Keisha Lance Bottoms is the former mayor of Atlanta, a current candidate for governor of Georgia, and the daughter of soul superstar Major Lance. In her new memoir The Rough Side of the Mountain, which Mariner Books will publish on Tuesday, she writes about her joyous childhood, and what she realized when her father’s star began to fade as she grew older.
The name Major Lance was pretty big in soul music in the late 1950s and ’60s. Standing at 5’10″(although Mama said he claimed to be six feet) and never weighing more than a meager 145 pounds, my daddy’s stature never matched his big personality — something everyone said he’d had since he was a child. Along with a great voice and being light on his feet as a fantastic dancer, Daddy’s charisma made him a performer well worth the price.
He never met a stranger and always kept his friends. Otis and Gus, Daddy’s best friends since they were boys, were fixtures in our lives, with them visiting us in Atlanta or us them in Chicago. No matter where the three of them were, when they were together, they would tell the same stories and laugh as if it were the first time. Mama always said they all exaggerated, so I never knew what was real and what was not. Like the story about Daddy opening for the Beatles when they came to America for the first time. I absolutely thought that was a lie until my nephew sent me a picture of Paul McCartney holding one of Daddy’s albums under his arm upon the Beatles’ return to the UK after their first tour of America. All of it was an outsized dream that Daddy made come true. It was also a stunning accomplishment for a man who was born on a sharecropper’s farm in Mississippi and had grown up in the projects of Chicago.
My daddy met Curtis Mayfield when they were teenagers growing up in Cabrini-Green. Rumored to be the housing project the 1970s hit TV show Good Times was based on, there were always more hard times there than good. Daddy thought a career as an athlete or a musician could be his way out. Early on, it was pretty clear that Mayfield’s exit was going to come through music.
They both attended Wells High School. Mayfield, who went on to pen the iconic Super Fly soundtrack, and is in both the Grammy Music Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, was already writing music back then. He said that Daddy was always rifling through his bag for songs and had a knack for picking out the melodies that were the best suited for him. In 1962, one of those, “Delilah,” became Daddy’s second single. He was 23 years old, sweeping floors at a drugstore in Chicago to pay his bills. Daddy often talked about how he thought he had hit it big the first time he heard “Delilah” played on the radio, only to discover that by the time the record company, managers, band, and everyone else got their cut, he actually took home more money sweeping the drugstore than he did with that record. A year later, he fared better with his third single, “The Monkey Time.” Also written by Mayfield and produced by Carl Davis, that became Daddy’s first truly big hit. His career was off and running. His dream was coming true and it led him to a show at the Royal Peacock in Atlanta — and to Mama.
The Royal Peacock is a Caribbean nightclub today, but back in Daddy’s day it already had a storied history as a hot spot on the Black cultural landscape of Atlanta. It was also a staple on the national Black music scene and a premier stop on what was called the Chitlin Circuit, so named for the performance venues in Black communities where Black patrons could frequent, sitting anywhere they pleased. All the major acts of the day came through, from Ray Charles, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Sam Cooke, Jackie Wilson, and Little Richard, to Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions, the Temptations, the Four Tops, Aretha Franklin . . . and my dad. Located on legendary Auburn Avenue, the Royal Peacock might have looked like a small hole-in-the-wall to some, but a gig there was a big deal.
Just after Daddy’s set, Mama was sitting at a small table in the Royal Peacock with her friend Linda when Daddy’s old friend Gus approached them.
“Major Lance wants to talk to you,” Gus said to Mama. Apparently, that was enough for other women, but Mama quickly let it be known that would never be enough for her.
“Well, if he wants to talk to me, he needs to come over and say something to me himself,” she replied. Linda leaned in and whispered to my mother that she had better go over there and talk to him. Mama was about to reply that she wasn’t interested but, before she could say another word, they looked up and Daddy was standing right there, introducing himself. She wouldn’t give him her phone number that evening, but she would find out later that Linda slipped it to him as they left.
