Three 6 Mafia Members: The Six Who Built Memphis Rap, Their Roles, and Where They Are Now

Ask ten heads to name the Three 6 Mafia members and most will stall after DJ Paul and Juicy J. That gap is the whole story. Three 6 Mafia was never a duo with friends. It was six voices out of Memphis, each with a job: two producers who ran the boards and the business, a rapid-fire lyricist who named the crew, a horror-tinged co-pilot, the first lady of the camp, and a dancer who became the group’s live wire. Between 1991 and the Oscar stage in 2006 they turned lo-fi North Memphis tapes into a sound that trap, phonk and half of modern Southern rap still lean on.

This is the member-by-member breakdown: who the original six were, what each one actually brought to the sound, when they left, who has passed, and who is still carrying the name today.

Who Are the Three 6 Mafia Members? The Quick Answer

Three 6 Mafia had six official members. The cast list below is the one Wikipedia, AllMusic and the group’s own reunion billing all agree on:

• DJ Paul (Paul Beauregard): co-founder, producer, label co-owner. Active member.
• Juicy J (Jordan Houston): co-founder, producer, hook man. Active member.
• Lord Infamous (Ricky Dunigan, 1973–2013): co-founder, lyricist. DJ Paul’s half-brother.
• Koopsta Knicca (Robert Cooper Phillips, 1975–2015): joined in 1994.
• Gangsta Boo (Lola Mitchell, 1979–2023): the group’s only woman, on board by the 1995 debut.
• Crunchy Black (Darnell Carlton): joined in 1995 as a dancer and hype man, then a rapper.

The founding trio

The roots go back to 1989, when DJ Paul and Lord Infamous were working as a duo called Da Serial Killaz. In 1991 a young North Memphis DJ named Juicy J went looking for Paul because he needed beats. The two clicked, pulled in Infamous, and started recording as The Backyard Posse. Paul and Infamous kept the Serial Killaz name alive on the side, and their 1993 tape Come With Me to Hell carried early versions of songs that would later become Three 6 staples, including “Tear da Club Up.”

How the name happened

The name came out of a verse. According to DJ Paul, speaking to HipHopDX after Infamous died, Lord Infamous called the crew the “Triple Six Mafia” in a freestyle, and it fit the music better than anything they had. The Backyard Posse name was gone. By the time the debut album landed it had softened into the version on every tape since: Three 6 Mafia.

The 1994–1995 expansion

Koopsta Knicca came in around 1994. Crunchy Black and Gangsta Boo were in by 1995, the year the group put out Mystic Stylez (May 30, 1995) on Prophet, their first independent imprint. That’s the classic six-member lineup, the one that cut the cult records fans still trade like scripture.

Who is in Three 6 Mafia now?

Today the active lineup is DJ Paul, Juicy J and Crunchy Black. Those three are the surviving original members. Lord Infamous, Koopsta Knicca and Gangsta Boo have all passed. We get to the dates and details, handled with respect, further down.

DJ Paul and Juicy J: The Two Producers Who Ran Everything

You can’t understand the Three 6 Mafia members without understanding the power structure. DJ Paul and Juicy J produced almost all of the group’s catalog, and almost everything their labels released. They also owned the labels. Everyone else in the group rapped over their beats and released records through their companies. That arrangement made the sound cohesive, and later it was a big part of why members left.

DJ Paul: the architect

Paul Beauregard (born January 12) is the one who built the room. He was DJing and selling his own mixtapes around Memphis before the group existed, and his tapes slowly filled up with original Serial Killaz material. His production took the Memphis tape sound to its darkest extreme: drum-machine thump, eerie synth lines that sound lifted from a slasher score, chopped vocal chants, and plenty of space for the rappers to stack voices.

Paul was also the businessman. After moving on from their first imprint, Prophet, he and Juicy launched Hypnotize Minds in 1997. It became the group’s home base and it got real distribution, through Relativity for Chapter 2: World Domination, Loud for When the Smoke Clears, and Columbia from 2003 on, as the RIAA’s own certification records show. His solo run includes Underground Vol. 16: For da Summa (2002) and Scale-A-Ton (2009), which brought his half-brother Lord Infamous back onto the record.

Juicy J: hooks, beats and the longest second act

Jordan Michael Houston III (born April 5, 1975, Memphis) brought the other half of the formula. He was a DJ first, and his gift was the hook: short, chantable, endlessly repeatable phrases that work in a club before anyone knows the verses. Listen to how many Three 6 records are built around a Juicy J refrain and you’ll see where a generation of trap hooks learned the trick.

