'Sing to Me'

A book excerpt from the new memoir by music industry legend Antonio 'LA' Reid

Atlanta was not on the pop music map. It was a large Southern city, but it didn’t feel like the old South. It was the birthplace of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and the city where civil rights leaders Andrew Young and Maynard Jackson had been elected mayor. Atlanta had this robust history and an upwardly mobile black community. It felt like a city full of dreamers, a place where things could happen and a place that hadn’t been born yet musically.

It was a city that, in many ways, reflected what was going on with our music. Postdisco rhythm and blues in the MTV world had taken on a pop sheen, losing much of the raw, ghetto funkiness of the music I grew up playing. Like the black community itself, our music had taken on elegance, class and dignity, without sacrificing any of the essential black ingredients — grit, sass and soul. The more we thought about it, the better the idea of Atlanta sounded.