Hi, welcome to Hollywood crime scene. This is Rachel Fisher.

Hi, this is Desi Jettiken. We're back with our main episodes, finally. And we are starting off with one of the best singers to ever do it.

Mr. Mr. Mr. What an introduction. Luther Vandross.

Yay.

We have crime. We have scandal, we have amazing music, and tragedy, unfortunately. My main sources for this episode are the documentary on HBO called Luther Never Too Much. And the book Luther, The Life and Longing of Luther Vandross by Craig Seymour.

And a special shout out to Friend of the Pod, Sonia, who encouraged me to do this episode.

She posted about the documentary and I was like, ooh, and then we started talking about it. And she's

like, you should do an episode. And I was like, okay, because I needed an episode to do.

And it ended up being an interesting look at a life I really didn't know that much about.

Yeah.

So let's get started.

Luther Vandross was born April 20th, 1951. He was named after two things that got his mother, Mary Ida, through her pregnancy, her husband, Luther, and the pasta she consumed throughout her pregnancy, Ronzoni.

Luther's middle name is Ronzoni. Stop it. After pasta. Wait, I fucking love that. I know. I was like, when they were talking about her eating all this pasta in the book, I was like, where is this going? I was like, oh my God. Like, that's so funny. So he's the youngest of their four children. And the family lived on the lower East Side of Manhattan in the Alfred E. Smith

houses a public housing project. And this is when the project still had a lot of promise. People

were thrilled to move in here. It was like a great thing. And obviously, as we all know,

a lot of these really declined throughout the years and don't become a great place to live.

But Luther describes his childhood as happy.

One of the most enduring memories he has is dancing with his family and music was big in this household.

His sister, Patricia, was the first Vandross kid to get into music.

She was in a singing group called The Crest, and she

ended up having to leave the band when she was 15 because they were going on the tour and the mom was like,

no. Shortly after that, they had a really breakout hit, 16 candles, which many of you

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