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Angie Stone, who has died aged 63 in a traffic incident, was an American soul singer and songwriter. She rose to international prominence in the late 1990s and early 2000s with two albums, Black Diamond and Mahogany Soul, that spawned a pair of popular singles, No More Rain and Wish I Didn’t Miss You.
Eight further solo albums displayed Stone’s command not just of soul but of gospel, R&B and funk, often in collaboration with other songwriters and artists, including Prince (U Make My Sun Shine, 2001), Snoop Dog (I Wanna Thank Ya, 2004), Anthony Hamilton (Stay for a While, 2004) and Betty Wright (Baby, 2007).
Stone had first come to light in the late 70s as a member of the Sequence, a pioneering hip-hop trio whose much sampled 1979 single Funk You Up is generally cited as the first rap record released by an all-female group.
Once the Sequence disbanded she spent a number of years struggling for a further breakthrough until she became a member of the R&B trio Vertical Hold in the early 90s and then released Black Diamond in 1999, after which she never had to fight for recognition again.
Stone’s rich vocal dexterity on Black Diamond drew comparisons with Chaka Khan and Gladys Knight, and the album made it to No 46 on the US charts, eventually selling close to 1m copies. Its standout track, No More Rain, which portrayed the defiant upswing in mood that often follows the emotional depths of a break up, reached No 1 on the US Adult R&B single charts and made a big splash in Europe, too.
In similar but more vulnerable vein, Wish I Didn’t Miss You, from Mahogany Soul (2001), made an even greater impact in various parts of the world, including as a Top 30 hit in the UK. The album, which peaked at No 22 in the US, also generated four other singles and contained a version of Curtis Mayfield’s Makings of You that became a sublime staple of her many live shows.
Stone was born Angela Brown in Columbia, South Carolina. An only child, she grew up with her mother, a nurse, and her father, a cab driver, in the city’s Saxon Homes housing project, where she sang in the local Baptist choir and was a keen cheerleader at CA Johnson high school. She was academically successful, a good athlete and a notable basketball player.
With two other members of the cheerleading squad, Gwendolyn Chisholm and Cheryl Cook, she had begun to write her own stock cheers, and in time their rap-like material took on a more musical direction, encouraging them to form the Sequence.
Fans of the Sugarhill Gang, one of the early rap outfits that had emerged from the New York area in the late 70s, in 1979 they blagged their way into a Gang gig in Columbia, where they found themselves backstage singing their own compositions to the group’s manager, Sylvia Robinson.
She was so impressed with Funk You Up that she had them in a recording studio within a few days, and the song swiftly became a landmark release in the first wave of “old school” hip-hop. According to Rolling Stone magazine, “in a 70s landscape where the few rap records that existed were chorus-free rhyme marathons, the Sequence seamlessly mixed singing and rapping, unwittingly paving a lane for artists such as Lauryn Hill, Drake and Future”.
Over the next six years the Sequence toured widely alongside the Sugarhill Gang, making three albums and releasing 10 singles. But they were unable to recreate the success of Funk You Up, and in 1985 they split when Stone refused to renew what she saw as an exploitative contract. By that time she had married the rapper Rodney Stone from the group Funky 4 + 1, and had taken his surname.
Earning money by writing songs for other artists, including Jill Jones, Mantronix and Lenny Kravitz, she supplemented her income by working as a factotum at Kiss-FM radio station in New York, where she eventually met the musicians Willie Bruno and David Bright, with whom she formed Vertical Hold. Although the group disbanded in 1995 after two albums, they had a US R&B chart hit in 1993 with Seems You’re Much Too Busy, which was co-written by Stone and Kurtis Khaleel.
By then divorced, in the second half of the 90s Stone co-wrote songs with the emerging R&B singer D’Angelo (Michael Archer), with whom she had started a long-term relationship, until the years of hard slog finally culminated in a solo recording contract that led to Black Diamond and much wider acclaim.
Stone’s most commercially successful albums were her third, Stone Love, in 2004, which reached No 14 on the US charts, and her fourth, The Art of Love, in 2007, which made it to No 11, after which she continued to release new collections of material at regular intervals until her final album, Love Language, in 2023.
In the later part of her career, however, some of Stone’s attention had turned to acting, including on Broadway as Mama Morton in the musical Chicago (2003) and with small roles in movies such as The Hot Chick (2002), The Fighting Temptations (2003), Pastor Brown (2009), Scary Movie V (2013) and Ride Along (2014).
A popular live artist, she was due to be touring the UK this year. The road collision that led to her death took place in Montgomery, Alabama, as she was returning from a concert in nearby Mobile.
She is survived by a daughter, Diamond, from her marriage to Stone, a son, Michael, from her relationship with Archer, and two grandchildren.
