Quincy Delight Jones Jr. (born March 14, 1933) is an American record producer, musician, songwriter, composer, arranger, and film and television producer. His career spans 70 years in the entertainment industry with a record of 80 Grammy Award nominations, 28 Grammys, and a Grammy Legend Award in 1992.

Jones came to prominence in the 1950s as a jazz arranger and conductor before working on pop music and film scores. In 1968, Jones became the first African American to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song for “The Eyes of Love” from the film Banning. Jones was also nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Score for his work on the 1967 film In Cold Blood, making him the first African American to be nominated twice in the same year. Jones produced three of Michael Jackson‘s most successful albums: Off the Wall (1979), Thriller (1982), and Bad(1987). In 1985, Jones produced and conducted the charity song “We Are the World“, which raised funds for victims of famine in Ethiopia.

In 1971, he became the first African American to be the musical director and conductor of the Academy Awards. In 1995, he was the first African American to receive the Academy’s Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. He is tied with sound designer Willie D. Burton as the second most Oscar-nominated African American, with seven nominations each. In 2013, Jones was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame as the winner, alongside Lou Adler, of the Ahmet Ertegun Award. He was named one of the most influential jazz musicians of the 20th century by Time.

Quincy Delight Jones Jr. was born in the South Side of Chicago, Illinois on March 14, 1933, the son of Sarah Frances (died 1999), a bank officer and apartment complex manager, and Quincy Delight Jones, a semi-professional baseball player and carpenter from Kentucky. Jones’ paternal grandmother was an ex-slave from Louisville, and Jones later discovered that his paternal grandfather was Welsh. With the help of author Alex Haley in 1972 and Latter-day Saint researchers in Salt Lake City, Jones discovered that one of his mother’s ancestors included James Lanier, a relative of poet Sidney Lanier. Jones said, “He had a baby with my great-grandmother [a slave], and my grandmother was born there [on a plantation in Kentucky]. We traced this all the way back to the Laniers, the same family as Tennessee Williams.” Learning that the Lanier immigrant ancestors were French Huguenots who had court musicians among their ancestors, Jones attributed some of his musicianship to them.