1 Family Affair

(1943–1955)



Life is a record. But where do you drop the needle? You can put it down near the beginning, where a young boy in Northern California starts to discover how much music moves him. You can put it down a little later, when he assembles a band, or a little later than that, when the band appears onstage, first in front of small crowds in clubs, then in front of larger crowds, including one of the largest in history. Those are good tracks.

Or you can play the flip side of this bright and stirring story: the young boy, now a young man, facing the harsh light of fame; the young man, now a star, making his way through a house crowded with drugs and guns; the star, now letting his light be crowded out by those drugs and guns.

Or is it better to start right at the start? Find the lead-in groove. That’s the outer edge of the record before the first song. Put the needle down there. You may hear some static. Pay close attention to it. It’s giving you a chance to get ready.

* * *

In the story before my story, there’s Denton, Texas, a small city in a big state, north of Dallas and Fort Worth. In the 1920s, F. L. Haynes, Fred to those who knew him, went to Denton to set up the St. Andrew Church of God in Christ. The Church of God in Christ was a Pentecostal denomination with roots in Tennessee, only a few decades old at that point but gaining steam.

Fred’s family included two girls named Alpha and Omega. In Fred’s church, Alpha met a man named K.C. Stewart. Alpha and K.C. married in 1933 and brought a daughter, Loretta, into the world the following year. For a while that was the family, the three of them. Then, on March 15, 1943, a fourth face appeared. That was Sylvester Stewart. That was me.

The street where we lived in Denton is barely a memory for me. A cemetery was to the east. What was to the west? We all were, soon enough. A little while after I was born, we moved out to California. Denton went into the past and the future went into Vallejo, a city about thirty miles northeast of San Francisco on San Pablo Bay.

For a minute in the 1850s, Vallejo had been the state capital before Sacramento took over. Vallejo was a port, which meant that people were always coming in and out. They weren’t just getting off ships and getting on them. They were also building them. There was a naval shipyard on Mare Island that needed workers, and that grew the town. When we arrived from Texas, Vallejo was in the middle of a boom.

Boom! There we were. Our first Vallejo address was 125 Denio Street. Back then it was just a few kids—me, Loretta, and the next sister down the line, Rose. My father, K.C., who we called Big Daddy, had a cleaning business. My mother kept the house. I never met grandparents on either side, never got any of that spoiling. When I was four, a little brother arrived, Frederick Jerome, who we called Freddie. He bunked in my room, at the bottom of my bed. New faces needed new spaces. My dad put up another house behind 125 Denio, at 127, and we moved there. And a few years after that, a fifth child, another girl, showed up—that was Vaetta, who we called Vet.

There were seven of us, and the eighth member of the family was music. Even before children, my parents played. My father played washboard, guitar, violin, fiddle, harmonica. My mother played keyboards and guitar. Music was as much a part of our home as the walls or the floor. The piano was as prominent as the kitchen table. All of us sang from as early as I can remember, and the first songs we learned were gospel songs by Mahalia Jackson, Brother Joe May, the Soul Stirrers, the Swan Silvertones. We built our future in heaven. We dug a little deeper. We put our trust in Him.

We sang at home and then we sang in church. We all sang together but sometimes one of us would get a solo. I was put in front of the congregation to perform when I was only five or six. My mother said that I really came alive in front of a crowd. More than that: If they didn’t respond I would cry. Once, I was up there, singing, feeding off the audience, hearing their shouts and applause, when pieces of the crowd broke off and women started running down the aisle, holding on to their hats, still shouting. Now I see that they were feeling the spirit in the song calling them toward the stage. Back then, I thought they were coming to grab me. I turned around, jumped off the table, and started running for my life.

I stopped running. I came back for the music. From the time I was very small I could tell that I was deeper into it than most because I was so often with an instrument. It might have been drumsticks first, and then I was out on the street with my mother and saw a man playing guitar. I asked her for one. She sent my father out the next day with instructions not to return empty-handed.

