And, oh yeah, he was once voted “Best Dressed Man in the World” by Esquire. It didn’t take long to realize that Pharrell was the secret sauce behind countless hits (Snoop Dogg’s Drop It Like It’s Hot, Britney Spears’s I’m a Slave 4 U, Gwen Stefani’s Hollaback Girl, etc.), a musical collaborator with the likes of Jay-Z, Daft Punk, Miley Cyrus, Justin Timberlake, Ludacris, and Robin Thicke, and a multi-faceted entrepreneur and artist with business interests ranging from his Billionaire Boys Club clothing brand to jewelry, furniture, sculpture and furniture design partnerships with everyone from Louis Vuitton to Takashi Murakam. Around the same time, Happy became a worldwide sensation sending people from Poland to Cambodia into spasms of gleeful, unfettered, YouTube-shared dancing. Long a major player in the music and fashion industries, his public profile exploded when we all started noticing the fellow with the park ranger hat boasts more than 20,000 followers on Twitter) showing up at every awards ceremony as both a performer and recipient. If you didn’t know who Pharrell Williams was last year, you certainly know now. All because one man changed his mind 183 years ago. We wouldn’t Get Lucky and those Blurred Lines would remain clearly demarcated. He wouldn’t exist and the rest of us would be considerably less Happy. If not for this last minute change of plans, the gene pool that would eventually produce Pharrell couldn’t have crystallized.

Had he done so, his son Joseph would have been raised in Liberia instead of North Carolina and never would have become Pharrell Williams’s third great-grandfather.Īs it happens, Ambrose did go to Liberia, but opted for a solo round trip, rather than a family migration. Every one of us is an amalgamation not only of all our ancestors, but of their decisions, and in 1831, Ambrose Hawkins was contemplating moving his family from America to Africa.

Pharrell in my mind root