Soul Music Gave Me Surrogate Fathers — Then Helped Me to Know My Own
Growing up, old-school soul connected me to who I thought my father was; years later, it connected me to the man himself
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I used to think my father looked like Marvin Gaye. I’m talking about the Marvin of the ’70s, the What’s Going On/Trouble Man Marvin, the “I come up hard, baby, but now I’m cool / I didn’t make it, sugar, playin’ by the rules” Marvin. The denim-on-denim Marvin, with the two-month-old beard, the heavy-lidded eyes, and the devil-may-care grin. I used to study Marvin’s album covers while listening to his records in my bedroom, and I’d flip out over how much he and my old man looked alike. I was probably a little generous in my estimation. But if you’re a young, Brown boy whose father isn’t often around, older Black men — especially handsome and talented ones — tend to wield great power over your imagination.
I was born 40 miles west of Detroit, the birthplace of Motown Records. My parents divorced when I was a toddler, and I lived with my mother in Ann Arbor, while my father moved back home to Ypsilanti, a working-class city between the two. My father is dark Brown, had a…
