Grant Proposal: Summer Research Experience for Undergraduates
Funding Cycle for Summer 2002
Title: Black Celebrity, Urban Masculinity, and the Life of Sly Stone
David M. Jones, Faculty Supervisor
Assistant Professor, Department of English
Eliza Mbughuni, Undergraduate Researcher
Junior, Department of History
Summary:
The primary subject of this research project will be Sly and the Family Stone, an integrated group of popular musicians founded and led by Sylvester Stewart, reaching their peak of national popularity during the late 1960s and 1970s. The primary goals of the project will be to compile research findings on three related topics: 1) the musical career of Sly and the Family Stone, including biographical information about Sylvester Stewart; 2) radical cultural activism and public discourse about black/white relations during the late 1960s and early 1970s, especially in the San Francisco Bay Area; 3) the relationships between the life of Sylvester Stewart and representations of black masculinity, popular music, and celebrity in contemporary United States culture. Ultimately, this research will contribute to a biography of Sylvester Stewart, whose career has an importance in American cultural history that parallels the careers of Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Muddy Waters, Aretha Franklin, Miles Davis, and Bob Marley. Biographical work on Sylvester Stewart will be a valued asset within the discipline of African American studies, and research for the project will also provide a unique opportunity for a student researcher to gain practical experience using academic databases, examining primary sources, and identifying publishers for academic work.
Here is a list of specific objectives for this project, accompanied by a description of how the researchers will achieve these objectives. The objectives are presented in a chronological sequence:
1) Create a clipping file that includes published articles on Sly and the Family
Stone, drawn from both academic and popular sources. The faculty member will help
the student develop a sufficient knowledge of online databases, library catalogues, and printed guides to academic and popular periodicals to conduct a comprehensive search for pertinent articles.
2) Identify archival collections that have material on Sylvester Stewart and related topics. The researchers will contact libraries and historical societies in the San Francisco Bay Area and seek out collections specializing in popular culture. In consultation with the faculty supervisor, the student researcher would contact several nationally known collections of African American literature and documents, such as the Archie Givens, Sr. Collection of African American Literature and Life at the University of Minnesota and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in the New York City Public Library System. The student researcher will also contact the American Popular Culture Association in order to identify repositories of material pertaining to popular music.
3) Using maps in anticipation of future travel, the researchers will identify centers of African American political and cultural activity in the Bay Area, and identify music clubs where Sylvester Stewart performed during his residence in that area. The researchers will compile addresses and directions in anticipation of travel to the area at a later date, to take slides and to gather additional data. Sites related to the rise of the Black Panthers and the Haight-Ashbury counterculture might also be selected for mapping and further research.
4) Identify full-length texts about other nationally known African American musicians who
are considered visionaries and icons, such as Charles Mingus, James Brown, Billie
Holiday, and George Clinton. Using these texts, researchers will take note of critical discussions of racial politics, sexuality, drug use, and the iconic status of these
musicians with the listening public.
5) Identify former members of Sly and the Family Stone who are willing to be interviewed,
and develop a list of other persons familiar with Stewart’s career for interviews. Some former members of the band currently have an online presence, and the faculty researcher is familiar with at least one individual living in the Twin Cities who is a former member of the band. The student researcher will begin with these leads as the research project commences.
text, music, and graphics. The compiled materials will also be useful for grant proposals to support travel and further research, and for inclusion in a book proposal.
The undergraduate researcher, Eliza Mbughini, has an intellectual background that is uniquely suited to accomplish the aims of this project, and the experience gained through this research assistantship will serve her well in her academic studies and in her future career. Eliza is a history major at UWEC with a secondary interest in political science, and she is planning to attend law school after earning her undergraduate degree. She is originally from Tanzania and brings an international and intercultural perspective to studies of race, critical theory, social justice, and cultural change. For her history courses at UWEC, she has written papers examining the history of the Ku Klux Klan in post-World War I America, and discussing the legal arguments supporting slavery as authored by Thomas Jefferson and other antebellum political philosophers. For a political science class at UWEC, she has written a paper examining the role of critical theory in recent justice-seeking movements.
Eliza’s strong interest and extensive work in these areas of race, critical theory, and cultural change has prepared her for the challenges of working with primary texts, gathering information from interviews and literature searches, and using that information in scholarly writing. Working on a biography requires a high standard of factual accuracy, and the experience of working with primary texts is an important tool for researchers to establish that factual accuracy. This project will include close study of primary texts and practice writing up the results in a way that is factually sound and readable.
