Born William Anthony Colón Román on April 28, 1950, to Puerto Rican parents in New York City, Colón first picked up the trumpet in school. It seemed like a natural choice for the former bugle-playing Boy Scout, who attended the youth program at the suggestion of his grandmother. "So I could learn how to be a good boy," said Colón in a 1988 interview with Associated Press.
This was 1980 or '81, she reckons, just after she'd come off the road playing percussion for the jazz star George Duke; by 1984, she'd become a star herself with the pop hit "The Glamorous Life," which she cut with her mentor Prince and which went to No. 7 on Billboard's Hot 100. Over the decades that followed, Sheila E. went on to record or perform with everyone from Ringo Starr to Beyoncé.
