Sugar Pie DeSanto obit

Sugar Pie DeSanto, Larger-Than-Life R&B Performer, Dies at 89

 

She was not on the list.

Sugar Pie DeSanto, the San Francisco R&B singer known for her larger-than-life voice and personality, died on Friday, Dec. 20. She was 89 years old.

“My sister was one of a kind and you will never see anyone like her again,” wrote Domingo Balinton, her brother, in a post on Facebook. “She was full of energy and commanded respect when she walked on stage as well as in life. I am truly going to miss her.”

Balinton noted that DeSanto died in her sleep. No cause of death was given.

DeSanto, who performed well into her 80s, scored her first hit in 1959 with “I Want to Know,” a piano-driven, danceable kiss-off to a former lover that showed off her powerful, raspy voice. Following that initial success, James Brown invited her to open for him on tour, where she rivaled the Godfather of Soul in stage presence and theatrics, earning her the nickname “the Lady James Brown.”

Born Umpeylia Balinton in Brooklyn, New York to a Black mother and Filipino father in 1935, DeSanto moved to San Francisco’s Fillmore District as a child. She was the oldest girl of 10 siblings, and was childhood friends with Etta James, who became a lifelong friend and collaborator.

After World War II, the Fillmore’s vibrant Black businesses and nightclubs earned the neighborhood the nickname the “Harlem of the West.” In the 1950s, DeSanto began sneaking out to perform as a young teenager. Johnny Otis, a producer known as “the godfather of rhythm and blues,” discovered her when she performed at a talent show at 19 years old.

“As she said, ‘I like to leave the stage smokin’.’ And she did,” her late manager, James Moore, told KQED in 2023.

DeSanto was exacting about her craft. Often the only woman in the studio, and standing at just four feet, eleven inches tall, she developed a reputation for her tough personality and mischievous humor.

“I took over the studio, honey,” she told KQED in 2023. “And a couple of times I put the drums over their head, you know, hittin’ ’em across their head ’cause they pissed me off. I’ve always been very technical about my music.”

After touring with James Brown in 1960 and 1961, DeSanto made her way to Chicago to work with Chess Records. Her bluesy, seductive single “Slip-In Mules” hit No. 10 on Billboard in 1964; that same year, she traveled to London to perform at American Folk Blues Festival. The performance earned her a following overseas: In 1966, the Thanet Times and East Kent Pictorial, a British newspaper, called her “America’s top female blues singer.”

In the ’60s, DeSanto became a staff songwriter at Chess — unusual for a woman at the time — and with her creative partner Shena DeMell, she penned lyrics for musical greats like Minnie Riperton, Fontella Bass and The Whispers.

“That is one of the reasons I think that she has lasted,” said filmmaker Cheryl Fabio, who featured DeSanto in her documentary Evolutionary Blues. “She was a writer and a poet and a lyricist. So that when she’s performing, she’s telling you something that’s on her heart and on her mind.”

Through Chess, DeSanto and Etta James put out two duets: 1965’s “Do I Make Myself Clear,” a rock ‘n’ roll song that sent a warning shot to a cheating man, and the 1966 house-party anthem “In the Basement.”

Yet despite her international renown, DeSanto was part of a generation of influential Black artists who were not fairly compensated for their work. “Those people made the music business. The record labels made hundreds of millions of dollars, and those people would make anything, comparatively speaking,” said Moore, her manager, in 2023, noting that labels often didn’t share earnings statements for royalties. “And of course, music is America’s greatest export to the rest of the world.”

By the ’70s, DeSanto moved to Oakland, and kept up a rigorous performance schedule that lasted for five decades. Her fierceness never extinguished, even in the face of immense challenges. In 2006, she lost her husband Jesse Earl Davis in a house fire that destroyed her belongings. They were together off and on for 27 years, and married twice.

In 2012, she lost her childhood friend Etta James, who was 73 years old when she passed away from leukemia and other health complications. “That was my girl,” DeSanto says. “That really hurt me deeply that she passed.”

DeSanto continued to perform throughout the 2010s until the COVID-19 pandemic. Her onstage antics — backflips, straddling male audience members and singing upside down — earned her ovations at events like the Redwood City Blues Festival.

Liam O’Donoghue, host of the podcast East Bay Yesterday, befriended her after he interviewed her in 2017. She showed up to the interview in head-to-toe leopard print, big jewelry and a statement hat; afterwards, she asked him to take her to the grocery store, where she relished attention from fans as she shopped.

“She is one of the people who I will never, ever forget,” O’Donoghue says. “She just blew me away with just everything about her, her presence, her energy, her stories, her language. She was just vivacious.”

DeSanto’s most recent album, Sugar’s Suite, came out in 2018, and in 2020 she received the Arhoolie Award for extraordinary individuals who preserve traditional music. In 2023, she received a mayoral proclamation in Chicago for her contributions to the blues.