Do My Heart Good: My Odyssey Through Country Music, Medicine, and History

Born to a struggling family in Jim Crow–era Louisiana, Cleve Francis followed his love for music and passion for science into parallel careers as a singer-songwriter and cardiologist. One of the few Black artists to record for a major country music label, Francis had four Billboard hits as a Capitol Nashville/Liberty Records artist in the 1990s.

Francis’s account follows his “multidimensional life” through two milieus that rarely welcome Black men: country music and medicine. Merging rich st...