B. 1958

The Lives They Lived

Famous and influential musicians die every year, but 2016 was bewildering. David Bowie, Leonard Cohen, Prince, Leon Russell, Phife Dawg ... it’s as if we walked out to look at the stars and found major constellations gone. Who had even gotten over Lou Reed yet?

None of those deaths took a bigger plug out of me than that of Prince, mainly because his impact on my childhood had carried such asteroid-level force. To be an 8-year-old white boy in a beige-carpeted basement in southern Indiana and have “1999” come on at the end of 1982 was ... there was no going back from it. It offered lots of lessons, first and foremost how to deal psychologically with the threat of existential annihilation. You may recall that 1983 was the year of the made-for-TV nuclear-holocaust movies: “The Day After” and, most disturbing of all, “Testament.” I slept less that year than in any year until my 20s. We were all going to die, and die horribly — I didn’t know much, but I knew that. No one was telling me how to deal with this. My mom tried. She told me about the Cuban missile crisis, in a “we’ve been here before” sort of way. But now came Prince. He sang what continues to be one of the most wonderful lyrical openings to a pop song: “I was dreaming when I wrote this./Forgive me if it goes astray.” Then he told me what you do in the face of certain and total destruction. The advice has held up. Live.

There’s a temptation to try a thing about “the meaning of Prince,” i.e., one of those half-true, crypto-competitive think pieces we tend to trot out (we including I) at times like this. When an artist you love disappears, everyone else’s ideas about that person can seem grotesque and stupid, and even if right, right for the wrong reasons. I’m having it happen right now with all the essays on Dylan’s Nobel. How dare you talk about Bob! Partly it’s the narcissism of minor difference, but partly it’s the simple inadequacy of language. You know that old line, that writing about music is like dancing about architecture? (So is writing.)

One thing that seems maybe worth saying is to note how all the writing on Prince so far has paid such scant attention to his deepest and most important gift, his feel for pop melody. We often do this, for some reason, in talking about pop singers, almost as if the gift were shameful. But it’s like discussing Olympic runners without mentioning their speed. Everything else that made Prince special — style, virtuosity, movement, guts, beauty — all of it could be removed piece by piece like body parts in a game of Operation, and there would still be Prince on the table. But if the man had not been able to write a song like “When You Were Mine” or “Raspberry Beret” (by write it, I mean put the notes and vowels in an order that made them hard to forget), we would never have heard of him. Because he could, though, we have, and people will, for hundreds of years.

The only thing I’ll risk adding to what will no doubt soon become a library shelf of Prince biographies and appreciations has to do with the man’s name, Prince Rogers Nelson. It interests me. Years ago I wrote an essay about Michael Jackson and learned that the name “Prince” — which Michael bestowed on his sons, in a gesture that most of the world quite reasonably took to be ostentatious and silly — had in fact been in Michael’s family for hundreds of years, and was a name first given to one of his slave ancestors in the South. Could this also be the case with Prince? That is, after all, his real name. The birth certificate says Prince Rogers Nelson (the clerk wrote Prince Roger Nelson, a mistake). But it turns out that neither the name Prince nor that of Rogers had been used by Prince’s family in living memory. The reality of where he got them was way weirder.

First, there is the immediate derivation, one most Prince freaks know about: In the ’50s, his father, John, formed an experimental jazz band called the Prince Rogers Trio. At one point, they were called simply Prince Rogers (“prince rogers,” read the business cards, “a whole new concept in music”). They played in restaurants and supper clubs. They never “went anywhere.”

The question becomes, Where did Prince Rogers get “Prince Rogers”? Where did Prince’s father pick it up? Was there a real human being called Prince Rogers, a person whose name would have been known to the band and family? There was.

The first Prince Rogers’s real first name wasn’t Prince, though. It was Douglas. He was born Douglas T. Rogers. I don’t know where he got the name Rogers. I can’t find his father. His mother was Jettie Layton. He grew up in Decatur, Ill., and left while still in high school to join the Navy. When he moved to Chicago, he intended to pursue premedical studies at DePaul. But something fateful happened, and he fell into the circle of an infamous spiritual figure known as Prophet Jones.