Learning was looking. There was a guy in the church who played guitar. What he did with it was amazing, six strings and an infinity of things. I watched him like a hawk. He wasn’t a mentor. I don’t even know if I spoke to him. I just saw what he did and tried to figure out how to do the same and more. Guitar stayed with me, but I was always looking to whatever was next, taking up the bass, picking out songs on the piano. I felt incomplete without an instrument, or maybe it’s more to the point to say that I only felt complete with one. When I went out into the world, I was surprised to see people who weren’t carrying instruments. I wasn’t sure what they did instead.

* * *

I was up under the bridge with a friend of mine. We were small, six or seven, looking at clouds in the sky, at fog lower down, at reflections of light on the water. We spied on people, made up stories about them. Vallejo was all around us, which was cool with me.

In my neighborhood, we didn’t know about other neighborhoods, not yet. If you got along with your parents, you were good. I got along with mine by listening. Big Daddy was big on justice. He gave me some advice early on, in his Texas accent. “Ah tayl yew,” he said. “If ah ketch yew maken any kyna prob-um, ahm gonh wayh yew out. Donh evuh be stahrtinn a fight. But if somebody messiss wich yew, get a brick and make for sho’ you leave them quiverin’ or still.” That advice stuck with me, then and forever. Don’t fight. But if you see an injustice, don’t stop fighting back.

I remember dodgeball with other kids. I remember Halloween. My family didn’t really do costumes, but I would put a little black mask over my eyes so I could fool people and get candy. We had a contest to see who could get the most candy, and I used to win. A shopping bag was needed to hold it all.

I built roller coasters in the yard, tracks of boards nailed together. The first one was small. Freddie and I worked on that together. You could skate on it. Later I built another one that was big enough for soapbox derby cars. I did most of that one, though my father’s friend Brother Wilson helped out.

By the time I was eleven or twelve my older sister, Loretta, was already grown, and since I was second in line I was put in charge of the other kids. Big Daddy’s cleaning business handled some of the big buildings downtown. He would work every day. As he went out the door, he would point at the other kids and say, “Do a song with them.” I smiled and told him I would.

One day, he had another request. He gave me a shotgun and strict orders to use it if a certain neighbor chased his wife into our house. She was allowed to come in but he could not follow. I didn’t understand that they were drinkers and fought often. I just thought they were crazy. When I felt the weight of the weapon in my hand I cried.

When I was old enough to not be too young anymore, I went with Big Daddy on weekends to work. One of the buildings he cleaned was the Higgins Building, all five floors. I made money, but only from cleaning. If I found a coin on the floor, even a nickel, Big Daddy would make me leave it for the people in the office. It wasn’t ours to take.

My mother was my best friend. How can you describe a mother? She loved me. She made me feel safe. She put the idea in my head that I could do anything and worked to keep it there. She ran the house, including the kitchen. We ate collard greens, chicken with gravy, fried chicken, cornbread. We raised chickens for a while there too.

We kept singing and playing together as a family, to the point where we got noticed and then named: the Stewart Four. We even cut a single, one side with “On the Battlefield” (which might have been the song I was singing on the table), the other with “Walking in Jesus’s Name.” The record was released by the Church of God in Christ, the Northern California Sunday School Dept. Vocal with Inst. Acc., the label said.

The fifties was a parade of names. Truman, Eisenhower, Stevenson, Warren. That was politics, which belonged to the world beyond the town. Brando, Monroe, Taylor, Dean. That was the movies, which sometimes came to town. The radio brought more of the outside world into the house, and when we got a television, I watched everything I could. My eyes stuck most to the cowboy programs. I liked The Range Rider, with Jock Mahoney, tall as a tree. I liked Roy Rogers and Gene Autry. My favorite was Lash LaRue. There was no one cooler. He wore all black and used a whip. What for? To keep himself from shooting a motherfucker.

