Truly

In this memoir, musician and songwriter Lionel Richie traces his life from a sheltered childhood in Tuskegee, Alabama, through decades of unlikely success as a member of the Commodores and then as one of the biggest solo artists of the 1980s, to his reinvention as a global touring artist and a judge on American Idol. Richie frames his story as that of a self-described reluctant hero: a painfully shy, easily distracted child with undiagnosed ADHD and dyslexia who escaped into an imaginative inner world he calls the Other Side, only to discover that this perceived brokenness was the source of his creative gifts.

Richie opens at the 2015 Glastonbury Festival in England, performing on the Pyramid Stage before an estimated 175,000 to 200,000 fans. Plagued by doubt in the weeks before the show, he is overwhelmed by the spectacle of fans in Afro wigs and stick-on mustaches, banners quoting his song titles, and a crowd chanting his name. The sight triggers a flashback to 1968, when nineteen-year-old Richie and his bandmates arrived in Harlem only to have all their equipment stolen on their first night. From Glastonbury, Richie rewinds to tell his full story.

He grew up on the Tuskegee Institute campus in a home originally deeded to his grandparents by Booker T. Washington, the university's founding leader. His grandmother, Adelaide Foster, was a concert pianist and music professor. His mother, Alberta, was an English teacher and later a principal. His father, Lyonel Richie Sr., a World War II Army officer turned systems analyst, survived the indignities of Jim Crow through scathing wit and humor. Tuskegee was a self-sufficient, all-Black enclave where status was measured by education, and the pressure to achieve loomed large. Around age eight, on a trip to Montgomery, Richie drank from a "Whites Only" water fountain, provoking a confrontation in which white men hurled racial slurs at his father. Lyonel Sr. said nothing and ushered his son to the car; years later, he explained he chose to be a father rather than a dead man.

Richie's academic struggles and shyness left him feeling fundamentally broken. He found solace at his grandmother's piano, where Adelaide ended his formal training after catching him memorizing pieces by ear rather than reading the notes. The Civil Rights Movement shaped his adolescence: a college boarder named Ed Menifee educated him about voter registration and activist organizations, and the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham killed Cynthia Diane Wesley, a girl Richie had admired from afar. After his family moved to Joliet, Illinois, for his last two years of high school, Richie learned survival in a tougher, integrated environment before returning to Tuskegee for college in 1967.

There, an upperclassman named Michael Gilbert recruited him and several other freshman musicians into a new band. The name Commodores was chosen from a random dictionary page, and within two weeks they had their first paying gig. Gilbert drilled the band in showmanship, choreography, and business strategy. Defying his father to quit a summer factory job, Richie joined the Commodores for their first trip to New York, with crucial encouragement from a neighbor, Mr. Jefferson, who confessed his own lifelong regret at having been talked out of joining the Metropolitan Opera. In Harlem during the summers of 1968 through 1970, the band turned a dead Monday night audition at Smalls Paradise into a residency, encountered James Brown and the Isley Brothers, and received a street education that accelerated Richie's maturity. The Vietnam War loomed over the group: when Michael Gilbert was forcibly conscripted, the band lost its founder, and Richie rallied the remaining members to continue.

A Thanksgiving 1970 audition at a New York club won over Suzanne de Passe of Motown Records, who was captivated by Richie's rendition of "Wichita Lineman." The Commodores were hired as the opening act for the Jackson 5's world tour, and Richie forged a close friendship with twelve-year-old Michael Jackson. Signed to Motown in 1971, the band struggled for years to find their sound. Richie dropped out of college to commit fully to music, devastating his family. He absorbed lessons from Motown's legendary figures: Norman Whitfield taught him that songwriting did not require reading music, and Marvin Gaye demonstrated that if you could hear a song from tapping on a table, you were a songwriter. Producer James Anthony Carmichael became the Commodores' creative partner, recognizing that Richie's vocal phrasing naturally fit his own compositions.

Milan Williams's instrumental "Machine Gun" became their breakthrough hit in 1974. Richie's own ballads followed: "Sweet Love," "Just to Be Close to You," and then "Easy," whose hook came when he quieted his mind and waited in the silence of the Other Side. "Three Times a Lady," inspired by a toast his father gave to his mother, became the Commodores' first #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1978, also reaching #1 on the R&B and Country charts. Success bred tension within the band as Richie's press attention and songwriting royalties grew disproportionately. He wrote "Lady" for Kenny Rogers, producing it himself, and then "Endless Love" as a duet with Diana Ross, which stayed at #1 for nine weeks and became Motown's all-time highest-charting single. When manager Benny Ashburn died of a heart attack, Richie lost the one person he believed could broker a reconciliation, and his departure from the Commodores became inevitable.

Richie's solo debut, anchored by the ballad "Truly," reached #1. His second album, Can’t Slow Down, produced five hit singles and became a Diamond-certified record, signifying sales of ten million copies. On August 12, 1984, he performed "All Night Long" at the closing ceremonies of the Los Angeles Olympics before 2.6 billion viewers. On January 28, 1985, he helped lead the recording of "We Are the World" alongside Michael Jackson and producer Quincy Jones, assembling over 45 artists at A&M Studios for Ethiopian famine relief. The song raised eighty million dollars. At the 1985 Grammys, Richie won Album of the Year, and in 1986 he won the Oscar for Best Original Song for "Say You, Say Me."

The altitude proved unsustainable. In 1988, his wife Brenda discovered his relationship with Diane Alexander, leading to a tabloid scandal. His father, in declining health, counseled him that "winners are only determined by the punches they can take." Lyonel Sr. died on October 31, 1990. The prolonged divorce, vocal cord damage requiring multiple surgeries, and depression converged into a years-long withdrawal from the industry. He spent five days in Jamaica during a mental health crisis, sitting in a beach chair as the tide rose to his waist, until an older Jamaican man told him he had to survive because he was a beacon of hope. Richie found purpose in fatherhood: He and Brenda had adopted Nicole Camille Escovedo (later Nicole Richie), and with Diane Alexander, whom he married in 1995, he had two more children, Miles and Sofia.

Richie reinvented himself as a global touring artist, opening for Tina Turner in 2000 and performing at diplomatic events where he learned his songs served as bridges between divided peoples. He befriended Nelson Mandela during a visit to South Africa and discovered that his music preceded him in conflict zones: in Libya, a military commander cleared his passage by singing "Hello, is it me you're looking for?" He lost his mother, Alberta, in 2001, and across the years, many peers: Whitney Houston, Prince, and Michael Jackson, whose death shattered a childhood promise that they would never let tragedy happen to each other.

Around 2014, Richie met Lisa Parigi, a Swiss model and tech entrepreneur who had never heard of the Commodores. Under manager Bruce Eskowitz at Red Light Management, Richie pursued and received the Kennedy Center Honors (2017), the Gershwin Prize (2022), and induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame (2022). His 2012 album Tuskegee, featuring Country duets with artists including Kenny Rogers, Willie Nelson, and Shania Twain, debuted at #1 on the Country chart. He conquered the festival circuit, culminating in the Glastonbury performance that opens the book, and in 2018 joined American Idol as a judge alongside Katy Perry and Luke Bryan.

Richie closes with a Thanksgiving gathering surrounded by Lisa, his three children, and his grandchildren. He reflects that the true measure of success is not awards but making his family proud. He tends his garden daily, a passion he traces to his great-grandfather John Louis Brown, a formerly enslaved man who ended his life as a groundskeeper at an African American cemetery. Richie affirms that the test of life is knowing "you have loved deeply, purely, and truly."