TRUMPETING CYNTHIA ROBINSON
In the 1967 Top 10 hit “Dance to the Music” by Sly & the Family Stone, Sly Stone cued Cynthia Robinson for what would become her signature line. “Cynthia an’ Jerry got a message that says...,” he sang, referring to Robinson, the band’s trumpeter, and saxophonist Jerry Martini, upon which Robinson exclaimed: “All the squares go home!”
Those five words may have been the single time the world heard her speaking voice, but Robinson was a fundamental component of Sly’s sound. The Sacramento native was one of the first and one of the very few female trumpeters in the history of rock or soul—and perhaps the only one in a band that enjoyed nearly a dozen hit singles.
“I’d have to reckon that Cynthia Robinson was an unusual figure in R&B and Black music, because up to the mid-1960s most female instrumentalists, from Sister Rosetta Tharpe to Barbara Lynn, had been out front as featured artists,” reflects Grammy-nominated writer and reissue producer Alec Palao, who has assembled several Stone-related projects. “Rather, Cynthia was one of the first female team players, seamlessly integrated, along with her sax-playing sidekick Jerry Martini, as the influential horn ‘voice’ in Sly & the Family Stone.”
Robinson’s story, like that of so many players, begins in a school music room. She was a student at Sacramento High when her life path materialized. She’d been studying the flute since elementary school, but when she reached high school, flutes were in short supply, so she was handed a clarinet.
“They said, ‘Play it in the same way; just hold it in a different position,’” Robinson recalled to Paula Mejia of Rookie Magazine in 2013. “I really didn’t care much for it. Then I heard this kid playing trumpet in the practice room. Most high school bands are not in tune, but this kid must have taken private lessons. I listened to him, and I just thought, WOW. I didn’t even know what instrument it was, but he was playing it so beautifully! I stood by the door until he finished, and when he came out I said, ‘Can I try that?’ He said sure, took the mouthpiece out, wiped it on his shirt, put it back in and handed it to me. Everything I blew was off key, but I knew it could sound good if you worked on it, and that’s what I wanted to do.”
She continued her music studies at Sacramento City College. In an interview with Boston NPR affiliate WGBH-FM, Robinson explained that her choice of instrument wasn’t accepted by her peers “because guys played the saxophones, trumpets and drums. And the girls… would play other reed instruments and so forth, but usually they just gave me a hard time about playing trumpet.” She believed that “no guy in the world would let a girl play the trumpet in his group. So I decided, well, I’ll just… take some music courses, because I still wanted to play it.”
She didn’t even have a horn to call her own, but fate intervened again. “I was at this beatnik’s house one night and he had a trumpet just sitting in the middle of the floor,” Robinson reminisced. “I said, ‘Whoa! Whose is that?’ The beatnik said, ‘If you play it at my party Friday night you can have it.’ That Friday I was up in his loft, trying to find the notes to ‘Summertime.’ I kept missing and scratching the notes; I decided I couldn’t do it. I walked downstairs and everyone in the house was clapping. The beatnik said, ‘It’s yours.’ That was the first horn I ever owned. It smelled bad; it had all kinds of green crud inside the tubing, so I took it home, soaked it in hot water, cleaned it all out and it was mine.”
She had her axe, but breaking into the boys club was tough. At first only one local band would hire her, and at her first gig she learned that though she didn’t drink, a portion of the other players’ bar tab would be deducted from her $10 pay. Still, she kept returning to the bandstand.
She eventually began gigging with two Bay Area blues legends, Jimmy McCracklin and Lowell Fulson. “I used to hear all these guys on 78s at my mother’s when I was a teenager,” she recalled in Joel Selvin’s 1998 book, Sly & the Family
Stone: An Oral History. “When my friends came in with these 45s, I said I didn’t even want to hear about it. 78s were the thing for me! I used to daydream that I was onstage playing the solos… And I literally ended up being in a band that backed them up at different clubs. It was like a dream come true, but that was as big as I could dream.”
Still, she was chosen by her high-school acquaintance Sly Stone for The Stoners, the 1966 precursor to the Family Stone. While the rest of that outfit lacked what it took to fulfill Sly’s sky-high ambitions, he kept Cynthia in mind. In a 2014 interview at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame upon the band’s induction, Robinson remembered the day Sly, whom she’d known as Sylvester Stewart, came to Sacramento, asked to meet and pulled into her driveway in a 1954 Chevrolet: “His aura was forceful, but he was so gentle that I knew that this was something different. It was like a change in your life is getting ready to happen—maybe, if you take advantage of it.”
The chemistry in Stone’s new band was instantaneous and, for the trumpeter, overwhelming. “It was so powerful that I literally had to put my horn down and watch,” Robinson told Selvin. “It shocked me because I had never played [with] a group that was that together. I had heard it on record before, but I’d never been part of it. I knew from the first note that this [was] going to be something.”
Palao relates, “Right from the start, Sly gave Cynthia her very own showcase, a mournful, jazz-tinged treatment of ‘St. James Infirmary’ that was a highlight of any Family Stone performance, and which remained in the set long after they became nationally successful.”
“You know Cynthia was too afraid to ad-lib on the trumpet? But that’s because of the pressure she used to get from guys,” Stone told Palao in an unpublished interview. “She said, ‘I can’t play that solo; I’m scared.’ I said, ‘Don’t worry about that.’ She was ballsy, but she was afraid to let people down.”
