And he can get up and it can be like 4:30 a.m. “He told me one time that he has dreams where he’d see a keyboard in front of his eyes and he’d see his hands on the keyboard and he’d hear a melody.
When he was 12, he lived with his father for a brief time and had the chance to watch up close as he juggled a day job at Honeywell with late-night gigs and the nonstop urge to make music. “Here comes dad… I’m not supposed to touch his piano… but I want to play it so bad.”Īs time passed and Prince matured, he progressed from being intimidated by his father’s musical talent to being inspired by it.
At his reflective, autobiographical Piano and a Microphone concert at Paisley Park on January 21, 2016, Prince opened the show by sharing a memory of being enchanted by the sight of his father’s piano when he was just three years old. “The older one with all the responsibilities of heading a household & the younger one whose only modus operandi was fun.” In those nascent days, the younger Prince was often referred to by his nickname, Skipper.įrom a very early age, Prince remembered music filling his home. “There were 2 Princes in the house where we lived,” Prince wrote in the first pages for his memoir, The Beautiful Ones. Their musical union developed into a romantic partnership as well, and almost exactly nine months after marrying (their wedding was August 31, 1957), they welcomed their son Prince into the world. It was while he was playing with his group at the Blue Note jazz club that he first met Prince’s mother, Mattie, and recruited her to sing in his band. In the 1950s John Nelson had made a name for himself in the music scene playing piano and leading the Prince Rogers Trio, a jazz group who would play in clubs and community centers on the North Side like the Phyllis Wheatley House, a historic building that opened in 1924 to provide social services for African-American families moving to North Minneapolis. Prince’s parents, John Lewis Nelson and Mattie Della Shaw, found one another through music, and when their child was born they gave him John’s stage name, Prince Rogers.
Mattie Shaw and Prince / Copyright The Prince Estate
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