Music

And now, from the University of Chicago Institute of Politics and CNN Audio, the Ax Files with your host, David Axelrod.

This is the 500th episode of the Ax Files. I'll have more to say about that at the end of this podcast.

But appropriately, today, I'm joined by a legend. John Legend, the Grammy, Tony, Emmy, and Oscar-winning musician and film producer, his personal journey is remarkable.

But the way in which he's leveraged his celebrity to combat injustice and create opportunity here and around the world is truly inspiring.

So here it is, Episode 500, my conversation with John Legend.

John Legend, it's great to see you. I am so excited. I have you on my 500th episode.

Oh, wow! That's a nice milestone of the Ax Files. Yes, and I needed someone who was up to the task and who better than a legend to be on my 500th.

I'll talk to you later about how John Stevens became John Legend. Yes.

But I want to talk about going backwards and explore the Stevens family. I know you were on with Skip Gates on his show, and he explored your roots and you learned a lot.

Absolutely. And it was an extraordinary story. Tell me about your family going back.

He learned so much about my family that we had no idea about. And this was like cinematic. Some of the stories he was able to find out that we had some of our ancestors were enslaved in the south and a border state and were granted their freedom by their enslaver up on his or her death and then moved to Ohio.

And which is where I was born and raised moved to Ohio, but some of the surviving relatives of the enslaver wanted to basically bring them back into slavery.

And there was an entire court case fought about it and Ohio basically was on our side on our family side and fought for us in court.

And they won. They were able to win our family's freedom and the right for them is stayed Ohio. And I had no idea about any of that until I was on finding your roots with Skip Gates.

One thing that we can that we can assume is that one of the things that sustained them through all those or deals was faith, which I know was very a very big part of your upbringing. Talk to me about what the church meant to you as a child.

My family basically ran the church. So when I thought about the church, it was literally my family. So my grandfather was our pastor, my grandmother was the church organist. My mother was the choir director and my father taught Sunday school and sang in the church choir and played the drums as well.

So we all were very involved in running the church as a family. And I spent a lot of my time there as a kid. And when it comes to music, that's really where I got most of my foundational training as a musician singing and playing in church learning from my grandmother learning from my mother learning from my family and singing with them and playing with them.

And you'll hear that story quite a lot, particularly with black musicians, saying R&B and soul music that a lot of our roots are from gospel music. And we develop our chops by playing and singing in church. And I'm certainly one of those folks.

Then that influences still you can hear that influence in your music. Absolutely. It's here and it's here to stay. You knew very young that man, I like being up here, singing and performing in front of people.

I loved it. I loved it from a very young age. I would do it at school. I would do it at church. I would do it at recitals for my piano teacher. And either way, I enjoyed being on stage. I loved the connection I felt with people. I loved the feedback I got from people.

And I loved being creative. I loved coming up with a performance and coming up with songs eventually that I started writing when I was a little bit older as a kid. But I loved all of that. And I wanted to do it for a living.

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