But there's a more obscure name on the Pioneer program who embodies the ethos of the foundation, which aids aging R&B stars in need.
That would be Sugar Pie DeSanto, the 72-year-old singer who recorded R&B gems such as "I Want to Know," and "Do I Make Myself Clear?" for Chess Records in the 1960s.
"I was shocked," says DeSanto, when she found out she was to be honored at the gala, the second in Philadelphia since the foundation moved from New York to Broad and Chestnut in 2005 at the behest of Philadelphia International Records cofounder Kenny Gamble.
"But then again, I feel that this is due me by now," adds the 4-foot-11 vocal powerhouse, who was born Umpeylia Marsema Balinton to an African American mother and a Filipino father who met in Philadelphia, when her father was in the U.S. Navy. "After all the years I put in this business, they finally recognized that I am a true pioneer."
DeSanto grew up in the Fillmore district of San Francisco. "All my neighbors were different kinds of people," she remembers. "Japanese, Chinese, Russian. We all just got along. I was not raised Southernly," she says. "I didn't know what chitlins was until I was about 17."
Named Sugar Pie by bandleader Johnny Otis, who discovered her in 1955, DeSanto toured with James Brown's revue for two years in the early '60s. "They used to call me the Lady James Brown," she says. "He got tired of me cause I made him work so hard."
She experienced racism from a unique perspective. Because she was light-skinned, she was allowed in the front of restaurants, while her band ate in the kitchen. "I would always go in the back and eat with them," she says. And her first husband, guitarist Pee Wee Kingsley, was arrested in Georgia "for being with a white girl, which was supposed to have been me. I really didn't like the South when I was coming up."
