For nearly six decades, Michael Goessling knew he was adopted and knew he had been raised well. What he did not know was that the voice behind some of the most recognizable records of the late 1970s and early 1980s belonged to his biological father.
Goessling was placed for adoption as an infant after his birth parents conceived him when both were 14. Paul and Kay Goessling adopted him and raised him in St. Louis. He has said he always knew the circumstances of his childhood and has never wavered in his regard for the people who raised him.
“Always knew I was adopted,” he told KMOV. “Had a wonderful childhood. I could not pick two finer folks to raise me.”
The unanswered part was origin. That began to close when a half-brother Goessling did not know existed submitted a 23andMe test. Within 36 hours, Goessling said, the match came back: Michael Goessling, half-brother, St. Louis. From there the line ran to his birth mother, whom he met in person on his 58th birthday, and then to a phone call with his biological father.
On that call he asked what the man did for a living. The answer was that he was a musician, getting ready to come through St. Louis on tour that summer. Goessling put the pieces together and asked the question outright.
“And I said, ‘Are you Michael McDonald?’” he recalled. “And he said, ‘Yeah, I’m afraid so.’”
He was. The shared first name was coincidence. Goessling said he had been unnamed at birth and that Kay Goessling chose Michael on her own.
McDonald, the Ferguson-raised singer and keyboardist who joined the Doobie Brothers in the mid-1970s and became the band’s signature voice on “What a Fool Believes,” “Minute by Minute,” and “Takin’ It to the Streets,” is a five-time Grammy winner. His solo catalog includes “I Keep Forgettin’ (Every Time You’re Near)” and the Kenny Loggins duet “This Is It.” He also sang with Steely Dan before the Doobies years. He and Goessling’s biological mother stayed close friends across the decades, and McDonald said the two of them talked about the son they had placed for adoption and about the one fear they could not settle: how life had treated him.
“I always carried that guilt with me,” McDonald said on a FaceTime call reported by the station. “But just to know that he was okay and that he had a good life, and a life certainly that I wouldn’t have been able to afford him at that time, was a great reward. The real rock stars in this story are his adoptive parents.”
They later met in person. Goessling said McDonald opened his arms, pulled him into a hug, and told him he loved him. Goessling said the same back. The reunion also made McDonald a grandfather. He has described Goessling’s wife and their two children as a gift he is still taking in, and he has said he is proud of them.
McDonald, born Feb. 12, 1952, is on the road again with the Doobie Brothers. In 2024 he published the memoir What a Fool Believes, an account of the Steely Dan and Doobie years and of getting sober. The book does not appear to have included this chapter. The chapter arrived later, by a DNA match, a birthday meeting, and a phone call that ended with a name Goessling already knew from the radio.
For a music town that claims McDonald as a hometown voice, the story lands close to home. The man who sang “What a Fool Believes” spent most of his adult life not knowing whether the child he and a girlfriend had at 14 was all right. The answer, nearly 60 years on, came from St. Louis.
