I Want to Take You Higher_ The Life and Times of Sly & the Family Stone - Jeff Kaliss [5]
Into this joyful noise were born K. C. and Alpha's daughter Loretta in 1934, and son Sylvester on March 15, 1943, the first two of five children, all of whom would be raised in music. (Freddie Stewart would also inherit from his uncle F. L. Haynes a pastoral calling within the Church of God in Christ.) The growing Stewart family occupied a large white house on bustling Prairie Street. K. C. reportedly frequented the cotton and tomato fields, turning his percussion array to the purpose of entertaining and soliciting donations from the field workers. His wife, Alpha, worked as a maid in white neighborhoods, at least up until the birth of Loretta.
Not long after Sylvester's arrival, the family followed the path of several of Alpha's relatives out west to the San Francisco Bay Area, to seek a better life in an economy that had been stimulated by wartime industry.
Well-liked and dependable, K. C. Stewart found a home in Vallejo, a smaller city on the northeast outskirts of the Bay. The size of the black population in Vallejo increased dramatically during the '40s, jumping from 438 in 1940 to 1,513 in 1950, an increase of 345 percent. With modest income from maintenance work for a local department store and from other jobs, K. C. was able, with Alpha, to expand their family to Rose (1945), Frederick (1947), and Vaetta (1950). In the San Francisco Bay Area, the children were able to envision possibilities far beyond those their parents had been limited to in Texas. Black Stars magazine, in 1972, relayed an anecdote from Alpha, in which her sons had been asked what they wanted to be when they grew up. "Freddie said he wanted to be a lawyer," she remembered. "Sylvester said he wanted to be a bishop." (To this day, Sly has plenty to do with lawyers, but it was his younger brother who himself became an ordained church official.) Back in the '40s and '50s, each of the Stewart kids in turn, and ultimately in ensemble, came to share their parents' celebration of music and of the church.
There was a strong musical presence in the local black churches, as there had been back in Texas, and Vallejo spawned at least one successful recording gospel group, the Spartonaires. As in Denton, there was musical migration between sects, and the Stewart kids sang all over the Bay Area. In Mojo magazine, mama Alpha later singled out young Sylvester, then nicknamed "Syl," as the star of these devotional routines. "They'd stand this bitty fiveyear-old on a table and he'd sing `You Got to Move," she related. "People were hollering and wanting to touch him. You had to hold them back sometimes." For Syl's part, he was already sensitive to audience reaction, as recounted by his sister Rose in the 2000 Showtime documentary The Skin I'm In. "When we were little kids," she said, "if people didn't stand and applaud and really feel the spirit of what he was singing, he'd cry afterwards. It affected him that bad." A local church official urged the Stewart Family Four, formed from the eldest of the children, to further spread their appealing juvenile spirit in a 45-rpm gospel single. Syl, nine at the time of the recording, had picked up on his older sister Loretta's familiarity with piano. Mama Alpha, who played guitar in church, also introduced Syl to her instrument.
It could be supposed that potential musical influences, as with other opportunities, were more varied and eclectic for the Stewart children in the Bay Area than if they'd been raised in Texas. Young Sylvester might have developed as more of a bluesman and less as a forward-thinking re-imaginer of rock, though he did end up bringing to the mix some of the elements of blues and gospel that he shared with less influential Texans like Bobby"Blue" Bland and Junior Walker.
Across the city of Vallejo, the heritage of racism stayed in place, as it did in much of postwar America, but the lines were not as broadly drawn as in Texas. Each of the low-income