COTTON VALLEY, La. (KTAL/KMSS) – If you love the music of Prince, now’s your chance to put on your favorite raspberry beret and learn about the artist’s roots in the Deep South.
Prince Rogers Nelson had nineteen top 10 songs and won an Oscar during his career. And though he was born in Minnesota, many of his fans are not aware that Prince’s dad was from a tiny town rural northwest Louisiana called Cotton Valley.
The small town is in Webster Parish and is located about a twenty-minute drive from the Arkansas state line.
Prince’s family history in Louisiana tells a series of incredible life stories. By learning about his heritage, you also learn about a freed Native American woman who had been enslaved, generations of preachers, a woman who became one of the most popular Black speakers in the city of Chicago, and a slave owner who fathered Prince’s great-grandfather.
Ashley Williams Jones is the mayor of Cotton Valley. She grew up in NWLA and has lived in the town for 20 years.
“It’s really awesome for me to find out that Prince’s family is from this area, because I love Prince. He’s one of my top singers. Purple Rain is my favorite. I remember when Pretty Woman came out when I was a kid. She sang a Prince song in the hot tub.”
Jones said someone showed up at city hall recently asking questions about Prince.
“It’s very surprising,” she said. “I never would have thought his family was from here.”
Prince Rogers Nelson’s family line in Northwest Louisiana can be traced back more than four generations. And understanding his family history in Northwest Louisiana shows why the great migration was necessary.
Dig if you will the picture
You may not have heard the name of Mittie Maude Lena Nelson Gordon, Prince’s great-aunt. But Mittie was a star in her own right, long before her great-nephew was born.
Mittie was born in Cotton Valley, Louisiana, in 1889. She was the daughter of Reverend Edward Nelson, a minister in the Colored Methodist Episcopal (CME) Church. Her mother was Emma Hardy Nelson.
Mayor Jones said Cotton Valley likely got the name because of the early settler days, when cotton was growing everywhere in a beautiful valley that has now turned into a sleepy little town.
You won’t find much cotton around Cotton Valley anymore, but you can find two incredible bayous: Bodcau and Dorcheat.
“Dorcheat is my favorite,” said Jones. “I love it. I grew up between both of them (Dorcheat and Bodcau), but we take our boat all the time and go to Dorcheat. It’s a huge part of our lives here.”
Jones said locals know about places like Cox’s camp.
“There’s a big swing that the game wardens shoot out every so often, and the kids go and hang another one. Last time I went there was an old fire hose hanging to use as a swing. It’s a right of passage to go there.”
There’s little doubt that Prince’s family would have been quite familiar with the two bayous, as it has long been a part of Cotton Valley culture to fish for one’s supper.
Reverend Edward Nelson, Prince’s great-grandfather, likely fished in the local bayous.
Born in March 1862, during the Civil War, Edward was the son of a white slave-owner named John Nelson and a freed Cherokee woman who had been enslaved.
When Edward came of age his brothers denounced him for marrying a woman named Emma Hardy.
They were unhappy because Emma was Black.
Maybe I’m just like my father, too bold
Prince’s Great-Aunt Mittie, his grandfather Edward’s sister, was also raised in Cotton Valley. She was only nine years old when she witnessed a lynching and saw, according to her own words, “a lynch mob of 1600 men pass my home when I was nine years old.” Mittie wrote that they lynched this man, Will Streake, near Dorlean, Louisiana.
“Since that day I have been the most unhappy person that ever lived.”
Mittie’s brother, Clarence Allen Nelson, would later become Prince’s paternal grandfather.
After Clarence and Mittie grew up, Mittie became determined to flee the South. But like their father, Clarence stayed in Cotton Valley and became a minister.
Here’s how Mittie left Cotton Valley. When she was 14, Mittie married a man three decades older than her. He died six years later, and she worked as a seamstress to support her family.
Mittie moved to St. Louis, Illinois sometime around 1915 to create a better life.
Sideways over broken glass
In 1900, Clarence requested the church to send him to preach at a congregation in Arkansas. After the request was approved, Clarence packed up his family and moved them to Hope, Arkansas, where they were stunned to learn that conditions were the same in Hope as they had been in Cotton Valley.
Mittie’s grandfather (Prince’s great-great grandfather) was enslaved and not allowed to be educated. And the same Southern culture that did not want the enslaved to become educated prior to the Civil War remained much the same after the war ended.
Mittie said in later years that by the early 1900s, “School facilities for colored children were so bad in Webster Parish that the third grade was as high as one could go, because pressure was so strong against educating negroes.”
It was Saturday Night, I guess that makes it all right
Mattie would get away from the Deep South, but her Brother Clarence would stay.
Clarence and his wife Carrie (Jenkins) Nelson had a son named John Lewis Nelson who was born in Cotton Valley in 1916. After WWII, John fled the South for Minnesota.
As soon as he arrived in Minnesota, John started up a musical group called the Prince Rogers Trio. John was a jazz musician who specialized in the piano and after moving to Minnesota, he married Mattie Shaw–a jazz singer.
Their son Prince was named after the Prince Rogers Trio.
But what happened to Mittie, Clarence’s sister?
