Sugar Pie DeSanto, the 87-Year-Old Firecracker of R&B, Plots Her Comeback

This story is part of the series 8 Over 80, celebrating artists and cultural figures over the age of 80 who continue to shape the greater Bay Area.

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ugar Pie DeSanto has always had guts. At 15, she snuck out of her parents’ house to sing in clubs, with baseballs in her bra to make herself look older. At 26, she quit her gig as James Brown’s opening act to headline her own show. And at 84, she was regularly on stage doing backflips, and singing upside down with her legs wrapped around the waist of a lucky gentleman from the audience.

She might be temporarily retired due to health issues — key word: temporarily — but DeSanto is plotting her comeback. “The maker’s been good to me, you know, and I pray every day because I want him to bring me back to turn that backflip for ’em one more time,” says the singer, now 87, then cackles. “They’ll have a heart attack.”

That bold streak marks DeSanto’s approach to, well, just about everything, and her singing talents and gumption have taken her to some incredible places in her almost-nine decades.

How Umpeylia became Sugar Pie

Born Umpeylia Balinton to a Filipino father and Black mother in Brooklyn in 1935, DeSanto grew up in San Francisco’s Fillmore District as the oldest girl of 10 siblings. At the time, the Fillmore was a multicultural neighborhood where Black, Chinese and Italian families lived side by side.

“The good thing about it, we could all mix with each other,” she says. “You know, it’s not like now with a bunch of crap going on. The kids would come to your house and just walk in and say, ‘Hey, mom.’ … There wasn’t no locking no doors.”

One of those neighborhood kids was Etta James, who was three years younger. She was raised by foster parents and relatives, and came over often to sing with the Balinton girls on the back porch. She and DeSanto developed a lifelong friendship that would result in two classic soul duets: 1965’s “Do I Make Myself Clear” and 1966’s “In the Basement.”

But before DeSanto made chart-topping singles, she honed her skills singing live at jazz and blues clubs in the Fillmore, known back then as the Harlem of the West. After Black Americans from the South moved to California port cities during World War II, the music scene in San Francisco and Oakland flourished. DeSanto, who grew up playing classical piano, fell in love with the sound.

Her mother supported her musical ambitions, but her father wasn’t having it. One night, he showed up to a club during one of her performances — and pulled her off the stage by her ear. “‘Who told you you could shake your booty?’” DeSanto remembers him chastising her in his Filipino accent. “That was funny,” she chuckles, then pauses: “Wasn’t funny then, though.”

Still, DeSanto was undeterred. One night in 1954, when she competed in a talent show at the Ellis Theater, Johnny Otis was in the audience. The Vallejo-born, Greek American musician known as the “godfather of rhythm and blues” had discovered 13-year-old Etta James three years earlier, and he was taken by 19-year-old DeSanto’s powerful voice and irrepressible charisma.

Otis convinced her to go with him to Los Angeles, where she recorded her first singles, the lovesick slow-dance number “Please Be True” and uptempo doo-wop track “Boom Diddy Wawa Baby.” She was still going by her birth name, Umpeylia Balinton. “‘We can’t put that on no record,’” she recalls Otis saying. “‘You’re so little and cute, you could be Sugar Pie.’ And that’s how I got my name.”

Despite her youth and 4-foot-11-inch stature, DeSanto became a force to be reckoned with. Did she ever have to fight for respect as a female musician in the 1950s? She says no. “I took over the studio, honey,” she tells me. “And a couple of times I put the drums over their head, you know, hittin’ ’em across their head ’cause they pissed me off. I’ve always been very technical about my music.”

James Moore, DeSanto’s longtime manager, says he’s heard stories of how exacting she could be from other musicians, including the late Maurice White of Earth, Wind & Fire. “Some guy hit a wrong note,” Moore recalls White telling him. “He said Sugar Pie started using curse words that he’d never heard before, and paint started peeling off the walls.”

By 1959, DeSanto arrived on the national stage with her hit single “I Want to Know,” a danceable, piano-driven kiss-off to a former lover she co-wrote with legendary Oakland blues producer Bob Geddins and performed with first husband, bandleader Pee Wee Kingsley. The song hit No. 4 on the Billboard R&B chart.

The record began opening doors, and DeSanto was invited to perform at New York’s famed Apollo Theater, where James Brown was the headliner. Though he was a big name, DeSanto didn’t let on that she was impressed when he invited her to open for him on tour. She remembers him saying, “‘I want you, you little girl.’” “You want me for what?” she shot back. “‘To open my show. You really good,’” she recalls Brown growling, to which she replied coolly: “Oh?”

