The voice on the cassette is old, a little gravelly and pure New York. It belongs to Abe, a man who grew up poor on the streets of New York in the early 1900s, worked blue-collar jobs his whole life and never got the hang of reading or writing.
In 2003, he used that voice to talk to his gay grandson.
The two of them barely had a relationship. Abe came from a world where men like his grandson were expected to keep quiet and stay out of sight. Still, he sat down with a tape recorder and gave Richard Cortez what a grandfather is supposed to give: his blessing, plus some old-fashioned advice about love.
Richard, now a 41-year-old jazz singer in New York, listened once and put the tape in a box. He didn’t play it again for 23 years. When he shared a short clip this summer, Abe’s voice reached 3.5 million views, and people keep telling Richard it sent them straight to the phone to call their own family.
The Grandfather He Never Really Knew
Abe and Richard had never been close, and Richard’s mother had her own complicated history with her father. When the two of them started mending things late in Abe’s life, Abe reached out to his grandson too, Richard told PEOPLE, which first reported the story.
He did it the only way that felt natural to him. On the tapes, Abe admits that reading and writing never came easily, so instead of a letter, Richard got three cassettes of stories and advice.
Richard figures talking was simply easier for the old man than wrestling his thoughts onto paper and worrying about spelling.
At 18, though, Richard mostly felt confused. He couldn’t work out why a grandfather he’d barely had a relationship with was suddenly mailing him tapes, or what he wanted from him.
An 18-Year-Old With A Lot Going On
The tapes reached him between 2003 and 2004, just as he was getting ready to leave Florida for New York.
School had been rough. Richard was bullied and publicly scrutinized as a young gay teenager, and he dropped out in ninth grade before earning his GED. In a 2019 interview with Thotyssey, he said that after he appeared in a video teaching the Broward County school district about hate speech, Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church planned a protest at his school. Richard staged a counter-protest and made headlines.
Looking back, Richard believes his grandfather knew how much he was dealing with as he turned 18, and that the tapes came from a man who was worried about him.
So picture being that kid, already braced for the world to let you down, and finding a parcel from a grandfather you’ve hardly spoken to. You’d assume the worst too.
A Grandpa From Another World
The cassette in the video Richard later made for the recording is labeled 9/3/03. The video title adds where Abe recorded it: Pittsburgh.
Abe was a grown man decades before Stonewall. He’d lived nearly his whole life in an America where being gay meant hiding, and even in September 2003 the country was only starting to change. The Supreme Court had struck down state sodomy laws that June, in Lawrence v. Texas. No state let two men marry. Massachusetts’ highest court wouldn’t rule for same-sex marriage until that November, and the first licenses weren’t issued until May 2004.
A man of his age and background had every excuse to say nothing. Plenty of grandfathers did.
Abe picked up the phone instead, told his grandson a tape was coming, and then sat down and recorded it. Early on he admits the subject is “a little tough to talk about.” Then he talks about it anyway, because, as he puts it, “it is an important subject.”
Twenty-Three Years In A Keepsake Box
Richard didn’t fully understand the gesture back then, so the tapes went into the box and mostly stayed out of his mind.
His career kept going. He held weekly residencies at LGBTQ+ venues around New York, among them Club Cumming, Metropolitan Bar and Rebar, singing Cole Porter, Billie Holiday and Jerome Kern as an openly gay man. He played Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Jazz at Pride, sang All of Me with Alan Cumming, and shared the bandstand with Emmet Cohen, Sullivan Fortner, Peter Bernstein and Marilyn Maye. His debut jazz album, Mood Swings, came out in 2024.
What finally got the box open again was a cheap bit of tech.
He bought a cassette digitizer, played Abe’s tapes for the first time in 23 years and converted the recordings. What he heard moved him enough to start building them into his music.
The box held more than Abe’s three tapes. There was also a recording of his parents’ wedding ceremony, and it ended up on the first EP of the project he was building.
The Clip That Reached Millions
In July 2026, Richard posted a short clip of Abe’s tape. The original TikTok alone has passed half a million views, with more than 40,000 likes and close to 1,000 comments. Across social media, the recording has now been viewed 3.5 million times.
If the Rhodes twins’ call to their dad got you years ago, this one works on the same nerve. Nobody yells and nobody storms out. It’s an old man in Pittsburgh doing his best with a tape recorder.
Richard then gave the recording a proper home: an animated video on YouTube, released as an interlude on his EP ii. summer. It runs under a minute.
Listen to how Abe wraps it up. If you ever had a grandparent who liked to give advice, you’ll know that voice.
Advice The Way Only A Grandpa Gives It
“You are the same as any other human being in this world. You bleed the same way, you cry the same way.”
Abe doesn’t have the modern vocabulary and doesn’t reach for it. He goes straight to what a man who grew up on the streets knows for sure: people are people.
Then he does what grandfathers do and gets practical. “If you find a partner that you really like, stay with that one partner. Make sure he stays with you.”
It’s the advice he’d have given any grandson about a girlfriend, and that’s what makes it land. In his mind, Rich deserved the same love story as everyone else. He says so outright: “It’s just like a marriage. It’s exactly the same thing.” He said it in September 2003, when no state agreed with him and almost 12 years before the Supreme Court caught up.
And then the sign-off, the one every grandpa has used at the end of a little lecture: “But, you know what I mean. I think you do.”
Richard says the tapes are full of stories and little pearls of wisdom, but this part is the one that stayed with him.
The World’s Grandfather
The reaction has gone well past views. Richard says listeners have told him Abe’s voice pushed them to call a parent, reach out to a grandparent or open up to someone they love. Some say it’s the recording they wish they had of their own grandparents.
Abe was already part of the music by the time the clip took off. Richard built A Song for All Seasons, a four-part project with one EP per season, around the old recordings, and his grandfather’s voice comes back throughout it. i. spring and ii. summer are out now, and the third part, iii. fall, arrives November 6.
Richard has said he wove Abe into the music because he felt the old man “could become the world’s grandfather.” As he sees it, those words were never meant to stay in a box or belong only to him.
When those tapes arrived, Richard couldn’t work out why a man he barely knew was reaching for him. It took him 23 years, but he gets it now.
“I’ve never felt closer to him than I do now,” he said.