Purple Faith: Prince's Life as a Jehovah's Witness

BY ALEX HEIGL
04/21/2016 AT 05:15 PM EDT

Prince's conversion to the Jehovah's Witness religion actually started, in a roundabout way, with Sly & the Family Stone. Well, that's not entirely accurate: It started with Graham Central Station, the funk group started by Sly and the Family Stone bassist Larry Graham after his tenure in that band.

"I was on tour with Sinbad, Graham Central Station, Earth Wind & Fire and Teena Marie," Graham explained in 2013. "We did a show in Tennessee and we were playing the amphitheater and Prince was playing the big arena there in Nashville. He heard I was in town and invited me to one of his famous after-shows."

The pair struck up a friendship; the younger musician grew up listening to Graham Central Station and Sly & the Family Stone. Prince invited Graham onto his next tour, and things blossomed from there. Graham, who converted to the Jehovah's Witness faith in 1975, became Prince's de facto instructor in the religion. "He had all of these questions that he would ask me," Graham explained. "And we had Bible study pretty much before and after our show."

Prince was raised a Seventh-Day Adventist in Minneapolis frequently attending services with his grandmother at Glendale Church, a historically African-American congregation in the city. "Both of his parents believed in the strict faith as did Bernadette Anderson, who took him in after he left home," Touré writes in his book about Prince, I Would Die 4 U. Religion informed every part of his life: He told PBS that he informed his mother an angel told him he would no longer suffer from the epileptic seizures that plagued his early childhood.

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