Angie Stone, the neo-soul and R&B singer and songwriter, died on Sunday, March 1, her consultant shared through e mail. Stone died in a hospital after being concerned in a automotive crash after a efficiency in Alabama. She was 63 years previous.
Angela Laverne “Angie” Stone was born in 1961 in Columbia, South Carolina. Her first publicity to music got here from her father, a member of a gospel quartet that will follow at her home, coaching her ear for rhythm and vocal approach. She sang in choir and wrote poetry in junior highschool, which finally changed into songs of her personal; her music profession started in earnest when she and Gwendolyn Chisolm and Cheryl Cook dinner, two childhood pals and fellow cheerleaders, fashioned the hip-hop trio the Sequence in highschool, which signed to Sugar Hill Information after they auditioned for label boss Sylvia Robinson and the Sugarhill Gang when the MCs toured Columbia. With the energetic “Funk You Up,” launched in 1979, the Sequence grew to become the primary all-women hip-hop group to place out a charting single, which might go on to be sampled by artists akin to Dr. Dre and En Vogue.
After releasing three albums, the Sequence confronted a fallout with Sugar Hill Information over their contracts, and Stone left the group in 1984. Following the start of her daughter, Stone spent years as a backup performer, together with a stint performing saxophone on tour for Lenny Kravitz. She signed to MCA Common in 1990 as a songwriter and, along with musicians Willie Bruno and David Vivid, fashioned the R&B trio Vertical Maintain. The group launched two albums with A&M Information, 1993’s A Matter of Time and 1995’s Head First, earlier than disbanding.
Within the late Nineteen Nineties, Stone caught her second wind: A set of early demos reached an A&R govt at Arista Information, who signed her to file a solo debut album. She launched the gold-selling Black Diamond in 1999, whose honey-voiced singles “No More Rain (In This Cloud)” and “Everyday” helped outline the neo-soul sound of the period. The album kicked off Stone’s prolific solo profession, with 10 studio albums and three Grammy nominations all through her life; she additionally penned songs for artists akin to D’Angelo, Erykah Badu, and Raphael Saadiq. In 2000, Stone additionally contributed the theme song to the sitcom Girlfriends, through which she additionally appeared in a cameo position; Stone would go on to seem in a number of movies all through the 2000s, together with The Combating Temptations and The Sizzling Chick. Stone’s last album was 2023’s Love Language.
