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AGT singer speaks, performs at YSU awards
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 gauntlet” 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 Friday 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.
He continues to be busy performing across the country and was the headliner at a special charity benefit in Shanghai, China.
He lives in West Virginia, where he was born, and life is indeed different from his AGT audition days, when he was washing cars for a living and “singing to pass the time.”
He talked about growing up in Detroit.
When he first arrived, “I felt like an outcast.”
“My accent, my hair was long. ... I couldn’t afford to get a haircut.”
“My mom, she bought a pair of clippers ... from the Fingerhut,” he said, to laughter.
“We got government cheese, and grape juice and peanut butter.”
With the clippers his mother bought, he said, he began cutting people’s hair.
They became his “walking billboards,” he said.
He amused everyone with harrowing stories of cutting hair in the “hot zone,” a bad area of the city.
“The guy’s head I was cutting was a brother in huge gangs, and one time, I cut a patch in his head, and he didn’t see it cause he was blind,” he said.
“To stay out of trouble, I cut people’s hair,” he said.
By the time he was 18, half of his friends were in prison, said Murphy, who’s now 40.
“I went to church, played basketball and sang to myself,” he said.
“One time in church, I sang freestyle and recorded it and fell in love with it, and played it for everyone in the neighborhood as loud as I could,” he said.
He said that he believes he lived God’s plan, and it’s been a blessing.
“I want to continue to be a blessing to other people,” he said.
Imler said money raised from the concert will go toward increasing the scholarship fund for a bigger award or more awards.
The winner of this year’s scholarship is Catherine Cooper, a senior majoring in middle childhood education science and language arts. She has tutored students in grades five to eight, which allowed her to experience the complexities and diversity of the classroom.
She has contributed much time to community service projects. She is the National Society of Collegiate Social chair, member of Phi Kappa Phi, Minority Education Association, YSU Model United Nations, YSUnity, National Science Teacher Association and College of Democrats. She is a peer tutor; she has been on the Dean’s List for three years, and participated in the Harvard national Model United Nations in 2014 and 2015.
Receiving Campus Leadership Awards for promoting diversity were Mari Alschuler, assistant professor of social work and the faculty co-liason for the Student Social Workers for Veterans and Military Social Work student group; Amy Cossentino, assistant director of the University Scholars and Honors Program and the director of the Summer Honors Institute; and Alicia Prieto Langarica, assistant professor in mathematics and statistics who founded the Hispanic Heritage Month Colloquium Series. It brings four Hispanic mathematicians per year to the YSU campus to speak.
Receiving Leader of Tomorrow Awards for promoting and providing leadership in diversity and inclusion for peers were James MacGregor, a senior at YSU’s Beeghly College of Education. He is pursuing a degree in middle-childhood education science and language arts; Annaliza Ronquillo, a graduate student majoring in English; and Christina Marie Yovick, a graduate student in the counseling program in the Beeghly College of Education.