Angie Stone, whose powerful voice made her an acclaimed star of the neo-soul movement, was killed in a car crash Saturday morning in Alabama. She was 63.
Stone was riding in a Sprinter van when it collided with a tractor-trailer on Interstate 65 near Montgomery, Alabama state police said. The other eight people in the van were hospitalized with various injuries.
“Never in a million years did we ever expect to get this horrible news,” Stone’s children, Diamond Stone and Michael Archer, said in a statement. “Our mom is and will always be our everything. We are still trying to process and are completely heartbroken.”
Stone and her team were returning to Atlanta after a performance in Mobile, Ala., according to her representatives. The crash happened around 4 a.m. Saturday when the van “flipped over and was subsequently hit by a big rig,” Stone’s manager Walter Millsap told The Associated Press.
The truck was driven by a 33-year-old man from Texas, authorities said. He and the other passengers in the Sprinter van have not been publicly identified.
“We are truly devastated by this unexpected and unfortunate tragedy and there are simply no words to express how we feel,” Millsap said.
Born Dec. 18, 1961, in Columbia, S.C., Angie Stone was a singer from a young age. She first performed in front of an audience while singing gospel music at First Nazareth Baptist Church.
She broke into the music industry as a teenage member of the all-female rap group The Sequence, which was signed to the trailblazing label Sugar Hill Records. The group’s biggest hit was “Funk You Up,” considered one of the first hits for a female rap group.
But Stone’s biggest successes came as a solo artist. She released her debut album, “Black Diamond,” in 1999. Its lead single, “No More Rain (In This Cloud),” hit No. 9 on the Billboard R&B chart.
Her second album, “Mahogany Soul,” marked the peak of Stone’s commercial success. Two of its songs — “Brotha” and “Wish I Didn’t Miss You” — hit the Billboard Hot 100. But beyond its commercial success, the album was praised for the way it called on soul classics but still provided a new and powerful sound.
“Her songs have the stop-the-presses brilliance of R&B classics. They’re the kind of numbers anyone from any genre would clamor to cover,” Daily News music critic Jim Farber wrote at the time. “Stone’s voice holds everything together.”
Stone released eight more albums, most recently 2023’s “Love Language,” which reached various amounts of commercial success but received consistent critical praise. The biggest single of the bunch was 2007’s “Baby” alongside soul legend Betty Wright.
“That was a blessing in itself,” Stone told the AP in 2007. “I was honored; I was overwhelmed. She was actually in L.A. at the time I was recording the album. She walked in the room to hang out and see what I was doing. And the rest was history. It was honestly something that just happened.”
At the peak of her fame in the early 2000s, Stone also appeared in several films such as 2002’s “The Hot Chick” and 2003’s “The Fighting Temptations.” She later popped up for brief appearances in “Scary Movie V” and “Ride Along” and starred on reality shows “Celebrity Fit Club” and “R&B Divas: Atlanta.”
Stone was on her way back to Atlanta to perform the halftime show of the Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association championship men’s basketball game on Saturday. Virginia State defeated Bluefield State to claim the title in the historically Black league.
“I could not believe it when I received the call that the most beautiful soul is now gone,” said Claude Villani, CEO of Stone’s label, SRG-ILS Group. “The Angie I knew was always a beam of light and super positive, her contribution to hip-hop and R&B is cemented in our collective consciousness.”