I Want to Take You Higher: Sly Stone & the Sanctified Church
by Mark Anthony Neal
SeeingBlack.com Contributing Editor
Much has been made about the role of Soul artists like Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin and Sam Cooke in the mainstreaming of the black church aesthetic. Surely when The Edwin Hawkins singers logged a major cross-over hit with “Oh Happy Day” in 1969, they could point to the aforementioned artists as well as Mahalia Jackson’s historic appearance at the 1955 Newport Jazz Festival as laying the groundwork for their success.
Less talked about is the role of Sly & the Family Stone in introducing the Black church aesthetic to pop music audiences. When the group debuted in 1967 with A Whole New Thing, the title could have been a reference to range of things, including the interracial and cross-gendered makeup of the band. But I’d like to suggest that Sly and the Family Stone not only helped introduce the world to the power of the Black church, but that the group more specifically, introduced American audiences to what the legendary James Cleveland, once called the “sanctified church”. The recently released Sly & the Family Stone: The Collection provides an opportunity to revisit the era when Sly Stone might have been the most popular Black Pentecostal mystic in the country.
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