One night that year, he was having a meal at a Philadelphia diner with Billy Joel, Bruce Springsteen and Ed Sciaky, a local DJ who had arranged the meeting of the musicians. Between Edna and Willie, they pooled their money and sent me off to piano lessons once a week.' 'I tried playing the overtures of the Broadway scores on my accordion, and I did pretty well! But Willie knew that would never do, so he saved his money and bought me a spinet piano. I didn't even know it existed!' Manilow remembered. The collection included Broadway soundtracks, big band music, Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland, and classical music. As Manilow recalled, Murphy had a record player and a great music collection that was like 'a stack of gold' to him. Manilow's life changed further at the age of 13, when his mother married a man named Willie Murphy. The only music I was exposed to in my young life was Jewish folk songs and awful pop songs on the radio. 'I picked up reading music very fast, and I actually played the thing so it didn't sound like an old Italian baker outside his store. 'There wasn't much you could do on the accordion, but damn, I was good at it,' he recalled. As a matter of fact, it would have been interesting if my name was Barry Kelliher and if I was raised half-Irish and half-Jewish, but I wasn't. 'Right now it sounds stupid but back then they thought that having a Jewish son was the most important thing,' he added. 'Right now it sounds stupid but back then they thought that having a Jewish son was the most important thing. My mother made my father change his name to Pincus. They went back to the 1800s and they found one uncle, a Jewish guy called Pincus. They had to dig deep into my father's family to find one Jewish relative. When I was born, I was called Barry Pincus.

wouldn't even allow my name to be Kelliher,' he told the Independent. 'It was considered a terrible thing for my mother to have done.

Friction over Manilow's name started as soon as he was board, fueled by the fact that Manilow's father, Harold Kelliher, was an Irish-American truck driver.

Obama cant talk without a prompter