R&B legend Teddy Pendergrass passed away this week at age 59 after a long illness. He is survived by his adoring mother Ida, devoted wife Joan, and his three children Theodore Pendergrass Jr, Tishia and LaDonna Hollerway, and four grandchildren, Montaurius Drianen, Desaray Drane, Theodore Pendergrass III and Alana Nida Sky Pendergrass.
According to a press release, Pendergrass was ordained as a minister at the age of 10 before going on to become one of the most successful R&B singers in music history. In a 2009 interview with the Chicago Free Press, he commented, “”I was the first black artist to receive five consecutive platinum records. We opened it up even more, so the ’70s was a place where black music went over the top and those guys are responsible for that.”
With Grammy awards and sold out concerts, Pendergrass was on the top of the music world when a car accident on March 18, 1982, eight days before his 32nd birthday, paralyzed him for the rest of his life.

Defying expectations, after a year of physical therapy Pendergrass returned to the studio in 1984 and recorded his Elektra/Asylum debut Love Language, which went gold.
“My rehabilitation was totally due to the fact that I could still focus on continuing to make music,” Pendergrass told Wax Poetics magazine in 2008. “I got signs from God that he was going to let me continue.”
Pendergrass co-authored with Patricia Romanowski his autobiography “Truly Blessed” in 1998. For the better part of the 2000s, he was heavily involved in the maintaining his family and working with his charity the Teddy Pendergrass Alliance, a nonprofit organization he founded in 1998 to aid people with spinal-cord injuries
The official public viewing for Pendergrass will be held Friday, Jan. 22 at 10 a.m. at Enon Tabernacle Baptist Church, 2800 West Cheltenham Ave., Philadelphia, PA 19150, his record company has just announced.
The funeral will be held Saturday, Jan. 23 at 10 a.m., also at Enon Tabernacle Baptist Church. Interment will follow at West Laurel Hill Cemetery, Bala Cynwyd, PA.
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