Prince consists of Prince Rogers.
Prince (born Prince Rogers Nelson on June 7, 1958), known as from 1993 to 2000, is a popular and influential American musician. His music has spanned myriad styles including funk, pop, rock, R&B/ soul, and hip hop, and is regarded as the definition of the " Minneapolis sound".
Prince Rogers Nelson was born June 7, 1958 in Minneapolis, Minnesota at Mount Sinai Hospital to John L. Nelson and Mattie Shaw. John L. Nelson played in a jazz trio The Prince Rogers Trio, hence Prince's birth name. There are a number of myths regarding Prince's ethnicity and gender, some spread by Prince himself. The most pervasive is that he is the child of a black father and white mother, a myth later bolstered by the cult film Purple Rain starring Prince, Morris Day of The Time, and pop singer Apollonia. Prince's parents are, in fact, African-American and like most African-Americans are an amalgam of various ethnicities. His mother's heritage (according to Prince in a 1985 Rolling Stone article) is of African American, Indian and Caucasian extraction.
After the birth of his sister, Tika Evene in 1960, Prince saw his parents gradually drift apart. Prince's parents formally separated and he had a troubled relationship with his stepfather causing him to run away from home. He lived briefly with his father, who bought him his first guitar. Later, Prince moved in with a neighborhood family, the Andersons, and became friends with their son, Andre Anderson (later called Andre Cymone).
Prince and Anderson joined Prince's cousin Charles Smith in a band called Grand Central, formed in junior high school. Initially his involvement was just part of a mainly instrumental band that played clubs and parties in the Minneapolis area. As time went by and Prince's musical knowledge broadened, he found himself dictating the arrangements to the rest of the band. Before long he had become the band's frontman. By the time Prince had entered high school, Grand Central evolved into Champagne and started playing original music already drawing on a range of influences including Sly Stone, James Brown, and Jimi Hendrix.