Tyka Nelson, Sister of Prince Who Carved Her Own Path, Dies at 64

Out from under an imposing shadow, she recorded four albums as a singer and had two R&B hits before turning her focus to her brother’s legacy.

Tyka Nelson, who was once called “the most famous unknown singer” as she followed her brother, Prince, into a four-album recording career, and who helped promote his legacy after his death in 2016, died on Monday in Robbinsdale, Minn. She was 64.

Her death, in a hospital, was announced in a statement by her son President Nelson. He did not cite a cause.

Tyka Evene Nelson, the only full sibling of Prince Rogers Nelson — who assumed his mononymic persona and began his rapid rise to fame in the late 1970s — was born on May 18, 1960, in Minneapolis to John L. Nelson, a factory worker who performed as a jazz pianist under the name Prince Rogers, and Mattie (Shaw) Nelson, a jazz singer.

By the time Ms. Nelson embarked on a music career of her own, her brother had been turning pop music inside out with his kaleidoscopic fusion of funk, rock, R&B and the color purple for a decade. With the release in 1988 of her debut album, “Royal Blue,” an adult contemporary rumination on love and relationships, The Minneapolis Star Tribune compared Ms. Nelson to Anita Baker, Sade and Laura Nyro.

But it was another inevitable comparison that she found impossible to shake. “I was praying one day, I said, ‘Please, God, why can’t I sound like CeCe Winans?’” Ms. Nelson recalled in a 2018 interview with Australian television, referring to the star gospel artist. “Then people said I sound like him, so it’s definitely not intentional.” Still, she added, “If there’s anyone you can compare me to, c’mon, you might as well compare me to the best, right?”

Despite her brother’s long shadow, she made her own mark with two singles off the album: “Marc Anthony’s Tune,” a sunny love song that climbed to No. 33 on Billboard’s R&B chart, and “L.O.V.E.,” a shimmering up-tempo number that made it to No. 52. Ms. Nelson went on to release three more albums: “Yellow Moon, Red Sky” (1992); “A Brand New Me” (2008), a gospel album; and “Hustler” (2011).

In the end, stardom was not her fate. “I really wasn’t a singer,” she said in an interview in June with The Minnesota Star-Tribune, as the newspaper is now called. “I’m a writer. I just happen to be able to sing. I enjoy singing.”

But she did encounter one hazard of the profession: drug abuse. “I had a long time kind of battling those things, and after my father passed, it got really bad,” she said on Australian television. (Mr. Nelson died in 2001.) “And so I called up big bruh, said, ‘Help!’ He said, ‘OK, when and where?’”

As the world would soon learn, Prince had his own demons. On April 21, 2016, he was found dead at 57 of an opioid overdose in Paisley Park, his 65,000-square-foot compound in Chanhassen, Minn. An autopsy determined that his death was accidental.

When asked about her reaction to the news in an “Entertainment Tonight” interview later that year, Ms. Nelson responded with a surprising answer: “It wasn’t hard at all. It was a two- second phone call. ‘He’s gone.’

“I had been preparing for two years,” she added, “so I knew that it was coming. He said it a couple of years ago. What he said was, ‘I’ve done everything that I’ve come to do.’ So I was crushed for about two years.”

Untangling his $156 million estate proved an odyssey, since Prince had no spouse or children, nor did he leave a will. (His son, Amiir, died in infancy in 1996.) Eventually, Ms. Nelson and her half siblings Sharon Nelson, Norrine Nelson, John R. Nelson, Omarr Baker and Alfred Jackson were granted control.

Ms. Nelson ended up selling 98 percent of her stake to the music management firm Primary Wave, but she maintained her influence. “We are a teeny little corner,” she told The Star Tribune, in reference to her and her children’s remaining 2 percent. “But it’s a big role.”

In the years that followed, Ms. Nelson worked to open new windows on Prince’s prolific career. Six months after his death, Paisley Park opened as a museum, drawing from a trove of more than 7,000 artifacts, including touring outfits, motorcycles, around 120 guitars and 2,000 pairs of shoes — all of them heels, not flats (Prince was 5-foot-2).

“Opening Paisley Park is something that Prince always wanted to do and was actively working on,” Ms. Nelson said in a statement when the museum opened. “Only a few hundred people have had the rare opportunity to tour the estate during his lifetime.”

In addition to her son President, Ms. Nelson is survived by another son, Sir, and three of her half siblings. (Alfred Jackson died in 2019, John R. Nelson in 2021.)

She also did her part to usher along numerous posthumous releases from her explosively prolific brother’s considerable backlog, including boxed sets and “Welcome 2 America,” the so-called lost album he recorded in 2010.

“Prince always wanted people to hear his music,” Ms. Nelson said in a 2021 interview with Rolling Stone. “How dare I not do what this man broke his back to do all his life? There would be no way that I let one note of his music not ever be heard.”