Author Description

"In Bessie's Prayer, author Walter D. Braud offers a memoir of gratitude, joy, and celebration of the enduring power of love of family. He credits his remarkable mother, and her very specific prayers for him, which he knows made all the difference in his life. His story begins during the era of the first great migration from the US South by so many Black individuals and families like his own grandparents who each sought greater opportunities in the North. Never feeling "poor" despite the circumstances of his childhood on the South Side of Chicago, he was inspired by his family heritage of schoolteachers, musicians, and at least one superstar baseball player uncle. Though this child prodigy and natural performer did not achieve the particular "first" his family envisioned for him as the first Negro opera tenor to perform in Carnegie Hall, he blazed his own series of firsts in his quest to live up to his mother's goals for him - to put God and family above all things, pursue worthwhile endeavors, and help others before you help yourself. Walter will be the first to say that he fell way short on too many occasions. "But I gave it my best shot every day of my life. No regrets!" --back cover.