March 12 2003

By Lee Hildebrand

WHEN BANDLEADER JOHNNY Otis spotted 19-year-old Umpeylia Marsema Balinton during a San Francisco talent contest in 1955, he offered to take her to Los Angeles to cut a record, and the petite Filipina African American R&B singer jumped at the chance. After all, he'd recently done the same for her friend, 15-year-old Jamesetta Hawkins, whom he rechristened Etta James and transformed into a star. And it meant Peylia would no longer have to share a bed with her three younger sisters and wash diapers and dishes.

Peylia – who was dubbed Little Miss Sugar Pie by Otis and later given the last name DeSanto by Oakland DJ-producer Don Barksdale – still doesn't do dishes. "My husband does," says the vocalist, now 67, showing off her long, immaculately manicured nails. "I do housework, but I use gloves. But I don't do dishes, I don't do floors, and I don't cook. My husband does the cooking."

Standing 4 feet, 11 inches when not in spiked heels, Sugar Pie DeSanto also keeps her thin frame limber and muscular by working out twice a week at a gym and doing daily sit-ups and push-ups at the North Oakland apartment she shares with her 48-year-old husband, Jessie. Until November, when a kid on a scooter knocked her off her feet, breaking her collarbone, she was doing splits and back flips as part of her act. She still can, however, roll her hips like Miss Wiggles and other shake dancers she encountered on the so-called chitlin circuit during the '50s and '60s. And as a fan of some 35 years and a onetime drummer in her band, I've seen her mount male audience members without warning, wrapping her legs around their torsos and grinding to the beat in simulation of sexual intercourse.

She may move like a burlesque queen and sometimes talk like a sailor, but the rhythm-and-blues diva insists she's a good girl. Even James Brown has said as much, writing in his 1986 autobiography, The Godfather of Soul, that she was the only female vocalist in his revue with whom he never slept.

The Godfather of Soul, DeSanto says, never even came on to her during the two years, 1960 to 1962, they performed together. They'd often close shows by jumping off a piano in tandem, landing on the stage in splits. "I was real mean," she explains. "When we went on tour, I had a little meeting with the band. I said, 'I want to make it clear to every man here that I don't want nothing, so don't bother me – and that goes for you too, James.' He said, 'I ain't botherin' you, you little mother.' "

Similar treatment was given to Howlin' Wolf, Lightnin' Hopkins, Sonny Boy Williamson, Willie Dixon, and the other bluesmen with whom she toured Europe in 1964 as the only woman in the American Folk Blues Festival. "I refused all them old goats," DeSanto boasts.

Sanctified blues

Born in Brooklyn and raised on Buchanan Street in San Francisco's Fillmore District, DeSanto is 1 of 10 children of a Filipino seaman and an African American pianist who'd met in Philadelphia. DeSanto spoke both English and Tagalog as a child and still speaks a little Tagalog at reunions with the Asian branch of her family. She sang popular standards at home, with her mother supplying accompaniment, and picked up enough piano to later use in writing songs.

"She didn't know anything about the blues," DeSanto says of her mother. "There were a lot of kids in the neighborhood whose parents were from, like, Memphis and Mississippi. I used to sneak over to their house, and they'd be playin' the blues. I knew all the standards like 'I'm in the Mood for Love.' But they'd be goin' 'bump-de-bump-de-bump,' and I'd go 'What is that?' I started liking it."

"A few of them were going to the sanctified church," adds DeSanto, who was raised Catholic. "They asked me to come over to the church one Sunday. After I went over there and saw all that ballyhoo and jumpin', I kinda liked it, so I went back again. And then I joined."

Unlike her friend Etta James, with whom she would cut the incendiary "In the Basement" and a couple of other duets for Chess Records in the mid '60s, success didn't come immediately for DeSanto as a recording artist. Her two 45s with the Johnny Otis band on Federal Records received scant attention outside California, as did a series of duets with singer-guitarist Pee Wee Kingsley for the Jody, Rhythm, Aladdin, and Music City labels. DeSanto had met Kingsley when both were performing in Stockton. They wed and moved in with his father, who lived in a West Oakland housing project.

He inspired her to begin writing songs, and one afternoon in 1959, they took a homemade demo tape of a rhumba-driven blues by DeSanto titled "I Want to Know" to Oakland producer Bob Geddins. Sensing a potential hit, Geddins rounded up some local studio players and held a session that very night. And to give the number pop appeal, he had DeSanto double track her voice to create a sound akin to that which producer Mitch Miller had used to great effect with singer Patti Page on songs such as "Tennessee Waltz."

The 45 on Geddins's Veltone label – currently available on DeSanto's MCA-Chess CD Down in the Basement – never cracked the pop chart, but it went all the way to number four on Billboard's list of R&B best-sellers during the summer of 1960 and made DeSanto a national attraction.

Chess playa

Soon she and Kingsley hit the road, which was sometimes rocky – particularly the time they got a speeding ticket in Tupelo, Miss. The cop, who doubled as the judge, refused to believe that Kingsley, a dark-skinned African American, was legally married to DeSanto, who is fair-skinned and had long, straight hair. Kingsley was jailed on morals charges, and their car impounded. DeSanto checked into a hotel and waited two weeks while a copy of their Nevada marriage license was tracked down and mailed to Mississippi.

Later that year, in Washington, D.C., DeSanto and Kingsley had a falling out. She went on alone to the Apollo Theater in New York, where she shared a bill with Ike and Tina Turner and James Brown, who asked her to join his show. Kingsley returned to Oakland, robbed a Bank of America branch, and served two years in prison. "He didn't have Sugar Pie anymore, and the money wasn't comin' like it was," she says of her late first husband's short-lived criminal career.

After recording several more singles for Geddins on which she was backed by Brown's musicians under the leadership of drummer Nat Kenrick, DeSanto signed with Chicago's Chess Records and moved to the Windy City. She scored only two minor hits during her seven years at Chess but fared better as a songwriter, penning tunes for such Chess artists as Fontella Bass, the Dells, Little Milton, Bobby McClure, Minnie Riperton, and Billy Stewart. DeSanto says she received $10,000 for signing with Chess – "They wanted me real bad 'cause I was hot" – but saw no royalties from her recordings and compositions for the company until recently, after her current manager, James C. Moore, began pursing them on her behalf.

Back in the Bay Area since the late '60s, DeSanto has been recording for Moore's Oakland-based Jasman Records for the past 30 years. She's done one LP and three CDs for the label, including 1997's Classic Sugar Pie, cut in New Orleans with Wardell Quezerque, an arranger noted for such hits as King Floyd's "Groove Me" and Jean Knight's "Mr. Big Stuff." Her Jasman recordings, like her earlier sides for Chess and other companies, reflect the eclecticism of DeSanto's influences – from down-home blues to uptown soul, with frequent hints of jazz. Indeed, she and Moore are talking about doing a CD of jazz standards with piano trio support.

DeSanto's contralto voice is raspier than it was in the Chess days, and her delivery is mellower. And if her recent injury has forced her to back off the acrobatics, her focus now is more on the music. "I'm toning down," she says. "I want people to see that I can really sing."