounds.

"At first, me and O.C., we didn't know what we was doing," Junior laughs. "We didn't even have a [CD] burner...After a while, we started doing our thing, we started to put Cord out because he had a lot of material and bought all the equipment and went broke, eating bologna every night, bologna and noodles."

Junior and Cordeezy's bedroom/studio is clean and large but Spartan. A low, frameless twin bed adorned with random unmatched blankets is shoved against one wall; a few feet away, a similar bed sits at a perpendicular angle. A small TV with antiquated antennae sits atop a dresser, silently displaying football highlights. It's not the most impoverished place; it doesn't scream decrepitude or desperation, but it whispers struggle. The recording area is a tiny closet with a microphone duct-taped to the wall. The acoustics are best in there, but it's only a couple feet wide, just big enough to fit a person inside, so anyone inside with the door closed is basically rapping with his face against the wall. Junior works out of a tiny corner, with a computer, small keyboard and cheap drum machine. This is the room where Junior and Cord spend most of their time, working, hanging out, sleeping.

But mainly working. Junior says he'll spend hours poring over beats and thinking of new hooks, only to stay awake in bed at night planning new material. As vice president of the label as well as producer, Junior pushes his little brother hard. "Sacrifice is a big thing," Cord says. "One night, Junior says, 'Cord, get up!'—at 12 o'clock at night, I'm sick, my throat hurtin'—he says, 'Cord, get up, you about to record this song.' And it happens to be the most crunkin' song on the album."

The song in question is "Wut Y'all Niggaz Doin'?" off of Solja Grounds, and crunk it is. As Junior sits at his slapdash console, he double-clicks his mouse and the track's rat-a-tat snare busts out through small speakers. It's a straightforward beat, nothing fancy, but an almost Middle Eastern-sounding keyboard blast provides a good hook, and various heads in the room—it's almost always filled with several members of the Steady Ballin' entourage—start to bob as soon as it begins.

The song is a rhetorical challenge to all the haters and naysayers who say Steady Ballin' will never make it. As Cord raps over the track, his flow bears the mark of Southern hip-hop: mid-tempo, not quite syrup-slow but in no particular hurry. His casual air combines with the intense cadence of his words, and his flow starts to take off on its own momentum. He can't be stopped. This is a young man who believes in what he's doing, who couldn't do anything else. Even if he has to do it with a sore throat in a closet.

Almost every member of Steady Ballin's group, from the bright-eyed rapper Junior High to the veteran rapper Big King Cole, who is nodding off on the couch, is here in Deborah's large living room for a label meeting. At the helm of the meeting is another piece of the Steady Ballin' puzzle, Cletus Freiburger. Another VP of the company, Freiburger supplies the group with much-needed business expertise, advice and a touch of structure. While most members of the Steady Ballin' crew are in their teens and 20s, black and speak a kind of street-smart shorthand, Freiburger is 56, white and speaks like, well, a 56-year-old white guy. So when the word "crunk" escapes his lips, there is an awkward silence, and then Cord lets loose with a spray of laughter. "Did he just say crunk?" he asks, one hand over a huge grin.

Everyone in the room grins too as Freiburger laughs good-naturedly, then continues checking off the agenda items for the meeting.

Freiburger grew up in Iowa and attended the University of New Mexico, where he received an art degree. He's an avid and serious sculptor; currently he's working on a series of bronze nude studies. He is a straightforward man, thoughtful as he squints behind his glasses, considering his words in an unhurried manner as he runs the meeting.