BILLY DORSEY, JR. Author, Music Producer & Songwriter Who or what inspired you to enter the music industry? My parents, who made me sing in church. Once, they had me get up in front of the congregation to sing, the bug bit me and never let me go. Could you give our readers a brief description of the journey of your music career? I signed my first record deal at 19 years old while a student at Louisiana Tech University, and moved to Houston to begin working on the first album under that deal with my group Serenity. When the label tried to replace one of the members of the group and I fought against it, they froze our contract out and I ended up homeless as a result, living on the streets of 5th Ward in Houston, TX. After nearly a year on the streets, I found a safe place to live and began working on new music. That music was discovered by Nick Velo, an A&R for Beluga Heights in Beverly Hills, CA, and led to the opportunity for me to write and produce songs for ma jor stars, some of which went on to win Grammys and to top a variety of Billboard charts around the world. You have written songs for prominent artists like Nicki Mina j, B.o.B, and TI. Which up-and-coming artist would you like to collaborate with next? I would really love the opportunity to write and
produce for an artist from California named Elhae, a phenomenal young singer and songwriter. His music is soulful and current, and I believe we’d make something special together. What inspired you to start the Your Word Project? I had the opportunity in 2015 to partner with United Bible Societies, the world’s largest publisher, distributor, and translator of the Bible, and they shred with me that there were more than 2500 languages and dialects around the world that didn’t have their own translations of the Bible. When UBS shared with me the costs per translation, I wanted to use my gifts of music and strategy to help raise the funds to provide those translations. So I wrote a song, “Your Word,” and partnered with some of the biggest Christian singers in the world to do translations of the song into 14 different languages. We released the songs and did concerts all around the world, with the proceeds from those translations of the songs going to fund brand new translations of the Bible in India, Italy, Uganda, and the Philippines. That project is one of the closest to my heart of all of the projects I’ve ever done, and the idea that sparked the project, We Are the World by Quincy Jones, was one of my biggest inspirations.
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