I Want to Take You Higher: The Life and Times of Sly and the Family Stone (3 page)

What emerged from all this was a portrait of a passionate talent-unpredictable, uncontrollable, and fantastic-which had
been based in family, community, and friendship, and then
extended into the wider world. The world was entertained, and
arguably bettered, by its embrace of Sly & the Family Stone. The
portrait also reflected on the peculiar and often perverse interdependence of media and celebrity, and on the pervasive influence
that both have on the culture at large, which is all of us. Fame and
fortune seemed to ultimately aggravate Sly's compromise of his
personal integrity and of the integrity of his group.

I came to realize that the faith of Sly's blood family and friends,
and that of his musical Family, had survived the decades of
estrangement and resentment. Despite old bummers, these people
seemed eager to see themselves now as part of a more positive and
forward-looking legacy, more about making memorable music,
both then and now. Looking back on Sly's story, however large and distorted the images may have become, we all can find familiar
facets of our own humanity, hopes, challenges, mistakes, and
achievements. I wish I could, Sly had sung in "If You Want Me to
Stay," get the message over to you now. In Sly's many messages, and
throughout this book, there are glitters of introspection and wisdom, as well as the makings of a great soundtrack.

-JEFF KALISS

O REFLECT THE FRIENDLY
and informal spirit of a family
and a band, first names are used
throughout the book after the initial use, or re-establishing uses,
of each full name. Generally, the present tense is used with quotes
from this author's interviews, and the past tense with quotes originating elsewhere, in order to distinguish the sources and to help
forestall misunderstandings. The only exceptions to this usage
comes in the stand-alone descriptions, in the past tense, of the
author's two in-person interviews with Sly, and in the scene of Sly's
return performance in 2007, where the author is clearly identified
and the present tense would have proven awkward.

You live your life religiously, and you live your
life with mankind, trying to make sure that you
can deal with this world while you're here.

-JAMES BROWN

1993 interview with Jeff Kaliss

HE STEWART FAMILY OF
Vallejo, California, had a reputation for making music, both in
their own house and in several houses of the Lord. The earliest
recording of Sylvester Stewart, later known as Sly, was a seven-inch
45-rpm disc with "On the Battlefield of the Lord" on one side and
"Walking in Jesus' Name" on the other. It was recorded in 1952, on
the recommendation of a local church official, when Sylvester was
nine. He sang lead vocals alongside brother Freddie and sisters
Loretta and Rose, and it was in the family, and their church, that
Sylvester found his earliest musical and spiritual inspiration.

The family made occasional road trips to Denton, in northern
Texas, to stay with relatives, perform in area churches, and peddle
their recordings. Those travels brought the kids' mother, Alpha, back to her own roots as a daughter of the Haynes family, founders
of the very musical St. Andrew Church of God in Christ, in Denton. The role of music in the sect, the largest Pentecostal group in
America, seems related to what is described in Church of God documents as "supernatural manifestations," having occurred in
Christ's time on the day of Pentecost, fifty days after Passover. "The
sudden appearance of the Holy Ghost appealed first to the ear," the
Church maintains today on its Web site. "The disciples heard a
`sound' from heaven which rushed with a mighty force into the
house and filled it, even as a storm rushes, but there was no wind."
No doubt the mind of young Sylvester and his siblings also
received this apocalyptic spirit.

The history of Denton, Texas, Sylvester Stewart's birthplace,
encapsulates an important portion of the history of African
descendants in the United States, and the influences under which
Sly and his family would be raised. Denton County's 1850 census
listed five slave owners and ten slaves. These persons likely originated in Tennessee, Kentucky, and the Carolinas, and whites and
blacks worked the fields side by side to subsist on the clay-based
soil of the newly created state of Texas, which joined the Confederacy in 1861, four years after the founding of the city of Denton.
Following the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the Civil
War, many of the former slaves evolved from servants to tenant
farmers, and the development of cotton, wheat, and other cash
crops expanded the influx of both races. The Chisholm Trail,
regaled in a jaunty cowboy ballad, brought cattle from the South
through Denton, and two major rail lines followed suit.

The settlement of Freedmen Town, in the area where Sly would
be born seventy years later, was populated in 1875 by twenty-seven
black families from Dallas. What would become an even larger and
more active black community, Quakertown (possibly named for Quaker abolitionists) took form a few years later, closer to the city
center. Outside of farming and service jobs within Quakertown,
the North Texas Normal College and the Girls Industrial College
both became significant employers of blacks after opening in Denton (to white students only) around the turn of the century. Other
Quakertown folk worked as daytime domestic servants of wealthy
whites along Oak Street several blocks to the west. Pride of place
in a growing Quakertown community ultimately fell victim to
resentful white racists, who appropriated the area to establish a
downtown park and fairground, forcing the black residents out of
the downtown and into an area of failed former pastureland to the
southeast. Many blacks opted to leave Texas, but those who
remained strived to restore Quakertown's hard-won level of selfsufficiency.

