Tyka Nelson, the younger sister of late music icon Prince, has died at the age of 64.
News of her death on Monday (November 4) morning was confirmed by her son, President Nelson, to the Minnesota Star Tribune. The cause of her death was not disclosed.
“She had her own mind,” Nelson’s half-sister Sharon Nelson told the outlet. “She’s in a better place.”
Nelson was Prince’s only full sibling. Born in Minneapolis two years after her famed brother to jazz musicians John L Nelson and Mattie Shaw Nelson, Nelson was also a singer in her own right.
Over the course of her music career, she released four albums: Royal Blue (1988), Yellow Moon, Red Sky (1992), A Brand New Me (2008) and Hustler (2011).
Nelson had plans to retire and perform a farewell concert at the Dakota in Minnesota in June of this year, but she ended up taking ill, and the concert went on without her.
“I’m getting older,” she told the Minnesota Star Tribune before the June show. “I really wasn’t a singer. I’m a writer. I just happen to be able to sing. I enjoy singing.”
She also revealed she was in the process of writing a memoir. “We are not there yet. We’ve got a few more chapters,” she said at the time. “It’s about me and my family.”
Nelson’s death comes eight years after Prince died in 2016. The “Purple Rain” singer passed away at the age of 57 at his Paisley Park estate in Minnesota from an accidental painkiller overdose.
Speaking to the Star Tribune in June, Nelson recalled one of the final conversations she had with Prince four days before his death.
“He kept avoiding questions. I kept getting mad,” she said. “I felt like, ‘Talk to me for two seconds.’ He’d change the subject, make a joke and then we’d both laugh. He asked me could I find more information about our family. Prince wanted me to find [half-sister] Sharon’s number. I didn’t question it.”
For 50 years, Sharon had lived on the East Coast. She hadn’t known Tyka until she moved back to the Twin Cities following Prince’s death.
Nelson is survived by two sons, President and Sir, two sisters Sharon and Norrine Nelson and a brother, Omarr Baker.
