All About Tori Kelly's Parents, Allwyn and Laura Kelly

Allwyn and Laura Kelly make up a huge part of pop star Tori Kelly’s support system

Tori Kelly might not be the pop star she is today if it weren’t for her parents, Allwyn and Laura Kelly.

Tori’s parents have had a huge, positive impact on her career. From introducing her to a wide variety of music as a child to helping her flourish as a singer, Allwyn and Laura have been there every step of the way.

After Tori was hospitalized for blood clots around her lungs and legs in the summer of 2023, the singer told The New York Post that the health scare made her feel even more grateful for family, friends and fans.

“It definitely makes me want to live in the moment more and just cherish every little thing and keep my people close,” she said.

In a 2019 interview with the Associated Press, Tori talked about how instrumental Allwyn and Laura have been in her career. “My family has been a part of, obviously, my whole life,” she said. “And even with my music, they’ve always been there and they’ve been my biggest supporters.”

Here’s everything to know about Tori Kelly’s parents, Allwyn and Laura Kelly.

They got married in 1991

Allwyn and Laura got married on March 2, 1991. Tori celebrated their 23rd anniversary with a throwback wedding photo on X (formerly known as Twitter) in 2014.

The photo features Allwyn and Laura in a tux and wedding gown clinking champagne glasses together. “My beautiful parents celebrated 23 years of marriage today. inspirational,” Tori wrote. “And nice mullet, dad.”

Allwyn is a construction worker and Laura is a nurse

Allwyn and Laura live and work in Southern California. Allwyn is a construction worker, a job he has had for more than 25 years. He owns his own business, AK Builders, which he posts about often on his Instagram.

Laura is an aesthetic nurse at A New You Aesthetics, where she administers treatments like fillers, Botox and platelet-rich plasma therapy, according to the medical spa’s website. She previously worked in nephrology. Laura has an Instagram account dedicated to her work and she regularly shares before and after photos of her clients.

Allwyn also has a musical background and is a bassist and singer. In 2022, he shared an Instagram post with some friends and alluded to being in a band at some point. “From air guitars at 6 yrs old to band reunion 50 years later. These guys are a huge part of my music but mostly friendship journey,” he wrote in the caption.

They have had a big impact on Tori’s career

Tori has made it clear that her parents have always supported her career, even when she was just starting out. In fact, their musical background helped to shape hers.

“I remember singing as always being second nature to me,” she told Esquire Philippines in a 2020 interview. “Some of my earliest memories involved music. My dad is a musician and my mom was really into music too, so I’m grateful to them for exposing me to music so early. Christian music was a presence in our household so I gravitated towards that.”

Allwyn and Laura introduced Tori to Christian and gospel music, but they also played a wide variety of genres that impacted their daughter's own interests and the kind of music she makes today.

“My parents were always playing different styles growing up,” she said in an interview with Fuse TV in 2013. “Everything from Led Zeppelin to a lot of Lenny Kravitz, and then you got the soul stuff like Maxwell, Jill Scott. I think it’s awesome; I give them a lot of credit for just playing all different genres, and no genre was off-limits, so it’s kind of all in me somewhere.”

"They’re my biggest supporters too, and that’s the best feeling,” she added.

In 2016, Tori told PopCrush that her parents had been there for her since the beginning. “When I decided to go the independent route they were right there, and when I decided to sign with a major label again they were right there,” she said. “I think it kind of just feels very organic. It’s almost like our sense of normal now of this family.”

They have two kids

Allwyn and Laura welcomed their first child, Victoria Loren “Tori” Kelly, on Dec. 14, 1992, just about a year after they got married. On Aug. 28, 1996, they had their second child, a son named Noah James Kelly.

Tori has not spoken often about her brother, but he regularly posts on his public Instagram page. He mainly shares photos of himself and his friends spending time together at concerts and traveling the world. Still, the siblings are close.

In December 2018, he posted a photo of himself and Tori on her wedding day and wrote: “complete nerd. subpar talent. gem of a sister. happy birthday 🧡.”

They got a divorce

By September 2019, Allwyn and Laura had divorced. In an interview with Forbes, Tori shared how their split influenced her album Inspired by True Events.

Asked how she ended up writing her “most personal album,” Tori said, “It wasn’t intentional.” She explained that she had been writing the album for over two years, with breaks in between.

“There was just so much that went on in the last couple of years that seemed to happen all at once,” she said. “My parents separated, which was very hard. And my grandfather passed away, which was also very hard.”

They didn’t approve of her husband at first

Tori married basketball player André Murillo in May 2018 and the two have been inseparable since. But in a 2019 interview with Vibe, she revealed that her parents weren’t thrilled about their relationship at first. She wrote about that experience in her song “Change Your Mind,” which is all about how her parents disapproved of Murillo and her father didn’t give his blessing before the proposal.

“It’s definitely a lot of different perspectives with family and support systems,” she told the outlet. “I think what it came down to was really that my parents and I are so close, and they’re so loving and so protective in a good way, my whole life, my whole childhood. I’m also their first child.”

Tori continued, “So I think when you bring this new person into the mix, and I happened to fall in love with him, I don’t think there’s a lot of room for that. So, I think it just took a while for them to really be trusting and accepting.”

She called the experience “isolating,” adding: “It was really hard, and I poured all that emotion into [the song]. It was comforting in an odd way.”

They’re very close with Tori

The singer often shares how close she is to her family, especially her parents. In a 2016 interview with PopCrush, Tori raved about Allwyn and Laura, saying, “I still get their wisdom all the time.” She added that “they really put family first,” no matter how much they help her with her career.

“All the glitz and the glam and all the different things that we do like all these shows, that’s all amazing, but I love that they never put that in front of being good parents,” she went on. “It’s been really cool. We have our struggles just like any other family does that are growing pains but I love them so much.”

In a 2020 interview with PEOPLE, Tori talked about how excited she was to see her family for the holidays. “I’m just looking forward to gathering and doing presents and coffee,” she said. “We have a tradition of doing orange rolls, which are like cinnamon rolls, but orange flavored. A lot of people think it sounds crazy, but it’s a tradition of ours that I’ve done since I was a kid.”

She added, “I’m really looking forward to those simple things that make Christmas really special.”

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