Sly Stone performing at the Harlem Cultural Festival in 1969. Sly and the Family Stone was the first major group to include Black and white men and women.20th Century Studios / Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures
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,” has died. He was 82
Stone, born Sylvester Stewart, had been in poor health in recent years. His publicist Carleen Donovan said Monday that Stone died surrounded by family after contending with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and other ailments.
Formed 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 singers screeched, chanted, crooned and hollered. 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. From early songs as rousing as their titles – “I Want To Take You Higher,” “Stand!” – to the sober aftermath of “Family Affair” and “Runnin’ Away,” Sly and the Family Stone spoke for a generation whether or not it liked what they had to say.
Stone’s group began as a Bay Area sextet featuring Sly on keyboards, Larry Graham on bass; Sly’s brother, Freddie, on guitar; sister Rose on vocals; Cynthia Robinson and Jerry Martini horns and Greg Errico on drums. They 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, and helped launch an era when the polish of Motown and the understatement of Stax suddenly seemed of another time.
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, built around such catchphrases as “different strokes for different folks.” 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.”
For a time, countless performers wanted to look and sound like Sly and the Family Stone. The Jackson Five’s breakthrough hit, “I Want You Back” and the Temptations’ “I Can’t Get Next to You” were among the many songs from the late 1960s that mimicked Sly’s vocal and instrumental arrangements. Miles Davis’ landmark blend of jazz, rock and funk, “Bitches Brew,” was inspired in part by Sly, while fellow jazz artist Herbie Hancock even named a song after him.
“He had a way of talking, moving from playful to earnest at will. He had a look, belts, and hats and jewellery,” Questlove wrote in the foreword to Stone’s memoir, “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin),” named for one of his biggest hits and published through Questlove’s imprint in 2023. “He was a special case, cooler than everything around him by a factor of infinity.”
In 2025, Questlove released the documentary “Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius).”
Sly’s influence has endured for decades. The top funk artist of the 1970s, Parliament-Funkadelic creator George Clinton, was a Stone disciple. Prince, Rick James and the Black-Eyed Peas were among the many performers from the 1980s and after influenced by Sly, and countless rap and hip-hop artists have sampled his riffs, from the Beastie Boys to Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg. A 2005 tribute record included Maroon 5, John Legend and the Roots.
“Sly did so many things so well that he turned my head all the way around,” Clinton once wrote. “He could create polished R&B that sounded like it came from an act that had gigged at clubs for years, and then in the next breath he could be as psychedelic as the heaviest rock band.”
