One night, someone contemptuously threw a quarter into the street for Burke outside of a bar. He went to pick it up and recalls distinctly hearing a disembodied voice say, “If you pick up that quarter, you’ll be doing that for the rest of your life.” He stood up – and got hit by a car driven by the wife of a dentist who took him home and nursed him back to health. He ended up marrying her niece Delores and got over the shame of his wrecked singing career, taking a job as an apprentice mortician at his uncle’s funeral home. “I loved the work,” says Burke. “At a moment when there is no hope for a family, a mortician can give them hope. My daughter Victoria is in the funeral business now, and she’s brilliant at it.”
Burke did everything from embalming to comforting the bereaved, and his family started to grow. By 1961, he had “three kids on the outside, and about four at home.” When a local manager offered him a Lincoln Continental if he’d resume his singing career, it seemed a good way to make money. Soon he was signed to Atlantic Records, which was looking for church-trained singers who had the chops to cross over.
Lots more at the link.
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