Sly Stone: influential funk pioneer who embodied the contradictions at the heart of American life

There’s immense variety in popular music careers, even beyond the extremes of one-hit wonders and the long-haulers touring stadiums into their dotage. There are those who embody a specific era, burning briefly and brightly, and those whose legacy spans decades.

Straddling both of those, and occupying a distinctive space in popular music history, is Sylvester Stewart, better known as Sly Stone, who died at the age of 82 on Monday June 9.

A pioneer of funk whose sound spread far beyond the genre, his band Sly and the Family Stone synthesised disparate strands of American popular music into a unique melange, tracking the musical and social shifts as the 1960s wore into the 1970s.

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A musical prodigy and multi-instrumentalist from a young age, Stone was born in Texas in 1943 and raised in California, in a religious Pentecostal family. He had put out his first single aged 13 – a locally released gospel song with three of his siblings, who would later join him in Sly and the Family Stone.

A record producer and DJ by his early twenties, he imbibed the music of British acts like The Beatles and Rolling Stones, and applied his eclectic tastes and musical versatility to producing local psychedelic and garage rock acts in the emergent San Francisco scene.

By the time commercial popular culture had flowered into a more exploratory “counterculture” in 1967’s Summer of Love, the ebb and flow of personnel across local bands had coalesced into a line-up including the Stone siblings – Sly, Freddie, and their sister Vaetta, with their other sister Rose joining in 1968. Pioneering socially, as well as aesthetically, Sly and the Family Stone had diversity at its core – a mixed sex, multi-racial and musically varied band.

This was notable for a mainstream act in an America still emerging from the depths of segregation, and riven with strife over the struggle for civil rights. While their first album in 1967 A Whole New Thing enjoyed comparatively little traction, 1968‘s Dance to the Music presaged a run of hits.

Their sonic collision of sounds from across the commercial and social divide – psychedelic rock, soul, gospel and pop – struck a chord with audiences simultaneously looking forward with hope to changing times, and mindful of the injustice that was still prevalent.

Singles like Everyday People, Stand, and I Want to Take You Higher, melded a party atmosphere with social statements. They were calls for action, but also for unity: celebratory, but pushing the musical envelope.

While the band wore its innovations lightly at first, their reach was long. Bassist Larry Graham was a pioneer of the percussive slap bass that became a staple of funk and fusion. And their overall sound brought a looser, pop feel to the funk groove, in comparison to the almost militaristic tightness of that other funk pioneer, James Brown.

Where Brown’s leadership of his group was overt, exemplified by his staccato musical directions in the songs, and the call and response structure, Stone’s band had more of an ensemble feel. Musical lines and solos were overlaid upon one another, often interweaving – more textured rather than in lock-step. It was a sound that would reach an almost chaotic apogée with George Clinton’s Funkadelic later in the 1970s.

The party couldn’t last. As the optimism of the 1960s gave way to division in the 1970s, Stone’s music took a darker turn, even if the funk remained central. The album There’s A Riot Going On (1971), and its lead single It’s Family Affair contained lyrics depicting social ills more explicitly. The music – mostly recorded by Sly himself – was sparser, the vocals more melancholic.

The unity of the band itself was also fracturing, under pressure from Stone’s growing cocaine dependency. The album Fresh (1973) featured classics like In Time and If You Want Me To Stay, but they were running out of commercial road by 1974’s Small Talk, and broke up soon after.

Periodic comebacks were punctuated by a troubled personal life, including, at its nadir, reports of Stone living out of a van in Los Angeles, and arrests for drug possession. By the time he achieved a degree of stability, his star may have faded, but his legacy was secure.

Stone embodied the contradictions of American popular music – arguably even America itself: brash and light-hearted on the one hand, with a streak of darkness and self-destructiveness on the other.

The handclaps and joyous shouts harked back to his gospel roots, but his embrace of electric instruments aligned soul with rock and pop. He was a funk artist who played at the archetypal hippie festival, Woodstock, and a social commentator whose party sounds were shot through with urgency.

He paved the way for the likes of Prince and Outkast, but also informed jazz and fusion. Jazz pioneer Miles Davis acknowledged Stone’s influence on his own turn towards electric and funk sounds in the late 1960s and early 1970s on landmark albums like Bitches Brew.

Sly Stone’s joyful provocations may not have lasted at the commercial centre, but his mark was indelible. His struggles were both personal and social, but his sense of groove, and of a collective voice, demonstrated the value of aligning traditions with new ideas – a musical America that was fractious, but still a family affair.

Adam Behr has received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council