Lionel Richie
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Factsheet
- Childhood home was actually on the Tuskegee University campus.
- Grandfather had worked with the college's founder, Booker T. Washington.
- Hoped at one point to become an Episcopal minister.
- Taught himself to play the piano by ear.
- First called the Mystics, his band became the Commodores after the word was picked at random out of a dictionary.
- The Commodores lost all their equipment to van thieves on a 1969 trip to New York.
- The Commodores opened for the Jackson Five on many tours in the early 1970s.
- Richie's compositions rose to the No. 1 position on the U.S. pop singles chart at least once in every year between 1977 and 1985.
- In 1985, composed (with Michael Jackson) and recorded "We Are the World," a recording benefiting African famine relief.
- Received the George and Ira Gershwin Lifetime Achievement Award in 2008.
- Has raised millions of dollars for the benefit of the Breast Cancer Research Foundation.
- In 2010, he took part in a remix of "We Are the World" (featuring the likes of Justin Bieber, Pink and Lady Gaga) for the benefit of those hit by an earthquake in Haiti.