Juicy also has the most remarkable afterlife of any member. His older brother is Project Pat, the Hypnotize Minds rapper who became the label’s biggest solo star. And after the group went quiet, Juicy rebuilt himself for a new generation. “Bandz a Make Her Dance” (2012), with Lil Wayne and 2 Chainz and produced by Mike WiLL Made It, put him back in the top 40 nearly two decades after the first Three 6 tapes. His 2013 album Stay Trippy followed. Not many ’90s Southern artists got a second commercial peak. Juicy did, and he got it on his own.

The credit that proves the point

If you want one receipt for how central these two were, look at the Oscar. The Academy’s own records credit “It’s Hard out Here for a Pimp” to Jordan Houston, Cedric Coleman and Paul Beauregard. That’s Juicy J, Hypnotize Minds rapper Frayser Boy, and DJ Paul. The song came from the group, but the publishing came from the two men who ran it.

Lord Infamous: The Triple-Time Flow Memphis Built On

Ricky Terrell Dunigan (born November 17, 1973) was the group’s sharpest pen and its most distinctive voice. If DJ Paul built the haunted house, Lord Infamous wrote the ghost stories.

The flow

Infamous rapped in a rapid triple-time cadence: three syllables packed where most rappers put one or two, rolling over Paul’s drum machines. That fast triplet pocket is one of the clearest lines from early Memphis tapes to modern rap. Trace the stacked, rapid flows that took over Atlanta in the 2010s back far enough and you’ll keep running into Memphis cassettes, and into Lord Infamous.

The horror

Infamous was also the main source of the group’s horror imagery. His solo tape Lord of Terror (1993) tells you everything in the title. Horrorcore wasn’t invented in one place, but the Serial Killaz and early Three 6 tapes are one of its clearest blueprints. It’s a straight line from that tape-hiss menace to the dark, distorted underground rap of the last decade, from Memphis revival crews to the phonk producers who loop old Three 6 vocal tags.

Leaving and coming back

Infamous left the group in the mid-2000s. Sources disagree on whether it was 2005 or 2006. He kept recording, and he showed up all over his half-brother’s 2009 album Scale-A-Ton. In 2013 he reunited with Paul, Koopsta, Gangsta Boo and Crunchy Black in Da Mafia 6ix, a new group built around the original horror sound. Their mixtape 6ix Commandments came out on November 12, 2013. Five weeks later, he was gone.

Koopsta Knicca, Gangsta Boo and Crunchy Black: The Voices That Made It a Collective

The three members who joined in 1994 and 1995 are why Three 6 sounds like a gang rather than a producer project. Every classic Three 6 song is a relay: one voice hands off to the next, and the contrast is the point.

Koopsta Knicca: the grim one

Robert Cooper Phillips (born April 27, 1975) was the fourth member, in by 1994, and he brought a darker, more menacing delivery than anyone else on the roster. Fans of the early tapes rank his verses with the best of the era. His solo album Da Devil’s Playground: Underground Solo came out in 1999, produced, like nearly everything in the camp, by DJ Paul and Juicy J. Its first version had been circulating as a tape since 1994. Koopsta was out of the group by 2000, just as Three 6 was about to have its biggest year.

Gangsta Boo: the Queen of Memphis

Lola Chantrelle Mitchell (born August 7, 1979) joined as a teenager and became the group’s breakout solo voice. Her 1998 single “Where Dem Dollas At” and debut album Enquiring Minds (1998) made her one of the first women in Southern rap with her own national lane. That’s why “Queen of Memphis” stuck.

Her range went beyond the camp. She appears on OutKast’s Stankonia (2000), alongside Eco on “I’ll Call Before I Come,” and holds a writing credit on it. That’s a Memphis horrorcore veteran trading bars on one of the most celebrated Atlanta albums ever made. She left Three 6 in 2001 to go solo. In 2014 she teamed with fellow Hypnotize alum La Chat on the joint project Witch. Her blueprint, a woman holding her own on the hardest posse cuts in the South, runs straight through the generation of Southern women rappers who grew up on Memphis tapes.

