The Minneapolis Sound

A basement in North Minneapolis, 1958. A band called the Big Ms — students from North High School — cut Minnesota's first R&B record in someone's house. Prince Rogers Nelson was born that same year. The timing reads like destiny now, but the real connection runs deeper than coincidence: those Big Ms set a template. Black kids in a segregated city making music on their own terms, no permission, no proper studios, because the infrastructure wouldn't have had them anyway.

That infrastructure had roots going back decades. Black families arrived in Minneapolis and St. Paul in the early twentieth century, drawn by railroad work, domestic service, and a wage premium over the Deep South. They built churches, and the churches built choirs. They built fraternal lodges that held dances, barbershops and beauty salons that doubled as booking agencies, newspapers like the Minneapolis Spokesman and the Saint Paul Recorder that covered Black musicians when no one else would. Neighborhood rooms like the Cozy Bar on North Lyndale, a Black-owned R&B club run by Jimmy and Margaret Fuller, gave professional musicians a place to work before there was a jazz scene to speak of, or a station like KMOJ to broadcast them. Prince wasn't the beginning. He was the flowering of seeds planted by club owners, church musicians, jazz educators, and organizers who spent a century building Black institutions from scratch.