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Soul Icon needs help

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Guys,

https://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c...DDGREMSLJK1.DTL

Anyone wanna help? Christmas coming , lots of gigs happening in UK, maybe a donation bucket or two or something? I'm not sure?

Somebody oughta do something though eh ...if not us ...then who? I'm happy to ad minister a fund or something through There's That Beat. In fact I'll kick it off....here's a hundred bucks.

Regards ,

Dave

www.theresthatbeat.com

www.hitsvillesoulclub.com

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Dave,

We have just donated the proceeds of our works Christmas do, £675, to the Pendleside Hospice. They might be a good recipient of any collection. We have raised over £2500 for them this year.

The story would also get in the Burnley Express if the soul community supported them!

Dave,

We have just donated the proceeds of our works Christmas do, £675, to the Pendleside Hospice. They might be a good recipient of any collection. We have raised over £2500 for them this year.

The story would also get in the Burnley Express if the soul community supported them!

slightly off topic, but knew you were a sensitIve soul :thumbsup:

ALB for Christmas and NY ,,,,KEV

too right. I remember johnny moore was going through hard times a couple of years before he died & someone came up with the idea of the 'lonely heart in the city' CD. a compulsory purchase really. tough times or not.

  • Author

some members did put up a few ebay auctions with all proceeds going towards this

any word on how they went ?

Hi Mike,

Monies were duly despatched to the fund set up for her. I'm taking the same route with the fund we have opened. (See other thread). I'll let the thread run week with later bump if you don't object , then close it and keep folks updated on what happened to their donations.

Regards,

Dave

www.theresthatbeat.com

www.hitsvillesoulclub.com

The Dog started a topic in soul on the web on here..Not many people know where it is because i see very few views on any topics there..Here is the story below..You can go into forum and click on soul on the web on follow the topic..Dave Moore is setting something up to help..

The fire killed her husband and destroyed everything. But not Sugar Pie's spirit.

Joel Selvin, Chronicle Senior Pop Music Critic

Tuesday, December 12, 2006

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Today was a good day for soul queen Sugar Pie DeSanto. She could laugh a little, even talk about the fire without crying. She may have wakened her manager with a panicked phone call around 5 that morning, but she was OK for now.

[MP3: "Life Goes On," Sugar Pie DeSanto]

She lit a cigarette and opened the window in the studio apartment the Catholic relief agency found for her in the Satellite Senior Center in downtown Oakland. The small, spotless room has only a few small pieces of inexpensive, brand-new furniture. She sits on a folded futon, where she sleeps at night, her sheets and blanket neatly stacked by the side.

It's been six weeks since she lost everything in an apartment blaze that killed her husband, "the love of my life," the 71-year-old R&B star says. Jesse Earl Davis was married to the singer twice over the course of a 27-year relationship.

"I think he saved my life and gave his own up," she says. "I think he really did. He shoved me down the whole hallway. I think he died trying to save my life."

The petite spitfire of a woman, who is known to the Red Cross, St. Mary's Center and all the other relief organizations as Peylia Davis, has carefully listed in a notebook the names of people who have helped her in the past weeks. She awoke in the middle of the night on Oct. 26 to find her Oakland living room in flames. Her husband, she says, pushed her out the door to safety. Wearing nothing but her nightgown, she didn't even have her teeth and she cut her bare foot on the way out.

"They hand me a metal box and his teeth," she says. "My husband's dentures and a box with some papers. That's what I got."

Down at the busy intersection of MacArthur and Telegraph, her burned-out, third-story apartment glares angrily at the street below. The blackened apartment is a total loss. Jesse Earl Davis was said to have been burned beyond recognition.

"He was my guy," she says softly, looking away, her eyes brimming with tears.

Davis was a strapping 26-year-old the day his future wife, sitting on her porch, saw him walking down the street in a pair of orange continental slacks, "skin tight to the bone," she recalls.

"We were together 27 years on and off," she says. "We did divorce for a few moments. Everybody has their problems. This takes the cake for me. I would never marry again. That's my last. I never will. I have to say he was the love of my life."

She is living on assistance, taking antidepressant medication and sleeping pills at night -- "nights are the worst," she says. She hasn't cooked for herself since the fire and says one takeout meal usually lasts her two days. The tiny woman has dropped from 129 pounds to 112.

"My nerves are bad, and I'm under great strain," she says.

Some of her colleagues in the music scene have thrown fundraisers, although the Celebrity Ballroom in Daly City is not the scene of rock star benefit concerts. Some of the old-time East Bay R&B guys such as the Dynamic Four or Johnny Talbot and De Thangs got together for an evening that raised more spirits than money. DeSanto herself jumped onstage and belted out some music. "The spirit hit me," she says.

Another old colleague, bluesman Jimmy McCracklin, turned his recent Biscuit & Blues performance into an event for DeSanto, and some local R&B singers such as Maria Muldaur dropped by to pay respects. There was a night at Kimball's Carnival. But only old-timers remember her now. Although she has done shows in Europe and elsewhere over the past several years, DeSanto has not been a national figure since she returned to live in the Bay Area in 1968.

For the past 35 years, she only made records because of Jim Moore, a retired Kaiser carpenter, who has been putting out DeSanto's records on his Jasman Records label since 1970 and serves as her manager. Moore knows something about what she is going through. His home burned to the ground in the Oakland hills fire 15 years ago.

She was the oldest girl in a family of 10 children who grew up in the Fillmore district. Her Filipino father worked making mattresses. Her African American mother was from Philadelphia. As a teen, one of her friends was a tough, plump delinquent who would change her name when she started her own recording career -- to Etta James. "This was one crazy family," wrote James in her 1995 autobiography. "I liked hanging out with them."

