Funk, gospel call, integrated band on fire
I Want to Take You Higher is Sly and the Family Stone’s late-60s lift-off anthem: funk groove, gospel call-and-response, and a multiracial, mixed-gender band that made the lineup itself part of the message. Sly Stone (Sylvester Stewart) built the Family Stone as a working unit that could shout politics and still fill a dance floor. The song’s title is instruction and promise; the arrangement stacks horns, bass, and stacked vocals until the room has nowhere to go but up.
Woodstock 1969 fixed the track in festival lore when Sly led a massive singalong. The band’s hits—“Dance to the Music,” “Everyday People,” this one—rewired what soul-funk groups could look and sound like on national TV and FM radio. Sly’s later struggles and the long gap before late-career returns belong to another chapter; this cut remains the clearest public statement of the early Family Stone ideal.
We would like to do a singalong together. And see what happens is you got a lot of people that sing and for some reasons that are not unknown to me they just don’t want to.
(Sly Stone, Woodstock, 1969)
After Sly’s death on June 9, 2025, the song circulates again as shorthand for his architecture of band-as-community. Its inheritance is concrete: integrated funk as chart strategy and stage practice, and a Woodstock clip that still teaches how a groove can organize a crowd.