DeSanto and Brown hit the road with their raucous live show. DeSanto sang while jumping over the piano into a split, earning her the nickname “the Lady James Brown.” Her memory of the exact tour dates is a little spotty, but newspaper records reveal advertisements for her concerts with Brown in cities like Philadelphia, Charlotte, Oklahoma City and Phoenix in 1960 and 1961.

This was during the civil rights movement, and DeSanto was shocked when she arrived from the multicultural Bay Area to the segregated South. Because she was racially ambiguous, with straight hair, venues would invite her to dine inside their restaurants but relegate her band to the barrels out back. She found this unacceptable. “Are you losing your mind?” she’d spit.

“‘If they can’t eat where I eat, then I ain’t eatin’ at all, and they ain’t either,’” DeSanto would tell the white venue staff before storming out. “Boy, they was pissed off,” she remembers. “But they wouldn’t start no stuff because they knew we weren’t gonna take it.”

But despite her hard exterior, “that hurt my soul,” she says.

Still, DeSanto thrived on tour, and eventually decided to split off from Brown to headline her own concerts, much to his displeasure. “He said, ‘You can’t leave me.’ The hell I can,” she recounts with that mischievous cackle, noting that the two later reconciled during a night of gambling in Reno.

Challenges in the music industry

Her success eventually took her to Chicago, where she spent most of the ’60s at Chess Records. In 1964, her seductive, bluesy single “Slip-In Mules” hit No. 10 on Billboard. With a track record of writing her own hits, she became a staff songwriter at Chess, where she collaborated often with her songwriting partner, Shena DeMell. In her time there, DeSanto penned over 100 songs for musical greats like Minnie Riperton, Fontella Bass and The Whispers.

It was during this era that DeSanto’s profile grew internationally.  There’s a video of her belting out “Rock Me Baby” — a suggestive, slinky tune — at the 1964 American Folk Blues Festival in England, her powerful voice erupting like a geyser as her body twists with each note. The audience was floored. “They tore down the walls and everything,” she says. “They jumped up and started dancing and howling.”

Her time in the U.K. clearly made a lasting impression. In 1966, the Thanet Times and East Kent Pictorial, a British newspaper, called her “America’s top female blues singer.”

For DeSanto and many of her peers, popularity didn’t always equal financial success in the music industry. Record companies often took advantage of young, Black artists’ eagerness to record their music, and weren’t transparent when it came to rights and royalties. They’d pay for things like hotels and cars (in DeSanto’s case, a tan Cadillac that matched her dog).

“But as far as giving you a statement saying, ‘We sold 10,000 records, we’re paying you 5% or whatever, you know, so this is how much money you have.’ She never got that,” says her manager, Moore, adding that he’s still tracking down her royalties from when her songs were featured in the hit series The Handmaid’s Tale and the Oscar-nominated 1999 film The Hurricane.

“Talk about reparations — that’s where the reparations should start,” Moore says. “The record labels made hundreds of millions of dollars and [the artists] didn’t make anything, comparatively speaking. Music is America’s greatest export to the rest of the world. … it was all started in the Black community.”

Yearning to return to the stage

By the ’70s, DeSanto returned to Oakland, and kept up a rigorous performance schedule that lasted for five decades. Her fierceness never extinguished, even in the face of immense challenges. In 2006, she lost her husband Jesse Earl Davis in a house fire that destroyed her belongings. They were together off and on for 27 years and married twice.

In 2012, she lost her childhood friend Etta James, who was 73 years old when she passed away from leukemia and other health complications. She and DeSanto had grown apart over the decades because of James’ struggles with drug addiction, but there was always love there. “That was my girl,” DeSanto says. “That really hurt me deeply that she passed.”

These days, DeSanto is focused on her own health. After being treated for cancer in her neck, she continues to struggle with respiratory issues. Still, her feisty spirit is strong as ever.

“I run this place,” she says with a sly wink when I visit her outside her senior apartment building.

“Hey, big guy!” she calls after a bearded man passing by, cracking up at her own antics.

DeSanto’s most recent album, Sugar’s Suite, came out in 2018, and in 2020 she received the Arhoolie Award for extraordinary individuals who preserve traditional music. She’s still writing songs from her bed, and is determined to one day make it back to the stage. She was crushed when she couldn’t go to Chicago on June 10, when she received a mayoral proclamation for her contributions to the blues.

“It ain’t about the money, honey,” she says. “It’s about me singing to the people and making everybody happy.”

“You don’t know how bad I miss it,” she continues. “When you’ve been given all those years to the public that I have, I miss my people.”