Jodeci’s Mr. Dalvin Asks Fans To Pray For TLC’s T-Boz

Jodeci’s Mr. Dalvin is asking fans to keep his longtime friend T-Boz in their prayers as the TLC singer’s known health issues return.

via: Baller Alert

Mr Dalvin is asking people to pray for T-Boz. The Jodeci member, whose real name is Dalvin DeGrate, posted a video to Instagram on Tuesday calling on fans to lift up his longtime friend Tionne Watkins as she deals with a health setback. He said she felt a little ill and acknowledged that she has crises sometimes, and he asked people to take a second for her whether they are TLC fans or not.

He asked God to heal her body and strengthen her so she can return to doing what she loves and be at peace and in good health. “I’m asking you, everybody, under the sound of my voice, to ask God to touch her and heal her, that she may have a speedy recovery,” he said. He closed by telling her directly, “we all love you and we all appreciate you.”

The message did not come out of nowhere. T-Boz missed TLC’s August 27 concert at Saratoga Performing Arts Center in New York. Chilli performed the set without her and told the crowd that T-Boz was going through a sickle cell flare-up. A review of that night noted that Chilli carried the show alone and that some of T-Boz’s vocals were played from prerecorded tracks.

Sickle cell disease is an inherited blood disorder. Red blood cells are normally round and flexible, which lets them slide easily through blood vessels carrying oxygen. In sickle cell, they harden into a curved shape and get stuck, blocking blood flow. When that happens the body is starved of oxygen in whatever area is blocked, and the result is what people living with the disease call a crisis. The pain can be sudden and severe enough to require hospitalization. It can last hours or days. It shows up without warning, which is what makes touring with it so difficult. The disease disproportionately affects Black Americans, and roughly one in every 365 Black babies born in the US has it.

T-Boz was diagnosed as a child and has spoken about it openly for her entire career. Doctors told her family early on that she was not expected to live past 30. She has been on stage for more than three decades since, selling more than 65 million records with TLC and winning four Grammys. She has also come through a benign brain tumor that required surgery and a long recovery, and in 2024 she was hospitalized with an abdominal blockage caused by scar tissue from a surgery she had more than 20 years earlier. That one forced TLC to cancel shows at the New York State Fair and Foxwoods, and she made a point at the time of clarifying that the blockage had nothing to do with her sickle cell.

Dalvin and T-Boz go back decades, to the era when TLC and Jodeci were two of the biggest acts in R&B and both were regulars in each other’s orbit. The two have collaborated more recently and have teased new music together. His video was not a management statement or a press release. It was a friend on his own account asking people to show up for her.

Neither T-Boz nor TLC has released a statement about her condition, and there has been no word publicly about whether she has been hospitalized or what her schedule looks like going forward. What is known is what Chilli said from the stage on August 27 and what Dalvin said on Tuesday.