Angie Stone, the neo-soul and R&B singer and songwriter, died on Sunday, March 1, her representative shared via email. Stone died in a hospital after being involved in a car crash after a performance in Alabama. She was 63 years old.
Angela Laverne “Angie” Stone was born in 1961 in Columbia, South Carolina. Her first exposure to music came from her father, a member of a gospel quartet that would practice at her house, training her ear for rhythm and vocal technique. She sang in choir and wrote poetry in junior high school, which eventually turned into songs of her own; her music career began in earnest when she and Gwendolyn Chisolm and Cheryl Cook, two childhood friends and fellow cheerleaders, formed the hip-hop trio the Sequence in high school, which signed to Sugar Hill Records after they auditioned for label boss Sylvia Robinson and the Sugarhill Gang when the MCs toured Columbia. With the energetic “Funk You Up,” released in 1979, the Sequence became the first all-women hip-hop group to put out a charting single, which would go on to be sampled by artists such as Dr. Dre and En Vogue.
After releasing three albums, the Sequence faced a fallout with Sugar Hill Records over their contracts, and Stone left the group in 1984. Following the birth of her daughter, Stone spent years as a backup performer, including a stint performing saxophone on tour for Lenny Kravitz. She signed to MCA Universal in 1990 as a songwriter and, together with musicians Willie Bruno and David Bright, formed the R&B trio Vertical Hold. The group released two albums with A&M Records, 1993’s A Matter of Time and 1995’s Head First, before disbanding.
In the late 1990s, Stone caught her second wind: A set of early demos reached an A&R executive at Arista Records, who signed her to record a solo debut album. She released the gold-selling Black Diamond in 1999, whose honey-voiced singles “No More Rain (In This Cloud)” and “Everyday” helped define the neo-soul sound of the era. The album kicked off Stone’s prolific solo career, with 10 studio albums and three Grammy nominations throughout her life; she also penned songs for artists such as D’Angelo, Erykah Badu, and Raphael Saadiq. In 2000, Stone also contributed the theme song to the sitcom Girlfriends, in which she also appeared in a cameo role; Stone would go on to appear in several films throughout the 2000s, including The Fighting Temptations and The Hot Chick. Stone’s final album was 2023’s Love Language.
