Grammy nominated singer Angie Stone has died following a car accident as she headed to a show. The R’nB singer was 63 years old.
Stone was part of late 70s hip-hop trio The Sequence, the first all-female group to be singed to the influential Sugar Hill record label.
She found her greatest success in the early 2000s as a neo-soul singer, and her work was also popular on the dancefloor with top DJs remixing her tunes.
Stone was scheduled to perform at the half-time show of the Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association men’s championship basketball game in Atlanta on Saturday.
At about 4am, the vehicle she was travelling in “flipped over and was subsequently hit by a big rig”, music producer Walter Millsap III told The Associated Press in an email.
Guy Todd Williams, better known as Rahiem from the Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, said nine other passengers were in a van with Stone during the accident.
“She left her indelible mark on the music industry initially as a member of the legendary rap group Sequence,” Williams said.
Stone was 38 years old when her debut album Black Diamond was released. Her solo success came after years of being a backing singer and members of different bands.
Born Angela Brown, she’d hit the charts in 1979 as a member of The Sequence with their tune Funk You Up. She’d worked with Matronix in the 80s, and in the early 90s had been a member of the band Devox, and lesser-known girl group Vertical Hold.
In the 1990s Stone was in a relationship with singer D’Angelo, and she has writing credits on his albums Brown Sugar (1995) and Voodoo (2000).
Signed to a solo record deal by Clive Davis, the music mogul who’d guided the career of Whitney Houston, Stone released Black Diamond in 1999 and followed it up with Mahogany Soul in 2001 and Stone Love in 2004. Her discography extended to ten albums, her most recent release being 2023’s Love Language.
Her biggest hit came with Wish I Didn’t Miss You, the sing topped the Australian club charts and hit number seven on the ARIA charts. A remix by Hex Hector and Mac Quayle turned the tune into a gay anthem.
Stone is survived by her daughter Diamond, whom she named her debut album after. Diamond’s father is rapper Rodney Stone who the singer was previously married to in the 1980s. She also has two grand-children. Her son Michael D’Angelo Archer II, from her relationship with D’Angelo, was born in 1998.