School marked time, mostly. I was smart, which teachers liked to tell me, usually because they were about to tell me that I should apply myself more. But I couldn’t pay attention. Lessons didn’t reach me because they didn’t challenge me. I was too smart for what was being sent my way but not smart enough to understand how to use it. Activities and competitions were more fun. One year, I had a role in a school play. I was Don Pepe, a guitar player, an easy part. Another year, during the class spelling bee, I was half-watching the teacher at the blackboard and agreeing— black, bored—when another boy went up to write down the names of the contestants. He spelled my name wrong: “Slyvester.” Everyone started laughing but I took a closer look. Sly: Not bad. The correct order of letters may be better, but a reversal isn’t always worse.



2Sing a Simple Song

(1955–1963)

“What do you want to be when you’re grown?” Adults like to ask kids that question. The adult in this case was the pastor of the church. I was the kid.

“The bishop,” I said. That was the top man in the Church of God in Christ. The pastor started to smile. The other people in the room laughed. I was serious. It seemed like the highest job for the highest cause. Why wouldn’t you aim for that?

That was my aim at twelve or thirteen. A year or two after that, I started to feel a pull from another direction. Some people called it R&B. Others said rock and roll. These singers—Little Richard, Clyde McPhatter—came out of the church, too, but went elsewhere. Sam Cook replaced R. H. Harris in the Soul Stirrers, stayed for a few years, then left to make pop records (and popped an “e” on the end of his name to mark the change).

These from-the-church singers were something. They kept what was holy and added in what was earthy, and the combination landed on me hard. I wanted to sing like them, control the stage like them. Jackie Wilson was especially amazing, pure electricity up there at the microphone, twirling around. He had an effect on the crowd and then some—he’d be falling offstage and shit, knocking the bitches out with his energy.

Ray Charles was one of the biggest names in music at that point, and the baddest. I dug the way he played. When he sat at the piano, he rocked his head from side to side. Stevie Wonder did something like that later and I know it wasn’t because he saw Ray doing it. I understood it as more than just a style. It was a way of showing that the spirit had gotten into you and stayed there. Even when I started to move away from the religion I was given—I wasn’t exactly God-fearing, didn’t see the point in being afraid of Him or anyone else—I believed in the spirit. It worked for Ray. He was so sincere in his songs, no matter what he was singing.

You learn music in stages before you learn it on stages. I started to play other people’s songs and soon enough I started to realize that I was playing my own. I would be learning something by Ray or Sam or Jackie, or Larry Williams or Bobby “Blue” Bland or Big Joe Turner, and suddenly I would realize that I had left it behind and was making something new. Sometimes it was just music. Sometimes words came along with it.

Music held people together. It held me to my brother Freddie. We would play guitar and bass and trade off. It held me to my friend John Turk, who could really play, with skill and showmanship both—trumpet with one hand and piano with the other. I mostly did one instrument at a time. I would see a poster for a talent show nailed up to a telephone pole: piano competition, guitar competition. If it required an instrument I already played, I would learn a song. If it required an instrument I didn’t already play, I would learn the instrument. If I managed to win, I could make a few dollars. I managed, more than once.

The other groups didn’t like to lose, and some of them liked it even less when they lost to a black group. Vallejo was diverse: white, black, Hispanic, Filipino. But diverse didn’t mean fair. There was only one day when black people could swim in the public pool. That was Saturday. I remember going one day when everybody was white. I don’t recall anyone saying anything to me, and if they had I wouldn’t have listened. I could never get into that way of thinking. The water’s the same for everyone.

* * *

In the midst of old Vallejo / Stands the school we love …

Now it was the late fifties, and I was off to Vallejo High on Nebraska Street. In some ways it was just more of the same, classes I couldn’t completely care about, teachers who told me that I should care.

But high school had some new attractions. Football was a big deal because of Dick Bass, who had been a star running back for the high school a few years before. In 1954, the Apaches—that was our mascot back then—went undefeated, averaging fifty-four points a game. Easy to remember. By the time I got to high school, Dick Bass had moved on to the Los Angeles Rams, but the Apaches were still tearing up the turf at Corbus Field. I also liked watching track. I was quick myself, but I didn’t go out for teams. I didn’t have the mentality for it. It wouldn’t have made sense to Lash LaRue, and it didn’t make sense to me either.

