singer; soul musician; songwriter
Personal Information
Born and raised in Columbia, SC, in 1965; father sang in a local gospel quartet; Son, Michael.
Education: Attended high school in Columbia; star basketball player; received but turned down several college basketball scholarship offers.
Career
Soul vocalist. Joined rap group the Sequence, ca. 1982; group released album The Sequence, 1982; worked as singer of television and radio commercial jingles, 1980s; joined group Vertical Hold, 1988; group released album Vertical Hold, 1992; active as songwriter for D'Angelo, Mary J. Blige, Lenny Kravitz, and other artists, 1990s; released solo debut Black Diamond, 1999.
Life's Work
Though the era of classic soul vocals reached its peak in the 1970s, it lived on into the twenty-first century in the voice of Angie Stone. Around the year 2000 a group of vocalists, predominantly female, turned to older soul and R&B styles in order to express various musical ideas, but it was Stone who evoked the pure vocal sounds of the pre-hip hop era. Releasing her debut solo album at the age of 35, Stone outsold many of the artists half her age who had begun to dominate the U.S. musical scene.
Stone was born in Columbia, South Carolina, around 1965. A strong gospel influence in her mature vocal style resulted from her singing gospel music at the city's First Nazareth Baptist Church and by attending gospel concerts with her father, a member of a local gospel quartet. In high school Stone was a standout basketball player (her father was also a fine football player). She received several offers of college basketball scholarships. But Stone, who had written poetry since she was a girl, hoped for a musical career; standing in front of her bedroom mirror she would lip-synch whole concerts to recordings of soul vocalists such as Aretha Franklin and Marvin Gaye.
Pioneer Female Rap Artist
Stone broke into the music business as a rap artist--which was ironic since her music would later be seen as offering an alternative to a hip-hop-dominated urban radio mainstream. In New York in the early 1980s, she joined with two other women to form the Sequence. That group landed on the roster of the pioneering rap label Sugarhill, and they are generally regarded as the first female act in the rap genre. Stone, who was known as "Angie B," delivered raps in such Sequence dance-club hits as a remake of Parliament's "Tear the Roof Off."
Statuesque and strong, with a large Afro hairstyle that she has retained throughout her career, Stone had a look that was little influenced by the high-fashion inclination of many urban artists. "I loved Pam Grier. Cleopatra Jones," she told Rolling Stone. "Strong, beautiful, dark-skinned women. Pam had the Afro, the strong 'I'm beautiful, but I'm bad and I'll take it there.'" But as with many of the other acts of rap's first generation, the popularity of the Sequence did not last. For a time, Stone supported herself by singing commercial jingles.
Recorded Budweiser Jingles
"I did Afro Sheen," she told Rolling Stone. "Budweiser, too. Budweiser ran for eight years, and I'm gonna tell you something: That stuff really pays well, because it really helped me survive when I was in transition with my career." But Stone's creative side didn't take long to reassert itself. A prolific songwriter, she began to work with other rap acts, such as the group Mantronix and the innovative white rapper Lenny Kravitz. By 1988 Stone had formed an R&B trio, Vertical Hold, that incorporated more of her own affinity for the classic style of soul vocals and enabled her to emulate such models as Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye, and Donny Hathaway.
Vertical Hold's records bubbled around the lower end of Billboard magazine's urban music charts for several years, and in 1993 the group released a self-titled CD. One dance number from the album, "Seems You're Much Too Busy," rose into the top 20, and several other singles made an impression, but that wasn't enough to propel the group to an ongoing recording career. Stone's family began to doubt her chances for success. "My mom used to say, 'If God had meant you to make it, then you'd have made it by now," she told the London Daily Telegraph. But Stone continued with her songwriting, numbering among her collaborations those with soul veteran Al Green and modern R&B hitmaker Mary J. Blige.
One collaboration in particular proved both personally and professionally fruitful. Stone contributed songs to the recordings of D'Angelo, whose 1995 debut album Brown Sugar is often credited with kicking off the neo-soul musical phenomenon, and who remains the most significant male representative of the style. Stone placed four tracks on D'Angelo's critically acclaimed 2000 release, Voodoo, which incorporated a host of modern influences into a basic soul context, and she and D'Angelo became romantically involved. The relationship resulted in a child, Michael, but after three years Stone and D'Angelo called it quits.
As Stone assembled material for her own debut release, Black Diamond, she was sometimes dogged by publicity connected to her relationship with D'Angelo, who remains a strong draw for female crowds. In conversation with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch she imitated the question she often faced: "Isn't that the lady that had D'Angelo's baby?" Nevertheless, she and D'Angelo remained friends; he contributed guest vocals on Black Diamond (as did Lenny Kravitz), and he continued to influence Stone musically.
Stone offers her own explanation for the preponderance of female vocalists in the neo-soul movement. "Our men are frustrated," she told the Daily Telegraph. "That's why you hear all that anger [in hip-hop music]. They feel it's the only way they can make themselves heard. We are able to tolerate more, and in any culture women will always take on that motherly role. We caress and comfort our men through song, because we understand how bruised they are."
Released Solo Debut
In her mid-thirties in late 1999, an age when the careers of many urban contemporary vocalists are on a downward trajectory, Stone released her solo debut on the Arista label. Black Diamond was a creative triumph. Gaining momentum over several months, the album, and its lead single, "No More Rain (In This Cloud)" (cowritten by Stone and based on a phrase she had often heard her father say), stayed on the charts for more than 30 weeks. The album spawned a successful tour which, unlike those of Stone's neo-soul rivals Macy Gray and Jill Scott, attracted predominantly African-American crowds. Billboard named Black Diamond its 2000 album of the year.
Part of the reason for the album's success was that it intelligently updated classic soul with samples and other manifestations of hip-hop techniques. Paying homage to such vocalists as Gladys Knight through samples (Knight's "Neither One of Us" is heard in "No More Rain (In This Cloud)"), Stone also drew on the 1970s funk styles of Rufus and other bands (the hard-edged vocals of Rufus frontwoman Chaka Khan are another influence on Stone's style). Yet it was Stone's voice that made the greatest impression. Clearly reflecting her gospel origins, it exuded a raw power of a kind not often heard in the increasingly electronics-dominated world of urban music.
"Real soul singers have used hip-hop beats as a crutch for too long now," Stone told the London Daily Telegraph. "My music stems from the church, and in church there are no limits to where music can take you." Stone emphasized a religious message in her concerts and in the liner notes to Black Diamond. Those notes said that the album represented "a woman's life, all the ups and downs, the trials and tribulations, and the joys." After 20 years of trials in the music business, Angie Stone had earned the right to a few joys.
Awards
Received Billboard magazine Album of the Year award for Black Diamond, 2000.
Works
Selected discography
- (with The Sequence) The Sequence, Sugarhill, 1982.
- (with Vertical Hold) Vertical Hold, A&M, 1993.
- Black Diamond, Arista, 2000.
Further Reading
Periodicals
- Billboard, April 8, 2000, p. 27.
- Daily News (New York), April 24, 2000, p. 46.
- Daily Telegraph (London, England), April 6, 2000, p. 27.
- The Observer (London, England), February 27, 2000, p. 10.
- Rolling Stone, March 16, 2000, p. 31.
- St. Louis Post-Dispatch, February 21, 2000, p. C2.
- Washington Post, May 5, 2000, p. C3.
- All Music Guide, http://www.allmusic.com.
— James M. Manheim




