Early Life
Riperton was born in Chicago to Thelma and Daniel Riperton, a Pullman porter. The youngest of eight children in a musical family, Riperton embraced the arts early on. Although she began with ballet and modern dance, Riperton's parents recognized her vocal and musical abilities and encouraged her to pursue music and voice.
At Chicago's Lincoln Center, Riperton received operatic vocal training from Marion Jeffery. She practiced breathing and phrasing, with particular emphasis on diction. Jeffery also trained Riperton to use her full range.
While studying under Jeffery, Riperton sang operettas and show tunes, in preparation for a career in opera. Jeffery was so convinced of her pupil's abilities that she strongly pushed her to further study the classics at Chicago's Junior Lyric Opera. The young Riperton was, however, becoming very interested in soul, rhythm and blues, and rock. After graduating from Hyde Park High School, now Hyde Park Career Academy, she enrolled at Loop College and became a member of the prestigious Zeta Phi Beta. She dropped out of college to pursue her music career. In 1967, Riperton met songwriter Richard Rudolph, whom she married five years later. They have a son named Marc, and their daughter is Maya Rudolph, a successful television and film actress/comedienne.
Read more about this topic: Minnie Riperton
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the alms-house as brightly as from the rich mans abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring. I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)
“Virtue and vice suppose the freedom to choose between good and evil; but what can be the morals of a woman who is not even in possession of herself, who has nothing of her own, and who all her life has been trained to extricate herself from the arbitrary by ruse, from constraint by using her charms?... As long as she is subject to mans yoke or to prejudice, as long as she receives no professional education, as long as she is deprived of her civil rights, there can be no moral law for her!”
—Flora Tristan (18031844)