Teddy Pendergrass
Teddy Pendergrass
Theodore DeReese Pendergrasswas an American singer–songwriter and composer. He first rose to fame as lead singer of Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes in the 1970s before a successful solo career at the end of the decade. In 1982, Pendergrass was severely injured in an auto accident in Philadelphia, resulting in his being paralyzed from the chest down. He subsequently founded the Teddy Pendergrass Alliance, a foundation that helps those with spinal cord injuries. He commemorated 25 years of living...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionR&B Singer
Date of Birth26 March 1950
CityPhiladelphia, PA
CountryUnited States of America
It gets harder and harder to make sure your public understands you're a sensitive human being, but I am sensitive. I don't like to be hurt.
The majority of my audience has always been women.
If you can't move the audience, they don't want you.
From the time I can remember my mother kept me in church. I think my first recollection of any place, being anywhere was in a church.
I love to be in control of everything I do and everything around me. So that means, you give me a romantic lyric and I'll make the atmosphere, I will build on that. And then the song then becomes, it takes me to do the song, it's just a belief, it's just who I am.
When I go on stage I am just, I don't make any attempts to do anything more than just what makes me comfortable.
As a matter of fact my, my very first time singing when I was two and a half, three, was in church. So, ahm, church is very, very much a part of who I am.
I've never written for anybody else. For me, it was a challenge. I write for me. I don't write for anybody else. And what was good about it was that I was writing for somebody I knew. I knew what my mother thinks and how she feels. So it was finding that creative spirit to write about my mother.
I can't speak for everybody, I think, for me, I will not be defined by the lyrics of my song. I am a man who does music. It's like clothes don't make the man, the man makes the clothes. It's, it's like that song don't make me, I make the song.
I've always been one to take chances and I've always been one to, to create or follow through with instincts.
I don't ever feel that it's necessary to say certain things. I think we can be very suggestive. I think we can allude to certain things.
I just know that I wasn't happy where I was. I didn't feel complete. I didn't feel like I was contributing what I needed to contribute to not only to my, my, my fans that I had begun to gather but to myself most of all, most importantly for me.
When you talk about bad luck and you talk about the things that create those circumstances and you talk about what it takes to overcome those circumstances and naturally to me includes, you know, a faith, a very strong faith. It should because through good times and through bad times there is one thing that relieves.
I've always been willing to take challenges, I grew up taking challenges: being an only child, having a mother, no father, I've always been one who has always done things the way I thought they should be done and not, and not having to answer to anybody for it and I've always taken my own chances and I've always followed by instincts according, mother would follow, follow wit, instincts, wisdom, whatever, always followed that.