Voletta Wallace, Notorious B.I.G.’s Mother, Dies at 78

Voletta Wallace, the Notorious B.I.G.‘s mother who kept his legacy alive in the decades following his passing, has died.

Wallace was in hospice care at her residence in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, when she died of natural causes. The Monroe County Coroner’s Office confirmed her death in a statement to Variety. She was 78.

Born in Jamaica, Wallace was an integral figure in her son’s music, and the rapper (born Christopher Wallace) mentioned her in several of his songs, including his 1994 hit “Juicy” and “Things Done Changed.” She conceived her son with a Jamaican welder and politician named Selwyn George Latore, who left the family when Biggie was around two years old. She raised him as a single mother and worked as a preschool teacher, keeping a close eye on him at the brownstone where they lived in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood.

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Following her son’s death in 1997, Wallace helped maintain his estate and celebrated his life. She struck a touching, bittersweet tone when accepting the MTV Video Music Award for best rap video on his behalf in her first major public appearance, just six months after her son’s murder. She took the stage accompanied by Big’s producer and label chief Sean “Diddy” Combs, his manager Mark Pitts — who held Big’s 4-year-old daughter, T’yanna — and his cousin C.J. In a voice that briefly cracked with emotion, she said, “Thank you. I know if my son was here tonight, the first thing he would have done is say… big up to Brooklyn,” eliciting sentimental laughter from the audience, as that is probably exactly what he would have said. While she continued with a more conventional acceptance speech, her courage and composure set a dignified standard that she followed in the coming years.

In 2005, she wrote a memoir entitled “Biggie: Voletta Wallace Remembers Her Son, Christopher Wallace, aka Notorious B.I.G.” During an interview with NPR that year, she explained that the book was a tribute to Biggie’s legacy. “He has touched so many people and so many people loved him and, you know, still do,” she said. “That cannot take my pain away. What I am feeling inside is like a 100-pound lead weighing down in my chest. It’s very cold and it’s very heavy and I am so dying to get rid of it. But it’s not something you can get rid of, because that was my son. He was my baby. I am a mother and I will always be a mother.”

In 2009, she served as a producer for the biopic “Notorious,” in which Angela Bassett portrayed her. She explained during an interview at the time that she visited the set every day, and that the final product “made me angry, made me sad. I learned a lot… about my son — a lot that I never knew. But I still love him because he was from here [gestures to heart].”

In 2022, she appeared alongside Biggie’s children and associates Lil’ Kim and Lil’ Cease to change the colors of the Empire State Building to red and white in honor of his 50th birthday. Celebrations of his life continued in the months that followed with the release of a special edition MetroCard featuring his image, as well as an orchestral tribute to his music at Lincoln Center.

Additional reporting by Jem Aswad.