America's Got Talent winner entertains Stambaugh crowd, raises scholarship funds

YOUNGSTOWN

Life has changed a lot for Landau Eugene Murphy Jr. since the singer won America’s Got Talent in 2011.

Yet, he says, he hasn’t changed, and he strives to make sure he never does.

He won the reality TV contest by the biggest vote total in the show’s history, pointed out Sylvia Imler, interim director of Youngstown State University’s Office of Diversity and Multicultural Affairs.

It was shortly after that win, he told The Vindicator, that Imler met him at a concert in Charleston, W. Va.

He told her then, he said, that he would help to raise funds for a scholarship for the university.

He never had an opportunity to go to college himself.

“I grew up in an area of Detroit where it was like running a gantlet” between drugs and violence, he said. Church, music and basketball kept him off the streets.

Now, he said, he is “just an entertainer,” in Youngstown this evening at Stambaugh Auditorium to speak and give a concert to raise money for a scholarship for the office Imler heads.

“The scholarship will benefit those kids,” he said — he’s just there to help make it happen.

He’s been making it happen, Imler said as she introduced him to a large pre-concert dinner crowd, since winning AGT, with a series of sold-out concerts in his home state of West Virginia that raised over $500,000 for state charities, and his Christmas CD, which is now a best-selling fundraising vehicle for the Children’s Home Society charity.

Read more about him and tonight's event in Saturday's Vindicator or on Vindy.com.