Born Erica Wright in Dallas, Texas, Badu was raised, along with her brother and sister, by their mother, Kolleen Wright

Since her husband had abandoned the family early on, Kolleen turned to her own mother for support in raising the children, while she made her living as an actress in local stage productions. By the age of four, Erica had performed professionally alongside her mother at the Dallas Theater Center. Immersed in the arts by Kolleen, young Erica painted, sang, and danced, and grew up to the seventies strains of the likes of Stevie Wonder and Chaka Khan. Erica's adolescent years coincided with the rise in popularity of hip-hop (her first concert experience was Run D.M.C., with the Beastie Boys), and at the age of fourteen, she landed a gig freestyle-rapping for local radio station KNON. (She was backed by a beat-boxing Roy Hargrove, who would one day achieve fame in his own right as a jazz trumpeter.) She successfully auditioned for admittance to Dallas's arts magnet school, Booker T. Washington High. At Booker T., Erica, a.k.a. "MC Apples," performed as one half of a female rap squad.

The nom de rap would not be the last name change she would undergo during her high school years. Declaring Erica Wright to be "a slave name," she changed the spelling of her first name to Erykah, because, as she explains, "'Kah' is the inner self, which can do no wrong." A new last name, Badu, resulted from a simple phrase that she would repeat over and over in a bit of scat-singing. She later made the discovery that the invented surname actually means "to manifest truth and light" in Arabic. After completing high school, Badu commenced theater studies at Louisiana's Grambling State University. But in 1993, she made the decision to focus on music full-time. Though she was just a few credits shy of a diploma, Badu returned to Dallas and worked multiple day jobs to support herself--in fact, if you had a latte at Grinder's, a Dallas coffee house, between 1993 and 1995, you may well have been served by her. She also taught dance and acting to children at the South Dallas Cultural Center. Meanwhile, she collaborated with her cousin, Robert "Free" Bradford, to create a hip-hop act they dubbed Erykah Free.