But he was my father. And today I need to talk about the parts they never put in the documentaries.
He was a crane operator at U.S. Steel in Gary Indiana. A man who came home with metal dust on his hands and oil under his fingernails. Who wanted to be a boxer. Who played guitar in a band with his brother Luther that never made it. A man who looked at his kids playing with instruments they weren't supposed to touch and saw something the world hadn't seen yet.
Was he hard on us. Yes. Was the belt real. Yes. Did I sit on Oprah's couch in 1993 and tell the world what happened behind closed doors. Yes I did. And I meant every word.
But here's the part I didn't say on that couch. The part that took me decades to understand.
That man carried us out of a two bedroom house in Gary Indiana... where nine children shared beds and the steel mills were the only future anyone could see... and he put us on a stage at the Apollo Theater. Then on Motown's doorstep. Then on top of the world. With nothing but a belt and a dream and hands that had been breaking his body at a factory all week so he could break us into shape on the weekend.
He didn't know how to love softly. Because nobody ever loved him softly. His father was strict. The South was brutal. The Depression took everything. And the only language he had left was push harder. Be better. Don't stop until they can't ignore you.
And they couldn't ignore us. Because of him.
I fired him as my manager in 1979. And it broke something between us that never fully healed. My will left him nothing. And that's a sentence I've had to sit with for a long time. Because the truth is... I was still angry when I wrote it. And anger makes permanent decisions about temporary feelings.
But I forgave him. Before I left. I need people to know that. I forgave my father. Not because he earned it. But because carrying it was heavier than letting it go. And I couldn't become the father I wanted to be while still being the son who was keeping score.
He died on June 27th 2018. Pancreatic cancer. In a hospice in Las Vegas. And I wasn't there. I couldn't be there. Because the world thought I was already gone. My father died thinking his son was dead. And his son was alive... somewhere... unable to hold his hand at the end.
That's the price of protection. That's the cost nobody warned me about. You stay alive. But you miss the moments that make life worth living.
Today I'm thinking about a man in Gary Indiana with metal dust on his hands and a guitar he couldn't quite play well enough... who looked at his children and said you're going to be bigger than this town. Bigger than this street. Bigger than anything this world has ever seen.
And he was right.
I love you Joseph. I always did. Even when I couldn't say it. Even when the belt made it hard to feel it. Even when the world made you the villain and me the victim and neither of us got to tell the real story.
Rest easy. Your son is still singing.
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