The project will include supervised practice in arranging and conducting interviews, which is a valuable skill in the disciplines of history and law. Additionally, the project will help the student researcher locate and use electronic and printed bibliographies and databases, another highly useful skill in Eliza’s chosen disciplines. While the faculty collaborator will provide extensive supervision and consultation, Eliza’s role in the project will be central to its success.
This project has a clear significance within the discipline of African American studies, but also has larger implications related to racial politics, gender relations, materialism and pleasure in American culture, and social change. Currently, there is no major biography or autobiography of Sylvester Stewart to parallel landmark texts on other highly influential African American music icons. Two examples of other landmark texts include Miles (autobiography of Miles Davis, ghostwritten by Quincy Troupe), and ‘Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky (biography of Jimi Hendrix by David Henderson). Both of these best selling and critically acclaimed texts balance detailed historical information about the musical history of these artists with close examination of the larger significance of the artists’ careers in terms of racial politics and cultural change.
These texts on the lives of Davis and Hendrix have been highly useful for assessing the influence of African American musicians over American public culture and for humanizing the work and personal struggles of these iconic figures. Miles Davis, for instance, reached the pinnacle of critical and commercial success in the most admired jazz styles of the century, such as swing, bebop, modern jazz, and fusion, and as a public icon inspired resistance against the conditions of inequality suffered by African Americans. His autobiography, Miles, probes into the rigorous work schedules and persistent experimentation that made his musical successes possible, and also discusses personal struggles with drug addiction, racist physical assaults perpetrated against him, and his physical abuse of women in romantic relationships. Closer examination of Davis’ life has spawned further work by black feminist writers such as Hazel Carby, who has used the Davis text as a starting point for a larger challenge of sexism within black communities, and has led others, such as documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, to consider more closely the unique obstacles that African American musicians have faced when they have chosen not to work within the most popular musical styles of the moment.
Jimi Hendrix, who has been described as the most accomplished musical virtuoso of the rock era, has similarly inspired cross-racial interest in traditional African American blues and in the musicological connections between blues, rock and roll, and folk music. Hendrix became especially popular among supporters of the youth countercultures of the 1960s, with some identifying him as a challenger to the notions of racial separatism that were supported by major black nationalist organizations of the period. Compared to Davis and Stewart, however, Hendrix did not draw his persona from the imagery of street life, but presented himself as a “trickster” figure, with ties to a supernatural world of mysticism and sensual pleasure. Hendrix’s ties to West African images of “tricksters” are evident in this persona, but close study of African American masculinity, cultural traditions, and performance helps to highlight his relationship to both 1960s countercultures and specific African American identities.
Sylvester Stewart has left a legacy as significant as the legacies of Davis and Hendrix in terms of influence over African American musical styles and mass audience tastes in music:
There was black music before Sly Stone and there was black music after Sly Stone.
Simple as that. Sly Stone showed Miles Davis what to do as much as he rewrote the
book of love for Motown, which were the polar extremities of contemporary black music
at the time. Stories are told about Berry Gordy brandishing copies of “Stand” at Motown
music staff meetings and Herbie Hancock imagining a new future for contemporary jazz
on first hearing Sly” (Selvin xi).
Stewart’s legacy is social as well as musical, following after the many popular musicians that have helped to shape the development of youth culture since World War II. In fact, Stewart “became one of the few black artists of his time to straddle audiences, having innumerable fans both black and white and managing, albeit briefly, to merge the popular cultures of these groups” (World Musicians). Stewart’s work has contributed to the continuing interest in African American popular music among large segments of the American listening public, and the integrationist optimism of his most popular songs (“Everyday People,” “Dance to the Music,” “I Want to Take You Higher”) now evokes a mainstream multicultural ethos as well as the countercultural idealism of the late 1960s.
Sylvester Stewart’s life has been impacted significantly by substance abuse, and this topic has been raised in every major biographical piece that I have encountered on this musician. According to Stewart’s former manager, David Kapralik, “there were, in effect, two Slys: Sylvester Stewart, the life-affirming poet, and Sly Stone, the cynical street hustler” (World Musicians). Similar claims have been made about Miles Davis, whose mastery of jazz idioms must be weighed alongside his exploitation of women in personal relationships, according to Hazel Carby:
I would like to explore the unfathomable space of the startling contradiction between the accomplishments of “genius” and the devastation rendered by patriarchal codes of domination. I think it is very important to challenge the apparent distances between Davis’s violence against women and the “genius” of his music, as if they were enacted on different planes of existence. First, this division reproduces the material/spiritual divide that Davis himself creates. The various women described in Miles are carefully given their place in his material world; they may service his bodily sexual and physical needs, but are albatrosses around his neck when he wants to fly with other men in the musical realm of “genius” and performance (Carby 144).
