Prince

Prince Rogers Nelson was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota at Mount Sinai Hospital on Saturday June 7, 1958 at 6:17pm to John L. Nelson and Mattie Shaw. John was a pianist and songwriter. Mattie was a singer. He is named Prince Rogers Nelson after the Prince Rogers Trio, his father's jazz band. As a boy, he was called Skipper. There are a number of myths regarding Prince’s ethnicity, some spread by Prince himself. The most pervasive is that he is the child of a black father and white mother, a myth later bolstered by the film Purple Rain, starring Prince himself. In fact, according to an April 28, 1983 Rolling Stone article, Prince's father is of African-American and Italian ancestry, and his mother is of African-American, Native American, and Italian lineage as noted in a 1985 Rolling Stone interview.