Eddie Levert: The Last Soul Survivor — The Man Who Turned Sorrow into Song

From Alabama’s red clay to Las Vegas light, from hunger to harmony — the heartbeat of The O’Jays has out-sung every storm.

When Eddie Levert walks on stage today, the applause feels less like fame and more like forgiveness.

At 83, the legendary voice of Love Train and Back Stabbers no longer sings for chart positions or record deals — he sings for ghosts. For his sons, Gerald and Sean.

For his daughter, Ryan. For the brothers who built The O’Jays beside him and the wife who believed he could fly before the world knew his name.

His concerts are quieter now, the lights softer, the crowd older — yet when he grips that same silver microphone he’s held for six decades, you still feel the tremor of every joy and every funeral etched into his lungs. The man who taught the world to love has buried nearly everyone he ever sang for.

And somehow, miraculously, he still sings.

The Gospel of a Hungry Boy

Long before The O’Jays filled arenas, Eddie Levert was a barefoot boy from Bessemer, Alabama, a steel-town child of church pews and cracked hands.

Born June 16, 1942, he grew up in a house so small “the wind knocked first,” he likes to say. His father hauled iron; his mother scrubbed strangers’ floors until her knuckles bled. When there wasn’t enough food, she’d break one slice of bread in two and whisper, “Eat, baby. I’m not hungry.”

She always was.

What saved Eddie wasn’t luck — it was sound. In the wooden sanctuary of the neighborhood Baptist church, his mother pushed him toward the choir loft. “Sing it like you mean it, Eddie.”

That command became prophecy. His voice rose through poverty’s silence — raw, pleading, holy. “I didn’t know it then,” he later said, “but every note I sang in that church was saving me from something.”

When the Leverts joined the Great Migration north to Canton, Ohio, hope rode in a truck that barely made it out of Alabama. Canton was cold and unforgiving, but in that northern grit, Eddie found rhythm.

“When you’ve got no heat,” he once said, “you learn to make fire from your own breath.”

Building a Dream on Empty Pockets

By 15, he was sweeping factory floors by day and rehearsing harmonies by night with a few high-school friends — Walter Williams, Bobby Massie, Bill Isles, and William Powell.

They called themselves The Triumphs, then The Mascots, then, finally, The O’Jays — named after Cleveland DJ Eddie O’Jay, the first man who ever played their demo.

Their microphone stands were broomsticks; their limousine was a rust-red Chevy coughing prayers. They slept in the car between gigs and ate potato chips for dinner. “We sang to keep warm,” Eddie laughed years later.

In 1961 King Records gave them a tiny contract. Their first single, Lonely Drifter, barely made radio rotation. One by one, members quit. But Eddie stayed, and so did Walter Williams. “If all we have is each other,” Eddie told him, “then we’ve got a band.”

They did.

The Sound That Saved a Generation

Philadelphia changed everything. Under producers Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, The O’Jays fused gospel truth with street grit, birthing the lush “Philly Soul” that would soundtrack Black America’s 70s awakening.

When Back Stabbers dropped in 1972, its opening horn line sliced through the radio like warning sirens. Then came Love Train — a song so jubilant that strangers hugged in parking lots. And For the Love of Money — part sermon, part funk revolt — sealed their immortality.

The group sold over 10 million records in three years. Eddie’s honey-gravel voice became the moral pulse of the movement — part preacher, part hustler, part prophet.

He went from church basements to Madison Square Garden, from hand-me-down shoes to $100,000 nights. “We never dreamed of fame,” he said. “We just wanted to eat.”

But success, he learned, costs interest.

The Price of the Spotlight

Between 1973 and 1980, The O’Jays played over 200 shows a year. Buses replaced bedrooms; applause replaced rest.

Eddie’s vocal cords shredded, his marriage to Martha Bird Levert strained, and exhaustion became normal. “If I stopped singing,” he told a journalist, “I stopped breathing.”

Contracts cheated them out of nearly $400,000 in royalties. Fame had made them visible but not invincible. And when founding member William Powell died of cancer in 1977, Eddie nearly quit. “I was tired of pretending I wasn’t breaking inside.”

Still, he stayed. Because survival was his true instrument.

By the late 80s, at 45, he clawed his way back with Let Me Touch You, a No. 1 R&B album that reminded the industry that soul still had a heartbeat.

Ten gold records followed, plus a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction in 2005. “It was never about the money,” he said that night. “It was about surviving long enough to be heard.”

The Love He Couldn’t Hold

Martha Bird had been there from the start — the girl who saw a star inside a hungry man. They married in 1966 and raised two sons, Gerald and Sean. But fame is a thief dressed in applause. Tours stole holidays; silence replaced laughter. “The road that gave me everything also took me from them,” he admitted.

The marriage ended quietly after nearly 20 years. “The papers said divorce,” Eddie said, “but what I lost was my family.”

Yet the love remained — reframed as friendship, as shared parenthood, as mutual grief that no divorce decree could dissolve.

