Jan. 24, 1941 Aaron Neville Credit: Wikipedia Legendary artist Aaron Neville — who NPR once said “sings like an angel who swallowed a wah-wah pedal” — was born in New Orleans.  With Black, Native American and European roots, he made a career of breaking through barriers and embracing a wide variety of music genres.  As a child growing up in poverty, he discovered that his voice was special.  “I would sing my way into movies or basketball games or whatever,” he told New Orleans magazine. “Whoever was on the door, they knew I could sing, so they’d say, ‘All right, Neville, sing me a song, and I’ll let you in.”  By the mid-1950s, he and his brothers began performing as an R&B group, scoring a local hit with “Mardi Gras Mambo,” but his career came crashing down when he was arrested in 1958 for car theft and spent six months in prison. The time served as a wake-up call.  “They had eight people in a cell designed to hold four,” he told People magazine. “Rats were running over everything.”  After prison, he settled down, married his sweetheart and began a solo career. He soon found success with his single, “Over You,” which reached No. 21 on the R&B charts and decided to move to Los Angeles.  The move, intended to boost his career, devastated his personal life when he became addicted to heroin and spent a year in prison for burglary.  Determined to make it in music, he returned to New Orleans and recorded with legendary producer Allen Toussaint, scoring a major hit with “Tell It Like It Is” (ranked on Rolling Stone magazine’s “The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time”). The song rose all the way to No. 2 on the charts, selling more than a million copies, but Neville received no royalties — only a flat fee for the recording session. As a result, he had to work as a ditch digger and dockworker to support his family.  “We were eating mayonnaise sandwiches,” his son, Aaron Jr., told People. “And we didn’t have a refrigerator. We had an ice chest.”  Neville continued to struggle with his addiction. “The worst time of my life was when I was separated from my wife and thought I would lose her,” he told GQ magazine. “Then I started praying real hard.”  After his mother died in 1975, he beat back the demons and began playing again with his brothers, becoming a mainstay of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival.  In 1989, his career enjoyed a renaissance after duets with Linda Ronstadt, creating the Grammy-winning single and international hit “Don’t Know Much.” The two performed together at the Grammy Awards in what was Ronstadt’s last performance on the show.  Neville went on to record the successful “Yellow Moon” with the Neville Brothers, and his solo career continued to soar with more hits, “Everybody Plays the Fool” and “Don’t Take Away My Heaven.”  In the years that followed, he explored other genres, including country, recording a duet with Trisha Yearwood. In 2006, he released a collection of soul classics. Four years later, he recorded a collection of gospel hymns.  “I do feel God when I’m singing,” he said. “(A social worker in England) told me there was this 6-year-old boy, he was autistic and they couldn’t do anything with him. The only thing that would soothe him was to put headphones on his ears and he would hear my voice. When I heard that, I thought, ‘Well, it must be the God in me touching the God in him.’”  Shortly after the album’s release, his wife, Joel, died of cancer. A year later, he met the woman who became his second wife, Sarah, during a People magazine shoot, and she inspired him to live on Freville Farm in upstate New York.  “I don’t have neighbors that close, so I don’t bother nobody if I’m singing loud,” he told Relix. “I can hit whatever notes I want. The only ones that are gonna hear me are the chickens, and they don’t mind.”  For the first time in his career, he recorded an album in which he wrote most of the songs himself, making “Apache” a reminiscent love letter to the city he grew up in and the people he loves. “I feel,” he told New Orleans magazine, “like I am a miracle.” The post On this day in 1941 appeared first on Mississippi Today.