Bandleader Johnny Otis, who discovered and renamed James, also brought young Umpeylia Balinton to Los Angeles to record and gave her the name Sugar Pie (DeSanto came later). Her national career started with the 1960 recording, "I Want to Know," done with her first husband, guitarist Pee Wee Kingsley. Recorded by Oakland R&B pioneer Bob Geddins, the track was sold to Chicago's Chess Records and DeSanto moved to Chicago, leaving Kingsley behind, where she made records on her own for many years, as well as writing songs for other Chess artists.

She never made the big time. She had a midchart hit in 1964 with "Slip-In Mules," a sexy answer to "Hi-Heel Sneakers," and another 1964 record, "Soulful Dress," has been revived by Marcia Ball, among others. She is probably best known for a 1966 duet with James, "In the Basement."

After the No. 2 R&B chart success of "I Want to Know," DeSanto toured for two choice years with the James Brown revue. Known for her athletic, acrobatic stage manners, she and Brown would often close their show by jumping off pianos together and landing in splits. Brown, not famous for acknowledging his colleagues, introduced her to a Circle Star Theater audience in the early '80s, bringing her onstage (although Brown admitted in his autobiography that she was the only one of his female vocalists he didn't sleep with).

She also toured Europe in 1964 as the unlikely female vocalist with Sonny Boy Williamson, Lightnin' Hopkins, Howlin' Wolf, Willie Dixon and others on the American Folk Blues tour. "I refused all them old goats," she said in a current interview in Living Blues magazine.

She is a feisty dynamo known for turning flips and other, more raunchy, stage antics. She can be boastful ("I have had quite a life") and, a sentence or two later, turn shyly modest, almost girlish, talking about a social worker driving her to appointments "just like I was somebody truly special."

The Red Cross put her in a motel and gave her food vouchers immediately after the fire. Her sister contacted the mayor's office in Oakland, which put them in touch with Catholic relief agencies to help find her housing. "I had offers, but I didn't want to stay with my family," she says. "I'm a grown woman and I wanted to cry on my own. I wanted my privacy."

Some of the relief workers recognized her, even without her stage name. "They knew I was Sugar Pie after they saw me on TV," she says. "How can I hide? Hell, I've sung in Oakland for 50 years."

Her booking agent gave her a new electric keyboard, which is carefully poised on one of her few chairs. Another friend knew how much she loved the mink coats she lost and gave her one of hers. She also lost her house cat in the fire. "They let you have pets here," she says, "but you have to ask."

She doesn't have any plans. There are no gigs on her calendar. She really doesn't know what she is going to do.

"I have no living right now," she says, "since all this happened. But I do plan to come back, if I live to do it, one of these days." She perches on the edge of her sofa, a straw-colored ponytail hanging out the back of a floppy knit cap. She is wearing around her neck a cell phone her brother gave her. She can laugh and talk dirty, but she is still a stunned victim, living in shock. The breeze blows through her hollowed core. Behind her glasses, dark thoughts cloud over her eyes, this spunky old dame who had the stuffing knocked out of her. It's been a long, hard life for DeSanto, but never any harder than it is now.

Edited by little-stevie

Horible story steve :thumbsup:

Maybe a event, with all proceeds to sugar?

An online auction to raise some dosh?

My worst fear is to lose every thing in a fire.

See other thread here for more info and donation by Paypal that Dave's set up https://www.soul-source.co.uk/index.p...c=39159&hl=

Cheers big ears :thumbsup:

will send a fiver through tonight :thumbsup:

Ok Rachel..I knew there was somehting like that someplace but folk did not really know...They can all find it via here now :thumbsup: ...

Ok Rachel..I knew there was somehting like that someplace but folk did not really know...They can all find it via here now :thumbsup: ...

Yeah, I'm not sure if anyone listens to the dog.. :thumbsup: he probably talks more sense than the rest of us as well...

Dave, just read this mate and is there anything i can do via the show mate??? let me know, i will be able to spotlight this on the New Years Eve show and a couple of weekks after, perhaps a few 'Sugar Pie' Tunes and the contact details might be a start to raise her very sad plight, we need to do something i feel.

Regards - Mark Bicknell www.solarradio.com

  • Author

Dave, just read this mate and is there anything i can do via the show mate??? let me know, i will be able to spotlight this on the New Years Eve show and a couple of weekks after, perhaps a few 'Sugar Pie' Tunes and the contact details might be a start to raise her very sad plight, we need to do something i feel.

Regards - Mark Bicknell www.solarradio.com

I've sent you a mesage Mate.

Regards ,

Dave

www.theresthatbeat.com

www.hitsvillesoulclub.com

  • Author

Hi all,

Thought it was time I posted an update. So far as a group of fans we have raised over $500.00. A huge thank you to all who donated. The majority of donations were for $10/$5 so just goes to show it don't cost much to feel good about yourself. Not going to embarrass folks by naming them, but a BIG thank you to you all, you know who you are.

We plan on keeping the fund open until the end of the first week on January and I will post details of the final amount, where it's all going etc.

For anyone still wishing to donate simnply click on the link... https://www.theresthatbeat.com/sugarpie.html

I'll be back in January with all the details for you.

Regards,

Dave

Edited by Dave Moore

  • 4 weeks later...
  • Author

I spoke to Sugar Pie DeSanto this afternoon. She is how you'd expect a lady of her years to be holding up. She wanted me to pass on her 'eternal gratitude' for the being in the thoughts of soul fans.

I also received this from Jim Moore (no relation!), her manager .

Hello Dave,

I did receive the money order for $637.22 and Sugar Pie and I thank you and the fans.

My best,

Jim Moore

So, well done boys and girls.

Regards,

Dave

https://www.theresthatbeat.com/

https://www.hitsvillesoulclub.com/

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