Crunchy Black: the live wire

Darnell Carlton (born August 20, 1974) started as the group’s dancer and hype man and grew into a rapper. On record he was the energy. On stage he was the reason a Three 6 show felt like a riot. He was on stage with Paul and Juicy when they collected the Oscar in 2006. He left in 2006 and released his solo album On My Own that same year. He’s also the one original member besides Paul and Juicy still performing under the Three 6 banner.

From the Underground to the Oscar: The Run That Outlasted the Lineup

The catalog tells the membership story better than any bio, because you can hear the lineup shrink and the hits get bigger at the same time.

The tape era to the first plaque

Mystic Stylez (1995) was the cult foundation: lo-fi, pitch-black and dead serious. It carried the original “Tear da Club Up.” Chapter 1: The End followed. Then Chapter 2: World Domination (1997) polished the sound without sanding off the menace and went Gold, the group’s first RIAA plaque. It carried “Tear da Club Up ’97,” a reworked version with a heavier, more aggressive beat.

When the Smoke Clears and the UGK link

When the Smoke Clears: Sixty 6, Sixty 1 (June 13, 2000) was the breakthrough, the group’s first Platinum album. Its signature single, “Sippin’ on Some Syrup,” brought in UGK, Pimp C and Bun B from Port Arthur, Texas, alongside Project Pat. That record is the Memphis-to-Texas handshake in one song: Three 6’s dark bounce meeting UGK’s slow, syrupy country-rap swing. If you want to hear where that Texas half of the conversation came from, go back to UGK’s 1996 masterpiece. We wrote about how Houston independents built that whole regional economy in our piece on Rap-A-Lot Records and J. Prince’s Southern blueprint.

The four-man years and Most Known Unknown

Koopsta was gone by 2000 and Gangsta Boo by 2001. That left DJ Paul, Juicy J, Lord Infamous and Crunchy Black to make Da Unbreakables (2003), another Gold record. Then came the commercial peak. Most Known Unknown (September 27, 2005) debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard 200 and went Platinum. “Stay Fly,” with Young Buck and 8Ball & MJG and built on a Willie Hutch sample, went double Platinum according to the RIAA.

The Oscar

At the 78th Academy Awards in 2006, “It’s Hard out Here for a Pimp,” written for the Memphis-set film Hustle & Flow, won Best Original Song. That came three years after Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” had become the first rap song to take the category. The Three 6 crew performed it on the broadcast and then took the stage to collect it. For a group that started with photocopied tape covers in North Memphis, it’s about the most improbable plot twist in rap history.

The duo era

By then the six had become two. Crunchy left in 2006, and DJ Paul and Juicy J carried the name through the MTV reality show Adventures in Hollyhood (premiered April 5, 2007) and the album Last 2 Walk (June 24, 2008). The title said it plainly: two members left walking.

Who Left, Who Passed, Who’s Still Here

Two of the most-searched questions about the Three 6 Mafia members are how many have died and which ones. The answer is three of the original six. Here are the dates, from the public record.

Lord Infamous (November 17, 1973 – December 20, 2013)

Lord Infamous died on December 20, 2013, at 40. DJ Paul said publicly that his half-brother died of a heart attack in his sleep. Da Mafia 6ix had released 6ix Commandments barely five weeks earlier. The man who named Three 6 Mafia was there for the reunion, and then he was gone.

Koopsta Knicca (April 27, 1975 – October 9, 2015)

Koopsta Knicca died on October 9, 2015, at 40, from complications after a stroke. He’d been part of the Da Mafia 6ix reunion and was one of the voices fans most wanted back on record.

Gangsta Boo (August 7, 1979 – January 1, 2023)

Gangsta Boo died on January 1, 2023, at 43. In June 2023 her death was ruled an accidental overdose, with fentanyl, cocaine and alcohol in her system. The tributes that followed, from Memphis peers to the many women in rap she influenced, showed how far past the original six her impact had spread.

The survivors and the reunion

DJ Paul, Juicy J and Crunchy Black are the three living original members. In August 2019, Paul and Juicy announced a reunion. The first show, on October 12, 2019, at the Landers Center in Southaven, Mississippi, just outside Memphis, brought Crunchy Black and Gangsta Boo back on stage, along with Hypnotize Camp Posse fixtures Project Pat, La Chat and Lil Wyte. A national tour was announced in early 2020 before the pandemic shut it down. Then, on December 2, 2021, the group went head-to-head with Bone Thugs-n-Harmony on Verzuz at the Hollywood Palladium. It was a proper meeting of the two crews that pushed rapid-fire Midwestern and Southern flows into the mainstream. If you only know one side of that matchup, start with our guide to every Bone Thugs-n-Harmony member.