In the meantime, blacks returned to being dependent on white
services downtown. "We knew where we were supposed to go and
we went where we were supposed to go, and we didn't go where
we weren't supposed to go," recalls Betty Kimble of her life as a
black teenager attending school with Sly's older cousins (including future college halfback and pro football Hall of Famer Abner
Haynes) in 1940s Denton. "We'd sit in the back of buses, and go to
colored water fountains, and at the restaurants we went through
the back door."

As southeast Denton laid in retail outlets and services along
Prairie Street, one of its two blacktop thoroughfares, the churches
did their best to sustain hope and community spirit. The newcomer St. Andrew Church of God in Christ and its pastor, F. L.
Haynes, must have seemed like novelties alongside the established
Methodist and Baptist sects, which dated back to Quakertown.
Haynes's congregation was "more free with their rejoicing and all,"
says Ruby Cole, who went to church and school with several of the pastor's offspring, Sly's cousins. Others remember that before St.
Andrew was constructed, worship occurred outdoors under a tent,
and intimidated passersby would throw things at the "hollering"
parishioners. Eventually St. Andrew earned more respect for its
music. The pastor's younger sisters, Alpha (Sly's mother) and
Omega, led hymns with pretty, powerful voices. Alpha's husband,
K. C. Stewart, who'd relocated to Denton from Fort Worth, fashioned a percussion instrument from a washboard, tin cans, and
baking pans. This unique form of accompaniment joined in with
the church's piano and numerous tambourines.

Into this joyful noise were born K. C. and Alpha's daughter
Loretta in 1934, and son Sylvester on March 15, 1943, the first two
of five children, all of whom would be raised in music. (Freddie
Stewart would also inherit from his uncle F. L. Haynes a pastoral
calling within the Church of God in Christ.) The growing Stewart
family occupied a large white house on bustling Prairie Street. K.
C. reportedly frequented the cotton and tomato fields, turning his
percussion array to the purpose of entertaining and soliciting
donations from the field workers. His wife, Alpha, worked as a
maid in white neighborhoods, at least up until the birth of Loretta.

Not long after Sylvester's arrival, the family followed the path
of several of Alpha's relatives out west to the San Francisco Bay
Area, to seek a better life in an economy that had been stimulated
by wartime industry.

Well-liked and dependable, K. C. Stewart found a home in
Vallejo, a smaller city on the northeast outskirts of the Bay. The
size of the black population in Vallejo increased dramatically during the '40s, jumping from 438 in 1940 to 1,513 in 1950, an
increase of 345 percent. With modest income from maintenance
work for a local department store and from other jobs, K. C. was
able, with Alpha, to expand their family to Rose (1945), Frederick (1947), and Vaetta (1950). In the San Francisco Bay Area, the children were able to envision possibilities far beyond those their parents had been limited to in Texas. Black Stars magazine, in 1972,
relayed an anecdote from Alpha, in which her sons had been asked
what they wanted to be when they grew up. "Freddie said he
wanted to be a lawyer," she remembered. "Sylvester said he wanted
to be a bishop." (To this day, Sly has plenty to do with lawyers, but
it was his younger brother who himself became an ordained
church official.) Back in the '40s and '50s, each of the Stewart kids
in turn, and ultimately in ensemble, came to share their parents'
celebration of music and of the church.

There was a strong musical presence in the local black
churches, as there had been back in Texas, and Vallejo spawned at
least one successful recording gospel group, the Spartonaires. As
in Denton, there was musical migration between sects, and the
Stewart kids sang all over the Bay Area. In Mojo magazine, mama
Alpha later singled out young Sylvester, then nicknamed "Syl," as
the star of these devotional routines. "They'd stand this bitty fiveyear-old on a table and he'd sing `You Got to Move," she related.
"People were hollering and wanting to touch him. You had to hold
them back sometimes." For Syl's part, he was already sensitive to
audience reaction, as recounted by his sister Rose in the 2000
Showtime documentary The Skin I'm In. "When we were little
kids," she said, "if people didn't stand and applaud and really feel
the spirit of what he was singing, he'd cry afterwards. It affected
him that bad." A local church official urged the Stewart Family
Four, formed from the eldest of the children, to further spread
their appealing juvenile spirit in a 45-rpm gospel single. Syl, nine
at the time of the recording, had picked up on his older sister
Loretta's familiarity with piano. Mama Alpha, who played guitar
in church, also introduced Syl to her instrument.