Sly & The Family Stone Leader & Funk-Rock Pioneer Was 82

Sly Stone, a Grammy winner whose pioneering funk-rock group Sly and the Family Stone produced groundbreaking albums and singles — three of which topped the Billboard Hot 100 — and was the subject of this year’s feature documentary Sly Lives!, died today. He was 82.

His family said he died after “a prolonged battled with COPD and other underlying health issues.”

Born Sylvester Stewart on March 15, 1943, in Denton Texas, the mercurial Stone wrote, produced, sang and played on the No. 1 singles “Everyday People,” “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)” and “Family Affair” and a number of other hit singles including the Top 10 “Dance to the Music” — which was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame — “Stand!” and “Hot Fun in the Summertime.”

Also mixing in elements of soul and psychedelia, the group won one Grammy on 13 nominations, had three platinum and two gold albums, performed at Woodstock and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993.

Formed in 1966 after a pair of bands were combined, Sly & the Family Stone made waves during the turbulent late 1960s not only with their music but the fact that the group was racially integrated and including men and women. Its first three albums in 1967-68 didn’t assault the charts — though the title track of Dance to the Music was a pop hit in the U.S. and UK — but that changed with the landmark 1969 LP Stand!

It reached No. 13 on the Billboard 200 and began a run of three consecutive revered studio albums, plus a hits compilation, that cemented the band’s legacy as funk-rock pioneers as well as hitmakers. Stand! spawned The Family Stone’s singsong double-platinum single “Everyday People” and launched the group into stardom.

That summer, Sly & The Family Stone played an overnight set at Woodstock, following Janis Joplin’s group and ahead of The Who. The band’s medley of “I Want to Take You Higher”/”Music Lover” is featured in the 1970 movie about the legendary festival, and an extended version that also included “Dance to the Music” was on the film’s hit soundtrack triple LP, which spent four weeks at No. 1.

RELATED: ‘Sly Lives!’ Director Questlove On The Genius Of Sly Stone And How He Influenced Generations Of Artists — Sundance Studio

Epic Records then released Greatest Hits, which combined singles from Sly & The Family Stone’s first three LPs but also included a number of tracks appearing on LP for the first time. Among those were “Hot Fun in the Summertime,” “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)” and the latter’s B-side “Everybody Is a Star.” The album was a smash, reaching No. 2 on the Billboard chart and eventually selling more than 5 million copies in the U.S. alone.

The band’s next album was 1971’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On, which became its lone chart-topper, spending two weeks at No. 1. It was followed by Fresh (1973), which also reached the Top 10. Stand!, Greatest Hits, There’s a Riot Goin’ On and Fresh all are represented in our sister publication Rolling Stone‘s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time list.

A half-dozen Sly & The Family Stone tracks also have made Rolling Stone‘s list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time: “Dance to the Music,” “Everyday People,” “Hot Fun in the Summertime,” “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin),” “Family Affair” and “Stand!”

The group’s fortunes were sliding by the mid-1970s as Stone descended into substance abuse had become notorious for missing concerts, interviews and other appointments — a label that followed him for decades.

But Stone and his band continued to be admired and cited as influences in the ensuing half-century by the likes of Prince, Public Enemy, Beastie Boys, Beck and many others. The group was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by P-Funk legend George Clinton. His Parliament-Funkadelic bassist Bootsy Collins once said in an interview, “The most talented musician I know is Sly Stone.”

Along the way, the group and its music have been featured in scores of films and TV series. The band appeared on Don Kirschner’s Rock Concert in 1973, and its songs have graced dozens of TV shows ranging from WKRP in Cincinnati, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Ari and ER to How to Die Alone, Love & Death and Atlanta. Sly & The Family Stone’s music also appears in such films as Heathers, My Girl, Crooklyn, Dead Presidents, Patch Adams, A Knight’s Tale, Zodiac, Milk, Eat PRay Love, Sparkle and the Questlove-directed 2021 documentary Summer of Soul.

Fast-forward to 2025, and Stone finally got the feature documentary treatment. Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson also directed Sly Lives! (AKA The Burden of Black Genius, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January. It tells the wild story of Sly & The Family Stone and its legendary frontman from their rise and glory days through his flameout and the band’s aftermath and legacy.

RELATED: ‘Sly Lives! (AKA The Burden Of Black Genius)’ Review: Questlove’s Passionate Doc Pays Long Overdue Homage To The Black Elvis – Sundance Film Festival

During a panel for Deadline’s Contenders TV: Documentary, Unscripted & Variety event in April, Questlove said: “[Sly] just happened to be at the helm creating the language and the alphabet for which even to this day, we are still using his tools and his tricks of the trade to express ourselves through music. But it’s also extremely, it’s very possible for all of that to get lost to history. And that’s kind of what this is about. … What [producer] Joseph [Patel] and I want to know is why would you get to the mountaintop and then just walk away from it? So, that’s pretty much the $10 trillion question.”

The film also explores the intense pressure Stone faced after the band rocketed to fame. As Deadline’s Documentary Editor and panel moderator Matthew Carey wrote: “Unlike white artists (David Bowie, for instance) who could shape-shift at will and dabble in politics if they liked, Sly was expected to resolve the contradictions between the objectives of the civil rights movement (integrationist in nature) and the emerging Black Power movement (to some extent, separatist in nature). He carried the weight of the world on his shoulders.”

Questlove added during that panel: “Is the burden real enough to stop him from progressing or is all of this stuff self-inflicted? And that’s what we investigate not only with him, but practically this is for every artist, myself included.”

During his remarkable life, Stone also worked as a radio DJ and produced records in the 1960s before making his own. He produced “Someone to Love,” a track from future Jefferson Airplane member Grace Slick’s previous band The Great Society that would be remade as “Somebody to Love” and became one of the Airplane’s best-known songs. He also produced The Beau Brummels’ hits “Laugh, Laugh” and “Just a Little” and co-wrote produced and produced “C’mon and Swim,” a 1964 single by pre-teen idol Bobby Sherman.

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