Keisha Lance Bottoms didn’t set out to write a political memoir. Instead, she’s written something more vulnerable: a portrait of what it means to grow up as the daughter of soul royalty, watching stardom from the wings while your father chases it across the country. Her new book, “The Rough Side of the Mountain,” lands just after her historic election as Georgia’s governor—a victory that made her the nation’s first Black female governor. But the real story she wants to tell starts decades earlier, in the glittering, complicated world of 1960s soul music.
In a recent interview with VIBE, Keisha Lance Bottoms opens up about her father, Major Lance, the Chicago soul legend whose voice defined an era. He wasn’t just a singer—he was a phenomenon. “The Monkey Time” hit No. 2 on the Billboard R&B chart in 1963 and sparked a national dance craze. A year later, “Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um” climbed to No. 1 on the R&B charts and No. 5 on the pop charts, catching the ear of John Lennon himself. Major Lance had made it out of Cabrini-Green, the Chicago housing project that reportedly inspired the TV show “Good Times,” by any means necessary.
But stardom comes with a price. Bottoms recalls how her father “never met a stranger and always kept his friends”—a generous way of saying he had a complicated personal life. She writes about meeting new siblings on childhood trips to Chicago, half-brothers and sisters who emerged as his early success took off. “Children started coming out of the woodwork, claiming that he was their father,” she explains. “This was before DNA testing, and I’m not sure if even Daddy knew what was true.” The comparison that stuck with her was inevitable: the Temptations’ 1972 hit “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone.”
Growing up with a musician father meant a childhood unlike most. Backstage passes to star-studded parties. Impromptu trips to New York, London, or wherever her father’s next gig took him. When Bottoms later served on Atlanta’s City Council, Jermaine Jackson from The Jackson 5 was thrilled to hear whose daughter she was. He introduced her to his brothers, who told her they used to clean their house in Gary, Indiana to her father’s music.
Yet Bottoms inherited more than just her father’s talent for the spotlight. She inherited his showman’s spirit—that fearless, unapologetic way of moving through the world. “The desire for the spotlight was in my DNA, thanks to my daddy,” she writes. “He was a showman and I was proud to be like him.” As a child, she never got the memo about being seen and not heard. Her world was big, bold, bright, filled with color. And her father was the main artist.
But fame and freedom came with consequences. In 1978, Major Lance was convicted on drug charges and served four years in prison. When he was released, a heart attack in 1987 ended his performing career. He died in 1994 at 55. Bottoms was still young, old enough to understand loss but young enough to still need her father.
“I wasn’t opposed to Daddy living his dream, I just wished he dreamed of something else—something that kept his love for music alive and gave our family the stability we needed,” she writes. “Perhaps if he had seen a way to do both, so much would have been different.”
“The Rough Side of the Mountain,” published by Mariner Books this April, traces the Southern lessons and family bonds that grounded Bottoms long before she stepped onto the national political stage. It’s a book about resilience and contradictions—about a father who gave his daughter both wings and wounds, about learning to hold love and disappointment in the same hand. And it’s a book that matters now, not because of who Bottoms has become, but because of where she came from.
★TR★
