When Beverly Glenn-Copeland was 64, he entrusted Elizabeth Paddon, whom he would soon marry, with a sobering prediction: His records would finally be noticed after he died.
For Glenn-Copeland, making music had been both a lifelong pursuit and a lifeline, the unifying thread through six tumultuous decades as a Black transgender man.
He grew up in Philadelphia watching his father play classical piano and learning spirituals his mother remembered from her Georgia childhood.
As a college student in Montreal, Glenn-Copeland studied lieder and the oboe, then opera in New York. At the start of the 1970s, he made two albums of yearning folk-rock, his formal training manifest in an ascendant vibrato and audacious arrangements.