Sly Stone, the remarkable, eccentric frontman, singer, songwriter, and producer of his family group,
Sly & the Family Stone
, has died. He was 82.
The musical icon had been battling lung disease, according to a statement provided by his family.
“While we mourn his absence, we take solace in knowing that his extraordinary musical legacy will continue to resonate and inspire for generations to come,” they wrote.
Born Sylvester Stewart, he was the second of five children. As an adolescent, Stone and his family moved from Denton, Texas to Vallejo, California. The family was heavily involved in the Church of God In Christ.
By age 8, Stone was recording gospel music with his siblings, Freddie, Rose and Vaetta as The Stewart Four. You can hear Stone as a child belting out “On the Battlefield of the Lord” on a single they recorded in 1952.
He was still in grade school when a friend misspelled ‘Sylvester’ as “Sly.” The nickname stuck. By age 11, Stone became proficient in keyboards, guitar, bass, and drums. In high school, he’d formed a multi-racial doo-wop group, The Viscaynes, which recorded some singles in Los Angeles.
As a young man, Stone was a successful disc jockey for KSOL, an R&B radio station in San Mateo, California. His playlists included popular records by white artists such as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.
During this time Stone also worked as a record producer for Autumn Records, producing San Francisco-area bands. One of the Stone-produced singles was Bobby Freeman’s “C’mon and Swim,” which reached No. 5 on the U.S. pop chart in 1964.
Stone and his brother Freddie merged their own bands together in 1966 to form Sly & the Family Stone. In it, women – notably – were not just vocalists but also played instruments, a rarity for the era. And it included both Black and white musicians. Within a few years, the group was turning out hits such as “Everyday People,” “Family Affair,” and “Dance to the Music.”
Although the group attracted a large and diverse audience from its beginnings, Stone was pressured by the Black Panthers to kick the white members out of the group — sometimes in menacingly and in person, as saxophone player Jerry Martini recalled
in a 2013 interview with NPR
.
“Sly always, always stood up for me, and in many instances, he saved my butt,” Martini said.
Sly & the Family Stone’s sound was a dazzling fusion of psychedelic rock, soul, jazz, gospel, and Latin. The group’s early morning performance at Woodstock in 1969 was widely recognized as a legendary moment in a legendary concert.
“The call, the response. It felt like church,” Stone wrote in his 2023 memoir
Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin). ”
The horns went up into the sky. When the show was over, we were wet and cold. I don’t remember how I left, maybe the same way I came in, but I wasn’t there to see Jimi [Hendrix] close the festival.”
“We knew something magical was happening. I think after we realized that it was a sea of people in front of us,” Sly’s sister, Rose Stone,
told NPR in 2007
. “It was about 5:00 AM when we went on. It was dark, and we were playing our best… And the sun started to come up and all of a sudden all we could see was just a sea of people. I think it was like an apex of our group.”
In the 1970s, Sly Stone’s music got gloomier and more cynical, reflecting a world made bleak by the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and President John F. Kennedy, as well as elevated racial tensions and the horrors of the Vietnam War.
After playing some of the most euphoric and politically charged music that defined a generation, Sly and the Family Stone dissolved, in part, because of Stone’s well-documented drug abuse. He became infamous for ghosting his own shows.
By the 1980s, Sly Stone had slipped into seclusion and he was arrested for cocaine possession in 2011. But in the mid 2000s, he started to make sporadic public appearances, including performing with his daughter’s band, Baby Stone.
The Grammys gave him a lifetime achievement award in 2017
. His memoir, wrote Associated Press reviewer Christopher Weber,
“overflows with wit and wordplay.”
Sly Stone was a musical visionary whose charismatic stage presence and distinctive vocals are now woven into the fabric of American joy.
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