There’s immense variety in popular music careers, even beyond the extremes of one-hit wonders and the long-haulers touring stadiums into their dotage. There are those who embody a specific era, burning briefly and brightly, and those whose legacy spans decades.
Straddling both of those, and occupying a distinctive space in popular music history, is Sylvester Stewart, better known as Sly Stone, who died at the age of 82 on Monday June 9.
A pioneer of funk whose sound spread far beyond the genre, his band Sly and the Family Stone synthesised disparate strands of American popular music into a unique melange, tracking the musical and social shifts as the 1960s wore into the 1970s.