By examining the life and career of Sylvester Stewart, this project will consider how images of urban street life have influenced representations of black masculinity in popular culture, and will also consider how both imaginary and real dimensions of urban street life enter into the public and private behavior of African American musicians themselves. Images and real life practices of street hustlers and pimps have clearly and admittedly influenced the life and careers of Stewart and Davis as well as several prominent musicians in recent black popular music, such as Dr. Dre, Tupak Shakur, and Ice Cube. A confrontational style of negotiating with record companies in the quest for artistic freedom, drug use and addiction, and exploitive relationships with women are a part of the street hustler image that all of these musicians have cultivated in their lives and work. Davis and Stewart were not born in the inner city, however. Both were born to parents who were part of the black middle class, albeit at a time of strictly enforced legal and de facto racial segregation. In any case, Stewart and Davis developed a style of band leadership and masculine identity that echoed the emotional detachment and abusive uses of force in intimate relationships that are often associated with street hustlers.
The street-influenced style of leadership and identity displayed by Stewart and the others might be read as a self-defense mechanism among talented African Americans who are under siege due to the racism of American society as a whole, or due to forces within the music industry that reward artistic compromise and punish the boldest and most original artists. Undeniably, however, the careers and personal lives of these musicians are marked by patterns of physical confrontation, neglect of parenting duties, and substance abuse. Abusive behavior by these revered musical icons may even serve to reinforce racist stereotypes about the general irresponsibility of African American males, and may also reinforce the hedonistic, self-destructive public images connected generally to rock and roll musicians. In the cases of Sylvester Stewart and Miles Davis, cultivating a street hustler image despite comparatively privileged births may indicate that a narrow range of black masculinities have been represented in U.S. culture, and thus the hustler image becomes appealing not only for inner city youth but for middle class youth as well.
Working from these considerations, this project will investigate the public and private influences that led Stewart at times to live as a hustler – surrounded by admiring women and bodyguards, using cocaine, PCP, and pharmaceuticals habitually, verbally and physically abusing people in his entourage on some occasions, disappointing thousands of fans by failing to show up for concerts (according to The World Musicians biography, in 1970 Stewart canceled 26 out of 80 engagements, twenty because “his stomach was in convulsions” and another six because of a clash with his manager), and producing a groundbreaking music now known to America as “funk.” As a musical style, “funk” was rhythmically complex, melodically innovative, and politically engaged as it emerged among distinct forms of popular music in late 1960s youth culture (Brackett). Squaring Stewart’s legacy of abuse of power and substances with his virtual invention of “funk” and urban soul would tell a great deal about how to narrate the contradictions in the life and careers of iconic black male musicians, without reinforcing the street hood stereotype or glamorizing abusive masculine behavior.
The results of this research will be disseminated in three specific ways, two of which will occur during the funded period. First, the researchers will prepare a conference proposal that will be suitable for such events as the American Popular Culture Association Conference or the International Association for the Study of Popular Music Conference, and for the 2003 Undergraduate Research Day. The faculty researcher has been a member of both of these organizations, and both would be suitable settings for presenting the results of this research. The researchers will also seek a conference or organization that would apply more specifically to the African American and social justice themes of this research. The researchers will submit the proposal for a conference at the end of the research period. Secondly, the researchers will prepare a book proposal for a biography of Sylvester Stewart, to be submitted to an academic or popular publisher. This book proposal will also be submitted at the end of the grant period.
Finally, the material gathered through this project will be suitable for dissemination in future grant proposals for travel support. Such grants would allow the researchers to participate in a professional conference, to visit the Bay Area for interviews and photography of key sites for slide production, or to work in archival collections.
Brackett, David. “Funk.” Grove Music Dictionary Online. October 1, 2001.
www.grovemusic.com/shared/views/article.html?section=music.46845.
Carby, Hazel. Race Men. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998.
Henderson, David. ‘Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky: the Life of Jimi Hendrix. Toronto/New
York: Bantam, 1983.
Selvin, Joel. Sly and the Family Stone: an Oral History. New York: Avon Books, 1998.
“Sly Stone.” World Musicians. H.W. Wilson Company, 1998. Available:
Wilson Web Online.