Anthony ‘Butcher T’ Scharschmidt was born to Jamaican parents in Montreal in 1962. He lived with his parents in Jamaica until his early teens. His family owned a bar that had a jukebox, where he spent a lot of time enjoying the music of Jamaican stars as well as renowned Black American R&B artists such as Jerry Butler, Curtis Mayfield, and James Brown.

During his time in Jamaica, Butcher T was exposed to sound system culture, a trend that gained popularity in the 1940s and 1950s. A sound system typically consisted of a generator, turntables, and speakers which were transported to various locations in the city for dances and parties. By the mid-1950s, Stone Love, Clement ‘Coxsone’ Dodd, and Duke Reid played significant roles in the development of ska and reggae through their sound systems.

In 1979, Butcher T went to New York with Howard ‘Stretch’ Carr; a pillar in Montreal’s Caribbean community who has been a host on campus radio station, CKUT, for more than four decades. At the time, Carr owned Stretch Records, a store located near the old Montreal Forum, where the young DJ worked.

He started making break-beats by cutting up tracks using a Lloyd’s home stereo with an 8- track player, radio tuner, and a turntable. He developed a continuous looping process by recording the break section of a track, paused the recording, and then started the break-beat again. It was Stretch’s nephew, Andrew Carr, who gave him the name Butcher.

Butcher T is one of the most notable and in-demand disc jockeys in Montreal for hip-hop and R&B. A trailblazing DJ and global ambassador for the genre, he first appeared on Canada’s inaugural hip-hop radio program, a six-hour Saturday night showed called Club 980 on CKJM in 1983. Nine years later, Butcher T’s Noon Time Cuts began airing on Friday afternoons on CKUT.

CKUT is the official campus-community radio station of McGill University and has been on the airwaves for more than 35 years. It quickly became an important voice for Montreal’s diverse Black communities. Butcher T’s Noon Time Cuts provides interviews from international and local artists in a wide variety of music genres, from old school to funk and hip-hop. Listeners can also tune in to hear Caribbean and Latin American music including reggae, soca, and salsa, to name a few.

Butcher T’s legacy has been added to Northside Hip Hop Archive, a digital collection dedicated to preserving and promoting Canadian hip-hop history and culture.