Mama was 24 years old, still living with my grandparents, working at the post office, and raising her two young children. She was full of ambition and an unquenched thirst for more of life than she knew, but she hadn’t been able to return to college, and she had never been on an airplane or been farther away from Atlanta than Detroit. Neither had my maternal grandparents. Grandmama would go on bus trips to family reunions or to see a horse race, but she never crossed an ocean or traveled more miles than a full day’s drive could take her. In fact, I’m not sure she had ever seen an ocean up close. So, a few days after that show, when Daddy phoned the house for my mama, telling Grandmama that he was calling from England, you could have knocked her over with a feather. A man calling from England for her daughter? He might as well have been calling from Mars. It was downright astonishing — and the first of many such calls.
Daddy was attentive to Mama, even when he was on the road, which was often. By the time they got married and I was born, Mama embodied a superstar’s wife. She was kind, fun, and supportive. Even when things didn’t exactly go according to plan, she believed in Daddy. He supported Mama’s ambitions too, which included earning her college degree. When she returned to Clark to finish, I often attended classes with her after my half day in kindergarten.
Back at our house, everyone seemed to visit us, and they came in droves. From the Harlem Globetrotters’ Meadowlark Lemon when he was making an album, to cousins, half siblings, friends and their kids, Daddy’s backup band and backup singers, somebody was always coming or going. The space never got too small, and my parents’ warm welcome never wore out. Our lives were an adventure. Where Daddy went, we went. Even if he was performing in the Playboy Club in Atlanta, Mama, my older siblings, and I were there, with me usually falling asleep in a dark, smoky booth, as waitresses dressed like bunnies in a beauty pageant worked the crowded room and the ice in my Shirley Temple melted.
Standing with Daddy and legendary soul singer Curtis Mayfield as they work in our backyard garden in Collier Heights.
Courtesy of Keisha Lance Bottoms
It was not uncommon for Daddy to tell Mama to pack us up on a day’s notice so we could leave for New York, London, or some other amazing city where we might stay for weeks at a time while he worked. On any given day, we were almost as likely to be headed to Italy or Belgium as to downtown Atlanta.
Daddy’s success gained him entrée into a global family of entertainers and access to amazing opportunities that he wouldn’t otherwise have had, and we got to benefit from them too. It also exposed him in other ways that affected us, far less positively.
It seemed like every time I visited Chicago, I’d meet another sibling. The family called them “Monkey Time children” because, in 1963, the minute Daddy’s first hit song by that name took off, children started coming out of the woodwork, claiming that he was their father. This was before DNA testing, and I’m not sure if even Daddy knew what was true. I guess it was enough that he knew what could be true. So, he never said anything negative about their mothers or created any room for them to be disparaged. Still, it was hard not to think of Daddy whenever I heard the Temptations’ 1972 hit, “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone.” But I was my parents’ only child together, the distinction of being the baby was all mine, and I reveled in it and the ways that I was like him.
To say that I was outgoing and outspoken as a child would be an understatement. I was all that and more. My parents told me that when they’d ask my grandparents to watch me, Grandmama would agree, with a qualifier. “Tell Keisha not to come over here doing a lot of talking and asking a bunch of questions.” So, Daddy’s instructions were always clear when we arrived at their door. “Keisha, try to not get on your Grandmama’s nerves today.” When Grandmama opened the door, he would respectfully reiterate, “Mrs. Robinson, I have told Keisha to try and not do a lot of talking today.”
The desire for the spotlight was in my DNA, thanks to my daddy. He was a showman and I was proud to be like him. Daddy never tried to rein in my self-image as a star (or, at least, a star in the making). If anything, he encouraged it. When he was home, he would drive me to school in his champagne-gold Seville. I’d ride in the back, fantasizing that the car was my limo and Daddy was my chauffeur. Sometimes, he would let me stand on the seat so I could emerge from the sunroof and wave at the neighborhood children, as if I were in a parade and they’d all come to see me.
