TELL IT LIKE IT IS

The title of the musician’s breakthrough hit provides a mission statement for his memoir.

Neville has long been a study in contrasts: a man with the physique of a longshoreman but the tremulous, fluttering voice of an angel; a family man and devout Christian whose narrative recounts a life of being led into temptation—stealing cars on a regular basis, getting into fights where he wasn’t sure whether he had killed someone, injecting heroin, which he started at age 16, leading to a long battle with addiction. His tone throughout is that of a kind and loving man, one who knows how reckless and stupid his behavior was, how much he hurt his wife, whom he married as a teenager, and his parents, who stood by him. He doesn’t excuse himself, but he provides plenty of context on growing up Black in a racist, segregated New Orleans, where the color of your skin could get you hassled for suspicion of something, warranted or not. Most of his brothers experienced similar trouble, as did a couple of his sons. Yet his plainspoken account leaves readers sharing his conviction that his life has been something of a miracle and that “my voice was my salvation.” His unique vocal style draws from both the yodeling he heard in the cowboy movies he loved and the open-hearted crooning of Nat King Cole, Sam Cooke, and the harmonizing doo-wop groups. His marriage survived more trouble than most could withstand, and his career flourished through a second act—as featured vocalist with the powerhouse Neville Brothers—and then a third, through his Grammy-winning duets with Linda Ronstadt, decades after “Tell It Like It Is” had seemed to consign him to one-hit-wonder status. An edit could have trimmed some repetition from his narrative, and some of the lyrics and musician credits go on too long, but the author’s life has been an inspiration.

A worthwhile musical survivor’s story.