About Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis
James Samuel "Jimmy Jam" Harris III (born June 6, 1959) and Terry Steven Lewis (born November 24, 1956) are an American R&B/pop songwriting and record production team. Their productions have received commercial success since the 1980s with various artists, most extensively Janet Jackson. They have written 31 top ten hits in the UK and 41 in the US. In 2022, the duo were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in the Musical Excellence category. == History == Jimmy Jam is the son of Cornbread Harris, a Minneapolis blues and jazz musician. Jimmy Jam met Lewis while attending an Upward Bound program on the University of Minnesota campus. In the mid-1970s, Harris formed or joined Mind & Matter, an 11 piece band. Lewis had been in the band Flyte Tyme, which Harris joined late in its history and which Prince restructured as the Time in 1981. As members of the Time, they played instruments on all but one of the group's five albums (Ice Cream Castle being the one exception), including Condensate which the group recorded as the Original 7ven. In 1982, Jam and Lewis were introduced to music executive Dina R. Andrews, who was then an employee of Dick Griffey's SOLAR Records, where they would be mentored by record producer Leon Sylvers III. The pair asked Andrews to manage them, and through her relationships, Andrews first introduced the duo to Clarence Avant. They produced their first work for Avant for the S.O.S. Band.
Biography source: Wikipedia. The profile adds birthday-specific historical context from the Celebs Birthday Today editorial database.