I first met Carlos Spann in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, during our undergraduate years. Even then, there was something distinctly different about him—an old soul quality that made me assume he was decades my senior, though he was only two years older. That same gravitas still radiates from him today, though now I understand its source: a lifetime of listening to the voices that matter.
On a crisp November morning, I sat down with Carlos for a legacy call—a deep dive into one person’s life story and the wisdom they’ve gathered. Over the next ninety minutes, what unfolded was a masterclass in the art of becoming, told through the lens of a man who has learned to hear the divine in his own reflection.
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Growing up in Brandon, Mississippi, Carlos was steeped in the rich traditions of the Black church. He spent his childhood surrounded by elders—his grandfather, great-uncle, and various family members who shaped his worldview through their connection to faith and community. At age eight, he found his first inspiration in the charismatic preaching of his great-uncle, Reverend Dr. Silas “Uncle Sy” Spann, whose masterful microphone command would plant the seeds for Carlos’s future career.
“People would be standing along the walls,” Carlos recalled, his voice carrying the warmth of memory. “They would be leaning forward just to hear what he would say.” That early exposure to the power of voice would prove prophetic, though it would take decades for the prophecy to be fulfilled.
For twenty years, Carlos lived a “held back” life, working as a television cameraman, training his lens on others while his dreams waited in the wings. He was good at his job, even working for top-rated stations where excellence wasn’t just expected—it was the air they breathed. “When I worked for these number one TV stations, we would just be like, ‘Hey, it’s expected for us to do great things. So we’re just gonna do great things,'” he explained, comparing it to the dynasty-era New England Patriots under Tom Brady.
But life has a way of speaking to us through unexpected messengers. For Carlos, one such messenger was a psychic named Marlene, whom he met in Las Vegas in 2007. Despite his initial skepticism—born from his strict religious upbringing—Marlene would become a crucial voice in his journey, predicting with uncanny accuracy the path that lay ahead: a house in the mountains, a son who would show signs of old wisdom and a career transformation that would eventually change his life.
Yet perhaps the most profound voice in Carlos’s story came from an unlikely source: a one-eyed man known as “Long Joe” Harvey, who sold snacks to local kids from his garage in the 1980s. One day, Long Joe shared a piece of wisdom that would take decades to fully bloom: “Boy, if you want to know what God looks like, go home and look in the mirror.”
That seed lay dormant until 2022, when, after facing rejection from dream jobs at both the Associated Press and CNN, Carlos stood before a mirror in his Atlanta apartment, asking the reflection, “What is the deal?” The answer came with the force of revelation: “You’re a voice actor.”
This moment of recognition sparked a transformation. Carlos threw himself into the craft of voice acting with the dedication of a monk, working with top coaches, studying acting under Angela Davis, and eventually creating a demo reel with the legendary Chuck Duran. The difference between his previous life doing voiceover work and his current identity as a voice actor is stark: “Before, I would just be reading pretty much reading the paper, reviewing the lines in my voice. I wasn’t doing any kind of whatever. I wasn’t acting like anybody. I was just being myself and reading stuff.”
At 48, Carlos approaches each script as an actor first and a voice artist second. A single line for a Snickers ice cream commercial becomes an opportunity to inhabit a character and to understand the world before and after that moment of speech. It’s a level of craft that has earned him representation from managers in Los Angeles, even as he continues his journey toward his ultimate goal: being able to work from home and live closer to his eight-year-old son, Harrison.
Harrison emerges as a central figure in Carlos’s story—a child who seems to carry old wisdom in his young soul. Harrison showed an inexplicable knowledge of his deceased grandmother’s love for Christmas and snow at age three. “I know,” the boy said simply when shown her picture, though he’d never been told about her. These moments of uncanny wisdom have only strengthened Carlos’s belief in something greater than ourselves, something that transcends our limited understanding of life and death.
As our conversation drew close, I asked Carlos what he’d learned about life through these experiences. His answer came wrapped in the wisdom of Andrew Young: “Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous.” In Carlos’s view, life on Earth is brief but rich with meaning, filled with voices that guide us if we’re willing to listen—be they from psychics, one-eyed storytellers, or our own reflection in the mirror.
What strikes me most about Carlos’s journey is the transformation from cameraman to voice actor and the more profound metamorphosis from someone who simply heard voices to someone who learned to listen to the right ones. His story suggests that our most significant task in life is not to find our voice but to recognize it when it’s been speaking to us all along.
Carlos wants to be remembered as someone who loved connecting with people and had an “uncanny ability” to read the energy of others and forge meaningful connections. But his more extraordinary legacy is as someone who learned to connect with himself, to recognize the divine in his own reflection, and to finally give voice to what had been waiting to be spoken all along.
In an age of artificial voices and digital echoes, my conversation with Carlos reminds me that the most important voice to hear might be speaking to us in the mirror—if only we dare to listen.
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