Danny Mitchell: From Abandonment to Empowerment Through Music

Danny Mitchell told me his story starts with abandonment. At three or four years old, he watched his biological dad leave after a fight with his mom. That was basically all he’d see of his father for years.

“Maybe once a year I would get a call or a visit from them,” Danny said about his dad, who hit the road with a crew of traveling asphalt workers. The promises hurt more than the silence. Danny remembers sitting outside on his birthday, maybe six or seven years old, waiting for his dad to show up. “I sat out there for like three or four hours and he never showed up, never called and I just remember sitting out there ball miles out.”

As a kid, Danny blamed himself. His dad had reluctantly given him fishing poles from his truck on a previous visit. “When he doesn’t show up, my first thought was, man, I shouldn’t ever ask him for that stupid fishing pole. You know what I mean? It’s all my fault.”

Seven Kids in One Room

Danny’s mom remarried, bringing seven kids total into a two-bedroom trailer in State Park, Illinois. “We lived in a two-bedroom trailer and there were seven of us kids living in one room,” he told me. His stepdad worked every day, but the family struggled financially. Despite the crowded conditions, Danny described good childhood memories of camping trips and visits to Six Flags.

But his stepdad had his own addiction issues. “He was a functioning addict as most people would call, you know, because he could use and get up and go to work,” Danny explained. The verbal abuse created a walking-on-eggshells atmosphere. When Danny’s mom and stepdad split up when he was 12, another man entered the picture. Danny’s rebellious streak kicked in hard.

“Here’s this new guy trying to step in and it’s just like I’m looking at this dude like, dude, you’re not going to tell me what to do,” he said. “I would go out of my way just if he says not to do something, I would go out of my way to do it.”

The Slide Into Addiction

Danny started drinking and smoking weed at 12 or 13, hanging with older cousins and family members. In that environment, heavy substance use looked normal. “If you drink, you’re supposed to get wasted. You know, if you ain’t puking, you ain’t drinking enough,” he told me. “It was socially accepted in my family to smoke weed and to drink alcohol.”

By 14 or 15, Danny tried Oxycontin and Vicodin. “That I felt like was my drug of choice, because when I first tried it, I was just like, whoa, like, this is good.” Pills were cheap and everywhere back then. His opioid addiction took root and would dominate the next two decades of his life.

Music entered the picture around the same time. Danny’s cousin, older and dealing drugs, had started making hip hop and encouraged Danny to try writing. “The lyrics just naturally came out,” Danny said about his first attempt. “Like, it was like so natural and so easy.”

Prison Becomes Home

At 13, Danny robbed houses in his neighborhood and got probation plus weekends in jail. The judge eventually got tired of Danny’s repeat offenses and sent him to IYC Harrisburg, a juvenile facility in Illinois. “There’s 500 kids in there,” Danny described. “There’s fights every day because these kids are trying to prove themselves.”

From ages 13 to 18, Danny spent about three years total cycling in and out of that institution. He got his GED inside and took some college courses, but the pattern continued. At 16, he had a son. At 18, a daughter. “I tell myself like I’m going to do the right thing. I’m not going to be like how my dad was,” he said.

But addiction derailed everything. DCFS took his children. “It’s like the person that I did not want to become, I was becoming,” Danny told me. When he lost his parental rights at 21, something broke. “That’s when I started using a needle. That’s when I started shooting heroin. Like it just, I just lost hope.”

The Long Road Back

Danny’s adult prison stretches were harder. In Missouri prisons, unlike Illinois, drugs flowed freely. As the lead barber at Pacific Correctional Center, Danny had access to move between wings, making him a drug courier. “Here I am. I got drugs galore,” he said about that period.

During his longest stretch, six years, Danny eventually got clean in his fifth year. He met Ronnie Langford, started doing Christian hip hop shows in the prison chapel, and made plans for release. But when he got out, the same environment pulled him back. One night of drinking led to heroin again within a month.

“It was like, man, I had my hopes set so high that I was so convinced that I was done with that life,” Danny explained about the relapse. “How did I even get to this again? Like, I was done with this and here I’m doing now, I felt out.”

Finding the Link

The name “Link Boys” came to Danny during a spiritual moment in prison. “I felt like the spirit was just like, open the dictionary and look at the first word you see,” he said. The definition read that in the 1600s, link boys were hired to hold lamps in the streets at night to help people find their way home.

Today, Danny performs as 3D and has songs on the radio, including “Rescue Me.” His music videos, shot in the trailer parks where he used to get high, carry the weight of lived experience. He’s building something different now, one song at a time.

The zigzag path from abandonment to music isn’t a straight line to success. It’s messier than that, with real setbacks and genuine second chances. But Danny’s still here, still writing, still trying to be the light that helps other people find their way home.