Needless to say, Robinson overcome that reluctance and began to exude a blazing confidence that inspired countless musicians. And throughout her life, despite considerable drama, she steadfastly credited Stone for affording her the self-assurance she needed to seize the moment.
“Cynthia actually adapted that male trumpeter stance but presented it with a female twist. It was very engaging and kind of hypnotic. It really focused you on her performance,” the band’s drummer, Greg Errico, pointed out.
The Family Stone gigged, rehearsed and jammed relentlessly—they saw more of each other, Robinson would later recollect, than they did of their families and closest friends. But the endless hours of dialing in and tightening up their sound resulted in an absolutely volcanic groove and a thrilling esprit de corps. As great as Stone’s songs were, they wouldn’t have had nearly the impact without his incredible ensemble.
“Dance to the Music,” “Stand!” “Everyday People,” “I Want to Take You Higher,” “Hot Fun in the Summertime,” “You Can Make It If You Try,” “Thank You (Falettin Me Be Mice Elf Agin)” and other singles flew up the charts and shook the culture—this coed, multicultural crew melded R&B, rock, pop and even country elements into a cohesive, thundering music marked by unwavering optimism. In 1969, the band’s stomping Woodstock performance before a crowd estimated at 400,000 is the stuff of legend as the funk engine fine-tuned in sweaty California clubs roared into the stratosphere.
When the Family Stone wound down (1973’s “If You Want Me to Stay” was their final Top 20 hit), so did Sly. A long descent into drug use and chaos followed, and Cynthia—who had a child, Sylvette “Phunne” Stone, with the mercurial star—was drawn into the maelstrom.
“Sometimes [Sly] would call and tell my mom to come to the studio to work, but it wouldn’t be worth shit,” Phunne told Michael Gonzales in a story for WaxPoetics. “Wasn’t nobody really working; they’d be down there getting high, running around, with my mom standing there with her trumpet like, ‘What’s going on?’”
The pull of drugs and dissipation in Stone’s orbit eventually threatened Robinson. “Cynthia was a pretty sad case when I met her,” author Selvin confided to Gonzales. “She was practically homeless, sleeping on her daughter’s living-room floor and making sandwiches during lunch rush at a local deli. She was delusional about her relationship with Sly, something he no doubt exploited ruthlessly. To me, it seemed as though she was the victim of tremendous psychological abuse. It wasn’t a pretty picture.”
In time, though, Robinson regained control of her life and began gigging again—even basking in the legend that had grown up around her work with the Family Stone. She remained in demand as a session player, with credits including Funkadelic, Graham Central Station, Robert Cray and Stargard. She and Martini even conjured a bit of the vintage Family Stone brass dynamic on Cray’s 2003 track “Your Pal.” They later played in Prince’s band and as part of the post-Sly Family Stone group, with Phunne as lead vocalist.
“If you have that spark of creativity, you already know you have it because you have some kind of desire to do it,” Robinson told Mejia when asked what advice she had for young women with creative aspirations. “You have to keep doing it so your creativity can develop. Look and listen as much as you can and see what you can improve. If you’re a musician, there’s no instrument that can be withheld from you. If you’re drawn to it, develop the talent for it.”
Robinson continued to perform until she was stricken by cancer. Phunne went to stay with her after the onset and was heartbroken by what she saw. “You could see how she changed so quickly,” she told WaxPoetics’ Gonzales. “Her weight, the way she was moving, the expressions on her face―it was bad. I was crying all the time until my mother… sat me down and said, ‘I have lived my life. I have beautiful kids, grandkids. I’ve traveled the world three or four times, and, most importantly, I was blessed to do what I wanted to do.’”
Cynthia Robinson died in 2015 at age 71. But her legacy lives on.
Sarah Kramer, an L.A. trumpeter who’s played on sessions for Leonard Cohen, Levon Helm, Snooks Eaglin and Eddie Bo, considers Robinson her major influence. “Cynthia Robinson, to this day, is the only female trumpet player I’ve seen in a horn section who’s kicking ass, holding it down and laying it out in an all-male scenario,” Kramer marvels. “Some people are just born with a trumpet voice… I too have tried to carve out a spot as a trumpeter and pave a way for other women horn players, but Cynthia really had success in that, and continues to have impact and influence―not as a schtick, just as a human being with something to add to lift the music, regardless of gender. That’s powerful.”
Says Emilio Castillo, leader of enduring Bay Area funk band Tower of Power, “For me, as a teenager trying to have a hip soul band, seeing Sly with a female trumpet player was totally unique. She could really play and bring excitement to the live show. At the time she was the only female trumpeter on the scene and, honestly, there haven’t been many since. The other thing about Cynthia… was that she was a genuinely nice person.”
Martini, who’d transformed his home into Robinson’s hospice, called her “the sister I never had,” revealing, “We climbed the stairs of the Eiffel Tower together. She was so soulful, and her big presence really lit up the stage.”
Palao likewise deemed her “a powerful presence onstage” and allowed, “She carried the flag for what she represented.”
In a memorial Instagram post, Questlove declared: “Cynthia Robinson held that band down.” More than that, she helped lift the world up.