The Hypnotize Camp Posse and the Three 6 Mafia Members’ Lineage

Part of the confusion over who counts as a member comes from the crowd around the group. Three 6 Mafia never grew past six official members, but there was always a bigger family: first the Prophet Posse, then the Hypnotize Camp Posse, named for the label. Posse cuts with a rotating cast showed up on nearly every release.

The camp

The names that come up again and again:

• Project Pat: Juicy J’s older brother and the label’s biggest solo star. He’s on “Sippin’ on Some Syrup” and so tied to the group that fans often count him as a member.
• La Chat: a Hypnotize Minds rapper, later Gangsta Boo’s partner on Witch, and part of the 2019 reunion shows.
• Frayser Boy: a credited co-writer on the Oscar winner.
• Lil Wyte: a 2000s Hypnotize signee and another reunion-stage regular.
• Indo G and The Kaze: earlier Hypnotize-era acts on the label roster.

The sample trail

The clearest proof of the six members’ influence is how often modern rap borrows from them, sometimes with legal consequences. Travis Scott’s “No Bystanders” (2018) interpolated “Tear da Club Up.” DJ Paul sued in 2019 and the case settled that same year. A$AP Ferg’s 2017 hit “Plain Jane” is built on a 1999 cut by Tear da Club Up Thugs, the Paul, Juicy and Infamous side project. Add the countless producers who sample old Three 6 vocal tags, and the Memphis revival that runs through acts we’ve covered, like Moneybagg Yo. The cassette never really stopped playing.

The Southern family tree

Three 6 Mafia sits at the center of a Southern network that rarely gets mapped properly. Houston had Rap-A-Lot and the Geto Boys, with Scarface writing the rulebook. New Orleans had No Limit, and Master P’s business-first hit factory. Atlanta had OutKast, who brought Gangsta Boo onto Stankonia. Port Arthur had UGK. Memphis had Hypnotize Minds, the darkest and strangest of all of them. For colder months, the UGK Ridin Dirty Hoodie is our pick for repping that Texas–Memphis axis. And if you’re into the history of wearing your rap allegiances, our deep dive into rap tees covers how the tape-era crews turned merch into identity.

Three 6 Mafia Members FAQ

Who were the original Three 6 Mafia members?

The six original members were DJ Paul, Juicy J, Lord Infamous, Koopsta Knicca, Gangsta Boo and Crunchy Black. DJ Paul, Juicy J and Lord Infamous founded the group in 1991. Koopsta joined around 1994, and Gangsta Boo and Crunchy Black were in by 1995.

Who is currently in Three 6 Mafia?

DJ Paul, Juicy J and Crunchy Black, the three surviving original members. Their reunion shows since 2019 have also featured Hypnotize Camp Posse members such as Project Pat and La Chat.

How many Three 6 Mafia members have died?

Three: Lord Infamous (December 20, 2013), Koopsta Knicca (October 9, 2015) and Gangsta Boo (January 1, 2023).

Is Project Pat a member of Three 6 Mafia?

Not officially. Project Pat is Juicy J’s older brother and the biggest solo star on Hypnotize Minds, and he’s all over the group’s records, including “Sippin’ on Some Syrup.” But he was part of the wider Hypnotize Camp Posse, not one of the six official members.

Were DJ Paul and Lord Infamous related?

Yes. They were half-brothers, and they started out together as the duo Da Serial Killaz in 1989, before Juicy J joined them.

Which Three 6 Mafia members won the Oscar?

The Academy credits “It’s Hard out Here for a Pimp” to Jordan Houston (Juicy J), Paul Beauregard (DJ Paul) and Cedric Coleman (Frayser Boy). Crunchy Black was also on stage with them at the 2006 ceremony.

Final thoughts

The Three 6 Mafia members story is a lineup that kept shrinking while the legend kept growing. Two producers built the machine. Lord Infamous gave it a name and a flow. Koopsta gave it menace, Gangsta Boo gave it a queen, and Crunchy Black gave it a pulse. Three of the six are gone now, but every triplet flow, every horror-movie synth loop and every chant-along hook in modern Southern rap carries a little of all six. Pull up Mystic Stylez tonight and listen to who is doing what. Once you can hear the six voices separately, you’ll never hear the music the same way again.

Stay creative — The Custom Creative Team