We remember Prince. ‘Someday My Prince Will Go’

This day (April 21, 2016 ), in Chanhassen, Minnesota, U.S., died Prince Rogers Nelson simply known as Prince, American singer-songwriter and musician extraordinaire

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PROLOGUE

Before identity becomes a construction. Everything begins with a name too heavy for a child. Being called Prince is neither metaphor nor nickname, but a direct projection inherited from a stage that predates his own birth. The name is not chosen for what it promises, but for what it extends: the father’s stage name, Prince Rogers, a local jazz pianist respected yet confined to a limited circuit. The child carries, before speaking, an artistic expectation formulated elsewhere, for someone else.

Music precedes the stabilized family. John L. Nelson, a self-taught pianist from Louisiana, plays in jazz clubs on the North Side of Minneapolis with the Prince Rogers Trio, an elegant group without national reach, circulating through community centers and segregated venues. Mattie Della Shaw, a semi-professional jazz singer, joins as vocalist after meeting him in a club. Their relationship begins as musical collaboration before becoming marital. The union formalizes an artistic pairing more than it establishes a durable home.

Inside, two models coexist without merging. The father composes at the piano, accumulates notebooks of chords, works through complex progressions without audience or recognition. The mother encourages, protects, names. She calls the child “Skipper,” a diminutive circulating within the family, temporarily neutralizing the weight of the official name. Skipper is small, fragile, often ill. The nickname functions as symbolic protection against a world that will soon mark his difference.

The body imposes early constraints. Prince is born with epilepsy. Seizures occur unpredictably. Accounts describe limited medical resources. Around age seven, the seizures stop. Prince later recounts a mystical episode. The narrative remains unverified. The material reality persists: a fragile child, often absent from school, aware of vulnerability.

At school, this vulnerability becomes visible. Small, well-dressed, focused on music rather than sports, Prince becomes target of mockery. His name is distorted into “Princess,” sometimes “Freak.” Attacks concern gender and body. Later androgyny is not yet a choice. It is imposed. Prince remains silent. Teachers describe him as withdrawn. Silence becomes method.

Parental separation intensifies instability. After divorce, Prince moves between households. His mother remarries Hayward Baker, more stable financially, more authoritarian, without establishing connection with him. Material conditions improve, but discomfort persists. Conflicts with his half-brother Omarr increase tension.

Movement becomes constant. Prince shifts between homes, sometimes schools, stays with his father, his mother, an aunt. Schooling fragments. Knowledge does not accumulate linearly. It disperses and reappears. Music becomes the only continuous space. The father’s piano, the guitar he gives, solitary repetition form a stable thread.

After an argument, John expels his son. Prince goes to the Anderson family next door and asks to stay. He moves into their basement for several years. This quiet displacement becomes decisive. With the Andersons, he finds functional normality: no constant judgment, space to play, a friend his age, André Anderson, later André Cymone. Musical collaboration begins there, in borrowed space.

School resumes irregularly. Prince attends Bryant Junior High, then Central High School. He plays basketball without distinction, remains identified as “the musician.” At talent shows, he attracts attention through instrumental skill. Recognition exists but remains local, temporary.

Another structure appears: dance. Through the Urban Arts Program, Prince enters the Minnesota Dance Theatre. Under Loyce Houlton, he follows rigorous training in ballet and modern dance. The body is disciplined, controlled. Dance is technical, not expressive. It adds a grammar of movement to that of sound.

Religion continues throughout. Raised within Adventist and Baptist contexts, Prince grows with biblical narratives, apocalyptic imagery, clear oppositions between good and evil. These elements accumulate without synthesis.

At seven, he composes his first piece, “Funk Machine,” on his father’s piano. The act is not celebrated. It extends daily practice. Music is never framed as miracle. It is available tool.

His relationship with his younger sister Tyka combines proximity and distance. Both are musical, both encouraged, but an implicit agreement forms: each proceeds alone. No assistance. No debt. Pride prevails.

By late adolescence, Prince begins appearing in more structured settings — local bands, early sessions, demos. These mark exit from childhood, not entry into career.

What forms in these years is not a narrative of early genius. It is a system of compensations: a sick child becoming silent, a mocked name becoming burden, an identity fragmented by households, a constrained body disciplined through dance, an inherited music reappropriated. Identity is not given. It is constructed.

The career begins afterward.

The text stops before.