Sugar Pie DeSanto, the electrifying R&B singer and songwriter who recorded the hit duet “In the Basement” with Etta James and toured with the Johnny Otis and James Brown revues, died on Friday at the home of her brother, the guitarist Domingo Balinton, in Oakland, Calif. She was 89.
Mr. Balinton said she died of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and congestive heart failure after two months in hospice care.
Ms. DeSanto’s first record to reach the charts, “I Want to Know,” was a gutbucket blues featuring her raspy vocals recorded on two tracks so she could harmonize with herself. The song was also one of her biggest hits, climbing to No. 4 on the Billboard R&B chart in 1960.
Its follow-up, “Slip-In Mules (No High Heel Sneakers)” — an answer to Tommy Tucker’s “Hi-Heel Sneakers” — was her highest-ranking single on the pop chart. It stalled just outside the Top 40 in 1964 and reached No. 10 on the R&B chart.
Ms. DeSanto never received the widespread acclaim enjoyed by Ms. James, her friend and collaborator, and other female R&B singers of her day. The power and grit of her music and persona nevertheless anticipated, among other things, the sexual braggadocio and swagger of 1970s soul singers like Millie Jackson and Laura Lee and latter-day hip-hop artists like Lil’ Kim and Foxy Brown.
“I got everything I know I need to keep my man satisfied,” Ms. DeSanto, who was 4 feet 11 inches tall, boasted over the lean bluesy backbeat of “Use What You Got.” “’Cause if you know how to use what you got, it doesn’t matter about your size.”
“Soulful Dress,” a song that would become a perennial in the set list of the Texas swamp-blues singer Marcia Ball, found Ms. DeSanto taking on her would-be rivals. “Don’t you girls go getting jealous when I round up all your fellas,” she growled, backed by stinging electric guitar. “’Cause I’ll be at my best when I put on my soulful dress.”
Ms. DeSanto was also known for her jaw-dropping acrobatics onstage, including back flips and splits, and for dancing wildly out into the audience. Widely regarded as the female James Brown, she performed at the Apollo in Harlem and other prominent Black theaters. When she toured with Mr. Brown in the 1960s, she often gave the hardest-working man in show business, as Mr. Brown was known, a run for his money with her flamboyant performances.
“We used to talk about it all the time,” Ms. DeSanto said, reminiscing about the two years she spent on the road with Mr. Brown in a 2018 interview with Blues Blast magazine.
“‘Now look here, Sugar,’ he’d say, ‘don’t you jump off no piano tonight,’” noting that Ms. DeSanto would join him onstage and the two sometimes ended the show by simultaneously jumping off the piano and landing in a split.
“I’d say, ‘Why not?,’ and he’d say, ‘Because you make me work too hard!’”
Ms. DeSanto’s most enduring recording was probably “In the Basement,” a lusty party anthem in which she and Ms. James, a childhood friend, exult in the prospect of cutting loose on a Saturday night. It reached the R&B Top 40 in 1966; 33 years later, it was heard on the soundtrack to Norman Jewison’s movie “The Hurricane,” in which Denzel Washington played the unjustly imprisoned boxer Rubin Carter.
Umpeylia (pronounced oom-puh-LIE-uh) Marsema Balinton was born on Oct. 16, 1935, in Brooklyn, one of 11 children of Alice (Coates) and Egnacio Bindo Balinton. Her father, who was Filipino, was a merchant seaman. Her mother, who was Black, was a concert pianist who encouraged her children’s musical pursuits.
“That’s who taught me my music, my mama,” Ms. DeSanto, who also studied ballet as a child, told Blues Blast. “She was a classical pianist, and she played ever since she was a very, very little young girl.” Her father, Ms. DeSanto said in a 2010 interview on the NPR program “Fresh Air,” “couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket.”
When Umpeylia was 4, the family moved to San Francisco, where they lived in the Fillmore district. By the time she was a teenager she was entering — and winning — local talent contests. In 1955, at the Ellis Theater in San Francisco, she came to the attention of the R&B impresario Johnny Otis, who hired her to perform in his revue. Mr. Otis also gave her the stage name Sugar Pie DeSanto, which he figured would be easier for English speakers to understand than Umpeylia Balinton.
In 1962, after touring with James Brown and enjoying middling success with “I Want to Know,” Ms. DeSanto signed a recording and songwriting contract with Chess Records and moved to Chicago. While there she teamed up with Shena DeMell, another female songwriter — a rare state of affairs in the era’s male-dominated music business — with whom she wrote songs recorded by Billy Stewart, Little Milton and Fontella Bass, among numerous others.
They also wrote “Do I Make Myself Clear,” a song recorded by Ms. DeSanto and Ms. James that reached the Hot 100 in 1965. Sounding like a female Sam and Dave, the two women issued a close-harmony ultimatum to their two-timing men.
The late 1960s were leaner times for Ms. DeSanto; among other things, she had disputes with Chess over compensation for her contributions to the label. Disenchanted, she left Chicago and returned to the Bay Area to be closer to her family.
In the early ’70s she signed with Jasman Records, a small label operated by James Moore, who would serve as her manager for the next five decades; among the albums she released on the label were “Sugar Is Salty” (1993) and “Refined Sugar” (2006). She also continued to perform and, when necessary, worked as a paralegal to make ends meet.
Tragedy struck in 2006 when a fire consumed her apartment in Oakland, killing her husband of 27 years, Jesse Davis, and destroying everything she owned.
Ms. DeSanto received the Pioneer Award from the Rhythm & Blues Foundation in 2008. She was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame this year.
In addition to her brother, she is survived by a sister, Alice Tennyson.
Fiercely independent and self-possessed, Ms. DeSanto more than held her own while working alongside imposing male artists like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf at Chess in the 1960s.
“I was one of the toughest women you would find, and a big mouth, and I didn’t take anything from no one,” she recalled in an interview with James Porter for “Flying Saucers Rock ’n’ Roll: Conversations With Unjustly Obscure Rock ’n’ Soul Eccentrics” (2011), edited by Jake Austen.
“I’m not crazy,” she went on to say. “I’m just talented, and I’m smart, and I’m tired of you guys holding me back.”
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