André De Shields
speaker
298 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 21 Jul
André De Shields’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Don't I swear, brother, don't I swear It was the road to hell It was hard times It was a world of gods And men It's an old song It's an old tale from way back when It's an old song It's an old song
The answer to that question is yes.
I believed from my very first conscious thought that my destiny would rise up and meet me.
So when my mother shared with me
that her lifelong dream had been to be a chorus girl, and that was the term she used.
She didn't say dancer, she said chorus girl.
And my father shared with me that he had always wanted to be a singer.
He had a beautiful tenor voice, but the closest he got to that dream coming true was to sing in the church choir.
Those two bits of knowledge only reaffirmed what I had been dreaming about since the day I was born.
I wanted to sing.
I wanted to dance.
Now I can look at it and understand, oh, wow, it's been bequeathed to me by those X and Y chromosomes that was responsible for my conception.
I didn't think I was going to be on Broadway at the age of 80.
But I did know that I would be alive.
And I did know that I would continue on my path.
And I had already in 1980, before there was an acronym HIV, that I had had an infection of my lymph nodes.
And not any one of three doctors on two continents could answer the question, what is this?
Now, in 1979...
when I had gone to London for the first time to perform in Ain't Misbehavin', there was already a friend of mine who caught a cold.
And three days later, he was dead.
Showing 1–20 of 298 · page 1 of 15
Next →