Angie Stone

Angie Stone was an American singer, songwriter, producer and rapper born Angela Laverne Brown in Columbia, South Carolina, who first rose to prominence in the late 1970s as a member of The Sequence, one of the earliest all-female hip-hop groups, known for the hit «Funk You Up». After a stint fronting the R&B group Vertical Hold in the early 1990s, she launched a solo career at the turn of the millennium and became one of the defining voices of the neo-soul movement alongside contemporaries such as D'Angelo, with whom she had a long personal and creative relationship.

Her solo albums, including «Black Diamond» and «Mahogany Soul», combined classic soul phrasing with hip-hop-informed production, and her rich, gospel-rooted alto became a hallmark of early-2000s R&B. Songs such as «Brotha» and «Wish I Didn't Miss You» showcased her ability to fuse vulnerability with grit, and she was widely respected as a songwriter who contributed to records by other major R&B and hip-hop artists.

Stone's career spanned hip-hop's earliest days through the neo-soul renaissance, making her one of the few artists to bridge those two eras of Black music with genuine credibility in both.