In the world of midcentury black Christianity, Prophet Jones was a figure equally loved and reviled. He had once been a man named James F. Jones in Birmingham, Ala. Down there he got mixed up in a church called Triumph the Holy Righteous Church, one of the countless splinter sects that emerged from the black evangelical revivals of 1890–1910, a kind of third Great Awakening in American history. In the 1930s, he went to Detroit as a missionary, and there he received his call. He could boast of hundreds and at times thousands of followers, black and white. The Detroit Free Press covered his doings extensively. Life magazine published a profile of him at one point; The Saturday Evening Post called him the “Messiah in Mink.” He conducted services from a kind of throne. Next to his throne was an empty chair for his dead mother. He claimed to be a real prophet: God spoke to him, showed him the future. He predicted that Eisenhower would win, and when this came to pass, Ike invited him to the inauguration, which made for excellent P.R. for the prophet.

Douglas T. Rogers became his right-hand man, or some combination of that and a body man. Never had the terms been more appropriate: Among the pictures of Prophet Jones, a startling number of them show Rogers, too. In the prophet’s organization, high-ranking figures were called princes and princesses. So Douglas Rogers became Prince Rogers, and people forgot he had ever been called Douglas.

It gets intriguing, in that Prophet Jones was most probably gay (a woman who knew him in his early days described him as a member of the “third sex”), and so, it appears, was Prince Rogers. Presumably they were lovers at first, after which it mellowed into a long partnership. The prophet’s scene was: lots of young men around, all the time, doing as the prophet wished. The prophet lived in a “French castle” with 54 rooms. He wore silk robes and an earring and a woman’s diamond bracelet and kept his hair long and wavy in back. At one point he was busted on “gross indecency” charges. The city’s Vice Bureau had sent in a spy, a handsome young man. The prophet, they claimed, had made “immoral advances.” When they threw Jones into his cell, he asked for two people: his lawyer and Prince Rogers.

Another time a would-be assassin broke into the castle. Prince Rogers, the church later claimed, had helped to thwart this attempt on the prophet’s life. According to the newspaper, however, he ran the opposite direction and fainted. “That’s all right,” said the prophet. “He’s just unconscious. It’s just the spirit of God.”

The prophet’s fame outside Detroit rested primarily on his radio show. His program, broadcast across multiple states, aired on Sundays. It seems safe to say his sermons were entertaining. It was said “to sound like a rock ’n’ roll concert.” Little Richard, in an interview with John Waters, owned the prophet as an early influence.

It would have been via this show, either closely listened to or casually overheard in the home of one John L. Nelson, that the name Prince Rogers entered the story of Prince Rogers Nelson, and the story of Prince. The prophet often mentioned his beloved prince in those Sunday transmissions. Strange evidence exists, in a 1954 issue of Jet, that Prince Rogers had become a known figure in Northern black culture: A handsome grifter in Chicago had tried to buy a fancy camera with a bogus check, and he claimed to be Prince Rogers, “secretary to the fabulous prophet.”

I don’t know what it all means. Certainly there seems to be some ... appropriateness ... in the idea that a sexually ambiguous black man known for displays of spiritual ostentation played some role in our hero’s evolution. Prince’s music and his theology, his musical theology, drew from so many of the same depths: eroticism and religion, physical purity and material display. But was there any real influence? We’d need to know first whether Prince’s father or any of the other band members ever got into Prophet Jones, or if the prophet’s message somehow played into the mission of the Prince Rogers Trio. Maybe they just thought it sounded good. We’d need to know whether Prince, as a boy, ever heard of the earlier Prince Rogers and his “fabulous” prophet. These things may be not merely unknown by now but unknowable. As for Prince, all we know is he has transitioned.

Prophet Jones died in 1971, but the first Prince Rogers seems to have lived on, in Los Angeles, into the ’80s. Long enough to witness the rise of his namesake. He has to have wondered.

He did not live to see midnight 1999, which according to Prophet Jones was the moment when death would pass from the world for good. “Men will stop dying in the year 2000,” he wrote, promising, by one account, that anyone “still alive then would become immortal.”

John Jeremiah Sullivan is a contributing writer for the magazine and the Southern editor of The Paris Review.