Gerald Levert: The Heir to Soul

Born in 1966, Gerald Levert was his father’s mirror — velvet voice, thunder heart. By the 80s, he fronted the trio LeVert, scoring chart-topping R&B hits and earning platinum success on his own terms. Father and son even shared a No. 1 duet: Baby, Hold On to Me.

“That wasn’t a lyric,” Eddie said later. “That was him talking to me.”

Then, on November 10, 2006, the phone rang. He’s gone. A reaction to prescription medication ended Gerald’s life at 40. Eddie dropped the phone and swore the house stopped breathing.

At the funeral, thousands sang Baby Hold On to Me for the man who no longer could. Eddie tried to join them, but his voice broke on the first word. “Grief,” he later said, “is like singing a song you can’t finish — but you keep trying just to feel close again.”

When Lightning Strikes Twice

Two years later, the nightmare repeated. In 2008, his second son Sean Levert died in custody at 39 from complications of sarcoidosis and medication withdrawal. “No father should have to bury his child,” Eddie whispered. “But two?”

He placed the same gold microphone from Gerald’s service on Sean’s coffin. “How many songs can one heart hold?”

The lawsuits and settlements that followed meant nothing. “They gave us money,” Martha said. “But they can’t give me my boys’ voices back.”

Eddie donated most of it to scholarships and medical charities. “If Sean’s gone,” he said, “let his name help someone else breathe.”

Finding Grace Again

In 2005, amid pain and revival, Eddie found unexpected peace with Raquel Capelton, the woman who would become his second wife. She didn’t marry the legend, she married the man still learning how to stay.

Together they raised their daughter Ryan, born 2002 — the miracle child who reignited laughter in a home long dimmed by loss.

“Ryan keeps me young,” he loved to say. “She reminds me to laugh, to breathe, to live.”

The Final Heartbreak

Then came 2024. Lupus stole what fame, time, and tragedy had left untouched. Ryan Levert — 22, radiant, compassionate — lost her battle after two years of fighting the disease publicly and bravely. Her last note to her father read, “Keep singing, Daddy. I’ll be listening.”

At her funeral, sunlight poured through stained glass and painted her white casket in purple and gold. Eddie placed a silver ribbon on top, whispered, “She fought harder than anyone ever should,” and left the church in silence.

Three graves now — Gerald, Sean, Ryan — stand side by side in Ohio. A father’s trilogy of love and loss. “When a parent has loved this much,” he said softly, “death doesn’t take the music. It just changes the key.”

The Brothers Who Built the Dream

Loss didn’t stop at family. Over the years, Eddie has buried nearly every founding member of The O’Jays.

William Powell, 1977 — cancer, 35.

Frankie Little Jr., missing for decades; his remains identified by DNA in 2021.

Bill Isles, 2019.

Bobby Massie, 2022.

“People see three men on stage,” Eddie said recently, “but I see five.” Every night, when the crowd sings Love Train, he hears the harmonies of ghosts. “Maybe that’s what heaven is,” he muses, “singing the same song from another place.”

Only Walter Williams Sr. — his lifelong friend — still stands beside him. Two old lions. Two survivors of an era that refused to die.

Eddie Levert Net Worth 2024: The Value of Survival

Today, Eddie Levert’s estimated net worth is around $20 million, built not from sudden fortune but from 60 years of relentless touring, 29 albums, ten gold records, and a voice that never sold out its soul.

His Las Vegas home, a modest 3,700-square-foot refuge, is filled not with trophies but with photographs — Gerald’s smile, Sean’s lyric sheets, Ryan’s doodles, Martha’s hymnal.

He keeps an old 1973 microphone in his living room, polished and ready. “It still works,” he says. “So do I.”

The Purpose After the Pain

He now divides his time between Nevada and Canton, raising funds for the Levert Foundation, which offers scholarships and lupus-research grants. He’s donated hundreds of thousands to the American Heart Association and to programs for underprivileged youth.

“You give because you’ve been given time,” he says. “And I’ve been given more time than I ever thought I would.”

His performances are rarer, his steps slower, but when that first chord of Love Train hits, the years fall away. Crowds still sway. Strangers still cry.

And somewhere between the verse and the echo, you can almost hear three voices joining him — Gerald, Sean, Ryan — keeping time from another realm.

What Remains

In the quiet mornings, Eddie brews coffee while Raquel hums hymns in the kitchen. He tends the small garden behind their house, the desert air warm against his skin. “I used to think love was what the world gave you,” he smiles. “But Raquel taught me it’s what you give back.”

Each night before bed, he whispers their names — Martha, Gerald, Sean, Ryan — not as prayer, not as pain, but as rhythm. The same rhythm that’s carried him from Bessemer’s dust to Billboard’s gold.

“People ask how I keep singing,” he says. “Easy. I sing for the ones who can’t anymore.”

The Last Verse

When the spotlight finds him now, Eddie Levert closes his eyes before the first note and breathes a single request: Let me sing it right — just one more time.

The lights rise. The band begins. The audience stands.
And the Love Train rolls on — slower, wiser, unstoppable.

Because pain turned into melody is the purest form of faith.
Because grief that still sings is proof that love never dies.

And because somewhere, beyond the glare of the stage, three voices are laughing again — harmonizing with their father from eternity.