Sly & The Family Stone: Greatest Hits [LEGACY/EPIC/SONY]

Why you'll love it

This Epic/Legacy reissue keeps the original 1970 running order, including three 1969 singles that first appeared on an album here. It peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard 200, the band's biggest album, and Rolling Stone ranked it among the 500 greatest albums of all time.

This edition

• Original 1970 track sequence
• Three 1969 singles first collected on LP here

About the album

Sly Stone's band was a radical idea in 1967: men and women, Black and white, playing together on stage in San Francisco and mixing brassy funk, psychedelic rock and gospel-tinged soul into something nobody had heard before. By 1970 they'd had a run of hits so strong that Epic put them together while the band worked on what came next.

It's twelve songs, and every one was a hit. "Dance to the Music" and "M'Lady" come from 1968, "Everyday People," "Stand!," "Sing a Simple Song" and "I Want to Take You Higher" from Stand!, and "Hot Fun in the Summertime," "Everybody Is a Star" and "Thank You" made their album debut here. Larry Graham's thumb-slapped bass practically invents a style on "Thank You," while Cynthia Robinson's trumpet and Rose Stone's keys keep the party sunny.

AllMusic's Stephen Thomas Erlewine called it one of the greatest party records of all time. Epic put it out to fill an eighteen-month gap between new albums, and as gap-fillers go, five million copies in America is a rather good one.

Also at Kops: more Sly & The Family Stone on vinyl · browse Classic Soul

Tracklist

Listen

On Epic / Legacy (cat# 88985432351), a reissue of the 1970 compilation.