Biography | Lionel Richie — The Campus Where the Commodores Took Their Name

People treat Tuskegee as a credit-line on a sleeve.

He was born there on 20 June 1949, and he grew up on the grounds of the Institute that later became Tuskegee University.

Lionel Brockman Richie Jr. was the son of Lionel Brockman Richie, a U.S. Army systems analyst, and Alberta R. Foster, a teacher who later became a school principal.

The family house stood across the street from campus.

His grandmother directed the choir. An uncle who had arranged music for Duke Ellington put a saxophone in his hands.

The town also sent him away. After a stretch in Illinois he finished at Joliet Township High School, East Campus, in 1967, then came back to the Institute on a tennis scholarship.

He marched with the Crimson Pipers. He read economics, with accounting as the minor, and took the bachelor's degree in 1974.

The band started before the diploma.

As a freshman in 1968 he was in a campus group called the Mystics with Thomas McClary and William King.

After a weak freshman talent-show set they joined members of another student band, the Jays.

King opened a dictionary and put a finger on a word. They became the Commodores, the naval rank between captain and admiral.

They played the Black Forest Inn and fraternity nights, then the Alabama circuit, still sitting exams between van rides.

Motown signed the group in November 1972, after the Commodores had opened for the Jackson 5.

The pin is the public heart of that campus: Charles Keck's 1922 bronze of Booker T. Washington, Lifting the Veil of Ignorance, at Booker T. Washington Boulevard and Campus Road.

The childhood house across the street is still a private address and is not mapped here.

What a visitor can stand under is the statue and the quad where a tennis recruit and a borrowed saxophone became a Motown band.

Photo: Mass Communications Specialist Chad J. McNeeley, U.S. Navy, public domain, 30 May 2010, via Wikimedia Commons. The portrait is later than the campus years.