Women, not girls, rule my world
Many a poor Southerner has fled the Deep South and found that racism exists in other places across America, and Mittie was no exception to that rule. She arrived in St. Louis as a single mother and a widow. But by the time she left St. Louis, she had lost her 10-year-old son John Sullivan to injuries he sustained during the East St. Louis race riot.
The East St. Louis Race Riot of 1917 was caused by white mobs who killed as many as 100 people of color.
Marcus Garvey gave a speech on July 8, 1917, that said the “East St. Louis Riot, or rather massacre, of Monday (July 2), will go down in history as one of the bloodiest outrages against mankind for which any class of people could be held guilty.”
Garvey said in his speech about the riot that it was time to lift one’s voice against the savagery of a people who claim to be the dispensers of democracy, and that’s exactly what Mittie did. She decided to leave St. Louis, then moved to Chicago and started raising her voice.
In 1920, Mittie met William Gordon who taught her more about Marcus Garvey and Black Nationalism.
The couple married and became a power couple. In 1929, Mittie attended Garvey’s sixth international convention of the Universal Negro Improvement Association in Jamaica.
In Jamaica, Mittie noticed that men were resisting her political authority because she was a woman.
FBI records are one of the main sources we have to understand exactly how loud Mittie’s voice became after her son was killed in St. Louis. In Chicago she became the president of the city’s division of Garvey’s UNIA. But after divisions arose within the UNIA, including gender discrimination, Mittie left the group in 1929.
In the mean time, Mittie had become one of the most popular street speakers in all of Chicago. She was known as Madame Gordon.
I said they rule my world
By 1932, Mittie owned a restaurant on the South Side of Chicago and started the “Peace Movement of Ethiopia” which garnered around 300000 members. Mittie was connected to political networks across the midwest, and with the assistance of other Black Nationalists she began a petition that was signed by more than half a million people.
Mittie then asked President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to help African Americans move to Liberia.
In December of 1932, Mittie stood before a sea of faces in Chicago and told the crowd that people of color “would escape from the economic, racial, and political problems which confronted the race in the United States” if Black Americans would move to West Africa.
Mittie was a significant contributor to the Black Nationalist movement, and when she was arrested in 1942 she was charged with sedition. The charges were related to her affiliation with several Japanese politicians.
Mittie denied turning people against the war effort, but that didn’t matter to the court. Mittie was convicted of unlawfully, knowingly, wilfully, and feloniously causing and attempting to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, and refusal of duty in the military and navy forces of the United States, to the injury of the United States, by willfully making and uttering certain oral statements to a large number of individuals assembled at a meeting of the Peace Movement to Ethiopia, which meeting was held at Boulevard Hall, 366 West 47th Street, in the City of Chicago.
Mittie went to jail for two years.
If you’d like to know more about Mittie Gordon, check out Keisha Blain’s book Set the World on Fire: Black Nationist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom.
Forgive me if this goes astray
Mittie Gordon’s story proves that Prince had a lot more than music and dance in his genes. He came from a long line of people in Louisiana who worked hard to create opportunities for themselves. They weren’t afraid to make political statements, even though some of their statements were quite extreme.
And that’s exactly what Prince did with his lyrics.
In 1996, the artist released an album named ‘Emancipation‘ that reflected his frustration with being symbolized as “the artist formerly known as Prince” and also celebrated his break with the record company that had signed him when he was only 18 years old.
“Prince is the name that my mother gave me at birth,” he said. “Warner Bros. took the name, trademarked it, and used it as the main marketing tool to promote all of the music that I wrote.”
Emancipation showed that Prince was thrilled with his newfound musical freedom.
Johnny, please, huh, when I was on my knees
My back was broken and my spirit ill at ease
And now it seems just like the autumn leaves
Your money’s turned from green to brown and now you best believe
Emancipation, free to do what I wanna
Emancipation, see you in the purple rain
Emancipation, free to do what I wanna
Emancipation, break the chain, break the chain
On the same album (Emancipation) Prince also sang lyrics that asked “What if God was one of us? Just a slave like one of us? Just a stranger on a bus, trying to make his way home?”
We are gathered here today to get through this thing called life
Each of us has eight sets of biological great-grandparents. It doesn’t matter whether we met them when we were little or not. They’re your great-grandparents–all sixteen of them. Eight are our great-grandpas, and eight are our great-grandmas.
It is significant that six of Prince’s eight great-grandparents were born into slavery, many in Louisiana.
Prince was only a few generations removed from family members who were enslaved in the South and people who fought for equality after the Civil War. But only one generation after his family left Cotton Valley, Prince managed to become one of the biggest rock stars in world history.
And Cotton Valley is linked to another group of Grammy-winners, too, though their music is quite different from Prince’s. The Cox Family, a multi-generational family that sings and plays country and bluegrass, is also from the little town in Webster Parish.
The Cox family has collaborated with Allison Krauss many times. They were also featured on the Oh Brother, Where Art Thou soundtrack.
“There are a lot of churches here,” said Mayor Jones. “A lot of times, we grow up singing in the choir, or grow up singing in church. And that could be the reason why there is a lot of musical heritage in Cotton Valley.”