I saw my daddy get up onstage and perform in front of hundreds, even thousands, of fans; to do that, you have to be fearless and free. That was exactly how I felt. There was this fearlessness in me that led me to believe I could be and do anything. If the old custom in Black families was that children were to be seen and not heard, then I didn’t get the memo. As a child, my life was big, bold, bright, and filled with color. And Daddy was the main artist.
Take the summers we spent swimming in Curtis Mayfield’s pool, for example, most often when Mayfield was not there. Now, I don’t know if he actually gave us permission to use the pool or Daddy just knew where his friend’s key was and took his chances. I knew they had a bond that went way back and they had worked together. And I also knew better than to ask if we had legitimate pool privileges. The unspoken questions hovering around our swims only made them more fun.
Daddy’s friendships with other celebrities were both normal and surprising to me. He didn’t brag about them, but when I’d ask if he knew, say, the Jackson 5 or Diana Ross and the Supremes, or any other household names at the time, he would always answer with some larger-than-life story that seemed too big to be true. Once, he told me someone had brought the Jackson 5 to him to take a look and he passed on the opportunity to mentor and break them into the music industry because he thought a group of kids couldn’t be stars. Another time, he told me he gave Elton John his professional start in music. I didn’t think my daddy was a liar, but seriously? I didn’t know what to believe.
I found out that the story about Elton John was true only when, one night during a sleepover at a cousin’s house, I drifted off while everyone was watching TV. I woke up to my cousins jumping up and down and screaming. Elton John had received an award on television and thanked my daddy.
Years later, when I was on the City Council, I met Jermaine Jackson. He was so excited when he found out who my father was that he took me to meet his brothers. They told me what a big influence Daddy had been on them and said that, before they were famous, they used to clean their house in Gary, Indiana, to Daddy’s music. Although he had passed on mentoring the Jackson 5, he’d broken in a lot of acts and was an influence on plenty of others, including Charlie Wilson of the Gap Band and Maurice White, of Earth, Wind and Fire fame.
With Daddy after my law school graduation. This is one of the last pictures that we took together. No matter how old I got, he still called me his baby. He asked me to come and sit in the chair with him.
Courtesy of Keisha Lance Bottoms
In the 1970s, when Daddy’s career began to wane in the States, he revived it in England, capitalizing on the “Northern Soul” craze. He’d made some major moves early on in his career, and he wanted that momentum to continue. Being celebrated and adored like that, I get it, you don’t want the ride to end. Unfortunately, sometimes, it does.
I wasn’t opposed to Daddy living his dream, I just wished he dreamed of something else — something that kept his love for music alive and gave our family the stability we needed. Perhaps if he had seen a way to do both, so much would have been different. But Daddy wasn’t wired that way. You don’t make your way from the cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta, through Chicago’s Cabrini-Green projects, to being a Grammy-nominated artist by being normal. As for me, I was a child; children want a sense of structure, and it is not too much to ask for parents that offer them that. I would grow to understand that you can’t have it both ways. You can’t bask in the highs of the extraordinary and lament the absence of the mundane.
Daddy never explained why he started selling drugs. Falling back on his aversion to conflict and difficult conversations, he left us to wonder why he would risk doing anything that could jeopardize his marriage, our family, and everything he worked so hard for.
Had I really even known this man? The man who coached Little League baseball? The man who would rather be in his garden, tending his okra, corn, tomatoes, and collards, than out running the streets? The man whose lap I sat in on family game night, contentedly playing Spades? The man who patiently watched Westerns on TV while I built elaborate forts under the sheets of his bed, right beside him? This was not a drug dealer. He couldn’t possibly be! But the State of Georgia said otherwise, and Daddy was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Only in hindsight did I see how much things had changed.
Excerpted from the book The Rough Side of the Mountain by Keisha Lance Bottoms. Copyright © 2026 by Keisha Lance Bottoms. From Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted by permission.
