Sly Stone, the revolutionary musician and dynamic showman whose Sly and the Family Stone transformed popular music in the 1960s and 70s and beyond with such hits as Everyday People, Stand! and Family Affair, died Monday at age 82. Sylvester, born Sylvester Stewart, had been in poor health in recent years. His publicist Carleen Donovan said Sylvester died in Los Angeles surrounded by family after contending with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and other ailments.
Founded in 1966-67, Sly and the Family Stone was the first major group to include Black and white men and women and well embodied a time when anything seemed possible — riots and assassinations, communes and love-ins. The music was a blowout of frantic horns, rapid-fire guitar and locomotive rhythms, a melting pot of jazz, psychedelic rock, doo-wop, soul and the early grooves of funk. Sly’s time on top was brief, roughly from 1968-1971, but profound. No band better captured the gravity–defying euphoria of the Woodstock era or more bravely addressed the crash which followed.
The group debuted with the album A Whole New Thing and earned the title with their breakthrough single, Dance to the Music. It hit the top 10 in April 1968, the week the Rev Martin Luther King was murdered. Led by Sly Stone, with his leather jumpsuits and goggle shades, mile-wide grin and mile-high Afro, the band dazzled in 1969 at the Woodstock festival and set a new pace on the radio. Everyday People, I Wanna Take You Higher and other songs were anthems of community, non-conformity and a brash and hopeful spirit. The group released five top 10 singles, three of them hitting No 1, and three million-selling albums: Stand!, There's a Riot Goin' On and Greatest Hits.
Miles Davis’ landmark blend of jazz, rock and funk, Bitches Brew, was inspired in part by Sly. In 2025, Questlove released the documentary Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius). By the early 70s, Sly Stone himself was beginning a descent from which he never recovered, driven by the pressures of fame and the added burden of Black fame. His record company was anxious for more hits, while the Black Panthers were pressing him to drop the white members from his group. Around the country, separatism and paranoia were setting in. “The possibility of possibility was leaking out,” Sylvester later explained in his memoir Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin).
Late in 1971, he released There's a Riot Going On, one of the grimest, most uncompromising records ever to top the album charts. “It is Muzak with its finger on the trigger,” critic Greil Marcus called the album. Sly and the Family Stone was inducted into the Rock & Roll of Fame in 1993 and honoured in 2006 at the Grammy Awards. He was born Sylvester Stewart in Denton, Texas and raised in Vallejo, California. Sylvester became ‘Sly‘ by accident, when a teacher mistakenly spelled his name ‘Slyvester’. Before a set on The Ed Sullivan Show, Sly turned to the audience and recited a brief passage from his song Are You Ready: “Don’t hate the Black, don’t hate the white, if you get bitten, just hate the bite.”
(Edited by Prattusa Mallik)