Blood will out. Which is why — after her Emmy-nominated turn in the soap “Another World” and launching a real estate firm — Rhonda Ross is singing again.
Backed by an eight-piece band, this love child of music royalty Diana Ross and Berry Gordy returns to the Iridium Sunday night to perform her own songs, an amalgam of R&B, funk and jazz she calls “music of the African diaspora.”
I feel I’m finding my voice and my purpose, and the music I really want to share.
- Rhonda Ross
But some may recall a 7- or 8-year-old Rhonda who, from the audience at Caesar’s Palace, sang “Reach Out and Touch (Somebody’s Hand)” as her Supreme mother held the mic.
These days, Raif, Rhonda’s 5-year-old son (with her pianist husband Rodney Kendrick), is likely to get onstage and bust some dance moves during her own set.
“It’s like a Ross rite of passage,” the 43-year-old says, laughing, and her wide smile eclipses her mom’s.
“The bottom line was, I looked just like [Gordy], and my sisters looked just like their father, a 6-foot-tall Jewish American man,” she says. Even so, she’s still close to the man who raised her as his daughter, “though he knew I wasn’t his when my mother was pregnant.”
Now living in Harlem, she was born in LA but grew up mostly in New York. The oldest of the diva’s five children, Rhonda was nearly 13 when she was told the man she knew as Dad — her mother’s husband and manager, Robert Ellis Silberstein — wasn’t.
Discovering who she really was came as a relief, she says. Gordy was already so close to the family that she and her sisters called him “uncle.”
And while it took her awhile to learn the truth, others had guessed it long ago. “I’d meet fans on the street who’d say, ‘Oh child, we knew you were Berry Gordy’s daughter — you look just like him!’ ”
And Rhonda sounds like her mom. She’s been listening to her sing since before she was born. Diana was preparing for “Lady Sings the Blues” while pregnant, and Rhonda thinks that experience led to her own lifelong love of Billie Holiday.
She’s amazed at how her mom juggled five kids and a career.
“We were not raised by nannies,” she says. “She’d do a gig in Atlantic City and helicopter back and forth to be there in the mornings to get us off to school. My grandmother was around till I was 13, so we had that support, but my mother didn’t work on Christmas, New Year’s or any of our birthdays.”
Granted, there were plenty of perks — like playing with the Jackson 5, who visited the Ross family in California. Michael even vacationed with them once in Miami.
“He was working on ‘Thriller’ and he was very secretive,” Rhonda recalls. “He’d hide in his room, I’d hear the music and knock on the door and he’d say, ‘Don’t come in!’ ” She sighs. “He was a lovely spirit.”
She’s never lacked for advice, and it’s Gordy who gave her the impetus she needed to sing again. “Recently, he’s advised me that direction is more important than speed,” she says. “I’ve been at this for a while, and now I feel I’m finding my voice and my purpose, and the music I really want to share.”