The passing of R&B goddess Angie Stone hit me pretty hard. Way harder than I expected.

Obviously, I’m a fan of her music, specifically her neo-soul run in the 2000s. If you’re on this site, I’m willing to be you are too. But the more I think about her groundbreaking achievements, I realize that her fingerprints were all over my music fandom.

Even her tragic passing following a Mobile, Alabama, Mardi Gras performance a couple of hours down the road from me – a performance that several of my friends attended – on a stretch of interstate I’ve traveled countless times, hit eerily close to home.  

It’s easy to box in Angie as simply a star of her era, applaud her for a couple of songs like “Brotha” and “Wish I Didn’t Miss You” and move on to the next headline.

But that’s a huge disservice to a woman who is much more than a former hitmaker. Her proximity to my life, your lives and Black culture itself is way more profound than you realize.

Instead of simply recapping her hits, I’m going to look at the moments in my life that were impacted by her genius. Angie’s voice was like Mother Nature made flesh  – she could be ice cold, blazing hot or a comforting breeze. She’s a game changer whether you knew it or not.

My Intro to Angie

When I heard Angie Stone for the first time, I didn’t know I was listening to Angie Stone.

Angie was a member of the groundbreaking female rap trio The Sequence, consisting of Cheryl “the Pearl” Cook, Gwendolyn Chisolm AKA “Blondy,” and Angie B, later known as Angie Stone. They were the first female rap trio signed to the Sugar Hill Records label in the late 70s and their 1979 hit “Funk You Up” became the foundation for Dr. Dre’s “Keep Their Heads Ringin” in 1995. If you were around back then, you remember that Dre track being played CONSTANTLY. Angie was all over my speakers before I even knew her name.

That same year, Angie again snuck into my music collection when she had credits on D’Angelo’s debut album Brown Sugar, a groundbreaking release in the neo-soul movement, a genre she’d soon dominate at well.

Her Time to Shine

Back in the late 90s, we were all obsessed with soundtracks. Many times, they were even better than the movies they promoted! An example of that is 1997’s Money Train, which still stands as one of my favorite soundtracks of all time. Nestled between Bad Boy remixes of Barry White hits, vastly underrated tracks from Lil Kim and Mary J. Blige, and my favorite Deborah Cox song (the real version, not the dance version!), there was a random track from an artist whose name didn’t ring a bell. Angie’s soul-soaked “Everyday” was a bright spot on the album, instantly standing out from the more hip-hop driven production. In 1997, it was just a random soundtrack cut but by the year 2000, it would be an official single on her debut album.

The Road Trip

In 2000, I joined a bunch of college classmates on a road trip to a journalism conference in Detroit. It would be an extremely transformative event – I met industry insiders, other young journalists from around the country and spoke to a ton of news veterans. It was one of those moments that confirmed that this career path was the one for me. I also saw the Dungeon Family stroll through our hotel (including Andre 3000 wearing weird pink pajama pants) but that’s a story for another day.

It was on that veryyyy long drive to the conference that I fell in love with Angie Stone’s single “No More Rain.” For some reason someone was playing it over and over on the van and the lyrics really sank into my soul. The timing was perfect, it felt like the climax of a movie when the main character received a moment of clarity. Angie sang about optimism over fear in such an warm, inviting way, reminding me that the coming life changes may be scary but brighter days were head. Twenty-five years later, it’s still hits me hard.

I’m not an emotional listener of music. I don’t play certain songs to lift my spirits, nor do I find songs to match my mood. I just like dope songs, period. There are very few songs that evoke an emotional experience from me, but “No More Rain” is one of them.

(Spoiler, there’s another Angie song that gets me in my feelings too, but more on that later)

The Album

Don’t talk to me about the greatness neo-soul era if you haven’t heard Mahogany Soul. In my eyes, there is no album that tells Angie’s story better than this one. In dropped in 2001, just a couple of months after I moved to a new city to start my journalism career – a career launched by that Detroit trip that she serenaded me on just a few months prior.

While everyone was hyped about her ode to Black men, “Brotha,” I was stuck on those album cuts. Her beautiful rendition of Curtis Mayfield’s  “Makings of You,” the soulful smackdowns of “Mad Issues” and “Pissed Off,” the gorgeously rendered “Snowflakes,” and the fed up fury of “Time of the Month,” which I STILL play regularly. And yeah, of course, “Wish I Didn’t Miss You” is an absolute masterpiece too. 2001 was the first year I lived on my own, in a brand new city, starting a brand new career, and Mahogany Soul was one of the albums that watched over me all the way.

The Legacy

Following her big run in the 2000s, more doors opened for Angie. Yep, that’s her singing the theme to hit TV show Girlfriends. She hit the stage play circuit and reality show beat – memorably attempting to serve as one of the voices of reason on the R&B Divas series. Even when R&B’s light began to dim in mainstream music, she kept giving us solid albums, producing heat like “2 Bad Habits” in 2015.

She also backed up Styles P on his A Gangster and a Gentleman album for “Black Magic,” one of my favorite rap/R&B collabos of all time. Yeah, I said all time.

 On the surface “Black Magic” might sound like the usual rap braggadocio, but instead it’s a deep look inside the soul of a man full of contradictions – he sees the pain of his community, realizes he’s contributing to that pain, but knows he has to make ends meet somehow:

Ask God when he stoppin the pain
A fiend got a shoelace on his arm and he poppin his vein
And the needle look dirty but I’m close to reaching 30
And the only thing I know it’s a profit to gain

And here comes Angie on the hook to add even more layers:

How do you move on this way
When taking all this stress and pain
There’s gotta be a better way
There’s gotta be a better way, yeah
If I should give up hope today
P, won’t you help me find my way
All I really want
Is to live my life so we can just get high, yeah, yeah

For me, this is the purest form of hip-hop, a depiction of the highs and lows of the Black experience – navigating pain in pursuit of joy. It’s one of my favorite songs of all time, one that gets me emotional every time I hear it. And Angie’s vocals tell that story so well.

That’s the memory that sticks closest to me. Angie Stone was way more than just a singer. She’s a hip-hop pioneer. She helped pen some of the most celebrate R&B albums of all time. But her strength was making her music feel so personal.

Whether she was the fed up Auntie putting someone in their place, or the wise mentor whispering guidance through our speakers, she was always there, ministering through song.

Angie’s songs walked me through a lot of major moments. I couldn’t ask for a better R&B fairy godmother.

Wish I didn’t miss you, Angie.