Just because I wasn’t for teams doesn’t mean that I was a loner. I got close to a black kid named Raymond Stith. I looked up to him. He dressed cool and acted the same. He was tough. He would knock a motherfucker out. Once he was arguing with another kid and a gym teacher made them fight it out in a ring with gloves on.

I ran with a group of guys called the Cherrybusters. People have said it was a gang but that’s not a word that really applies. We had parties. We had jackets. We didn’t have a leader, but I might have been followed a little because I had a car, a cherry Chevy. Cherry wasn’t the color. It was the condition. That’s the first car I remember having. It even had a nickname, Booty Green, because it was light green with a green trunk of a darker shade. Booty Green and I got around town.

The car had a passenger seat, of course, and when I was sixteen or so I got a passenger, Marilyn Bethel, my first serious girlfriend. She was a pretty black girl, good smile, good grades. Marilyn didn’t hang with a group, didn’t try out for this crowd or that one, and that was important to me, as was the fact that my parents met her and liked her. I gave her a ride to school, and drove her home, too.

* * *

Chuck Gebhardt, who was my age, and his younger brother, Vern, lived on the other side of town. Their father was a gym teacher—the same one, in fact, who had made Raymond Stith put on gloves. The Gebhardts had a friend named Frank Arellano, and the three of them knew two girls, a blonde named Charlene Imhoff and a brunette named Maria Boldway, who went by Ria. They had a singing group that practiced around school and at people’s houses, in basements and garages. Another kid had been with them and then they were without him, and they were looking for a replacement. They were looking at me.

I was all for it. John Turk and I were in a student organization called the Youth Problems Committee. Ria Boldway may have been also. It was formed “in order to better relations among students,” which I guess meant finding common ground among black and white and Japanese and Mexican and Filipino. I believed in that. But I wasn’t sure I believed in meeting in a room to get it done. A singing group made more sense.

What was the difference between a singing group and a group singing? A name. This group had a name. A few, in fact. For a time it was the Viscounts (that didn’t work on account of there was another Viscounts that turned up somewhere else), then the Vicounts (which stuck for a little while even though it looked like there was a letter missing), then the Biscaynes (that was the name of a Chevy sedan, full-size, four pillars). If you look hard enough, you can still find most of those names someplace: a high school yearbook, a single pressing, a newspaper ad. But the name that lasted the longest was the Viscaynes, with a “V” like Vallejo.

History talks about the Viscaynes like it was a major achievement in integration, but I didn’t see it that way. To me, it was a white group with one black guy (though Frank was Filipino). Chuck and I would play basketball sometimes. And I played with Ria Boldway, too. Not basketball: We flirted and then I saw her one time, sneaked it. Maybe a second time or a third, too. But we kept it quiet. Partly it was because her father didn’t like us dating, which was partly because of color. Partly it was because a relationship could shake up a group and we wanted to make it before anything could shake it.

From the start, I took the lead on the music side. I had experience singing and playing, which sharpened my ear for arrangements. The Viscaynes practiced until we got good and then practiced more until we got better. We sang around town, auditoriums, fairgrounds, hotels, military bases. Parents drove us to gigs. Sometimes we stayed overnight. Sometimes we even got paid.

At that time, American Bandstand was a national sensation. Every city had its own version. San Francisco’s was Dance Party on KPIX, Channel 5. A local actor named Dick Stewart (no relation) hosted. Kids danced, boys in jackets and ties, girls in dresses, as the camera got in close. Any record that could get feet moving got played: Santo and Johnny’s “Sleep Walk,” Johnny Zorro’s “Road Hog,” Chubby Checker’s “The Twist” and “Let’s Twist Again,” Joey Dee and the Starlighters’ “Peppermint Twist.” Lots of Johnnys, lots of twists.


Copyright © 2023 by Sylvester Stewart

Foreword copyright © 2023 by Ahmir Khalib Thompson