MINNESOTA TV STATION FINDS OLD FOOTAGE OF VERY YOUNG PRINCE
Matthew Liddy, a production manager at WCCO-TV, a CBS station in Minnesota, was watching footage of a 1970 teachers’ strike in Minneapolis in late February when he saw a familiar face.
On the screen was a boy, 11, in blue earmuffs and a jacket, being interviewed by one of the station’s reporters and giving a sidelong look and a sly half-grin.
“It has to be Prince,” Liddy recalled saying to himself.
That hunch led to a five-week investigation by producers and reporters, who verified that the boy in the clip was in fact Prince, the music legend and celebrated son of Minneapolis who died April 21, 2016, at age 57.
Long before “Purple Rain” and “Little Red Corvette” made him an international star, Prince Nelson is seen in the footage, just another kid in the crowd, supporting labor rights and hamming it up for the local television station.
“Are most of the kids in favor of the picketing?” a reporter, Quent Neufeld, asks.
“Yup,” Prince replies. “I think they should get some more money” because they’re “working extra hours for us and all that stuff.”
The interview lasts less than 20 seconds, but the footage has elicited glee from musicians including Questlove and Sheila E, a frequent Prince collaborator, and has captivated Minnesotans and Prince fans and scholars. “As an artifact, it’s absolutely extraordinary,” said Anil Dash, a technology executive and Prince scholar in New York. “You don’t even hope to find that kind of thing.”
The footage was part of a tape that had been digitized and sent to some newsroom staff members in February as tensions between the city’s teachers union and the school district grew before a strike in March. Liddy said the station’s assistant news director had suggested going through the archives to find footage of the strike in 1970 to put the current labor negotiations in context.
A historian who had researched Prince’s childhood helped connect reporter Jeff Wagner with Terrance Jackson, who had grown up with him. Wagner played the clip for him, and Jackson immediately recognized the boy as Prince.
Short as the interview is, it gives context to the causes Prince would later support, such as public education, labor rights and fair compensation for artists, said Elliott Powell, a professor of American Studies at the University of Minnesota who teaches a course on Prince.