Wait, John Legend isn’t his real name?
That’s right! During the March 1 episode of The Tonight Show, the EGOT winner told the true story as to how John Roger Stevens, his birth name, became a “Legend.”
“It was a nickname that some friends started calling me in the studio, just guys that I was collaborating with,” he explained to host Jimmy Fallon. “The first guy to call me that was J. Ivy. He’s a spoken-word artist from Chicago.
As John explained to Jimmy, he met J. Ivy through Kanye West.
He went on to add, “We were all in the studio together. He just started calling me ‘The Legend’ because he thought I sounded like one of our old-school soul legends. And it just caught on with our little group of friends and then they were like, ‘We should call you John Legend.’ And it just really was in our little circle.”
