After Dinner Speakers: Prince, Mike Watson, Harry Carpenter
Name at Birth: Prince Roger Nelson
From the late 1970s through the 1980s Prince wrote and produced funky pop songs that had cross-genre appeal, including the top-sellers 1999 and When Doves Cry. On many songs, Prince played all the instruments himself. Eccentric, independent and prolific, in the 1990s he changed his name to The Artist Formerly Known As Prince, then to an unpronouncable symbol, reproduced on the Web as O(+>. In 2000 he changed his name back to Prince.