The Bride’s Side
Even as a teenager, Sheila Horne was a firecracker – bursting with energy and a lightingstick voice that would quickly catch the ear of the biggest name in funk. Sheila claims to have been rocking around town, simply minding her own business in between classes at Michigan State, when she was brought over to Detroit’s legendary United Sound Systems studio (possibly by vocalist/keyboardist Clip Payne, or by Bootsy Collins’ guitar tech E-man). If she didn’t know who George Clinton or Bootsy were, Sheila could still feel the pull of a good opportunity.
“So I got in the studio and I just happened to have my little tape with me – you know, you gotta walk with your stuff.” Sheila met Bootsy and chatted up singer Lynn Mabry, who was lounging on some stairs playing music from a tape player; Sheila handed Mabry her demo cassette. “It's playing as George comes walking down the stairs with these big ass, like seven-inch boots and this all-red leather outfit. It was like 90 degrees outside. It was crazy.” Clinton – then in the height of fantastical P-Funk freakiness – was intrigued by Sheila’s voice, a wide range with a serious rock swagger a la Bettye LaVette or Tina Turner.
“And he listens and listens. And he said, ‘Do you have a passport?’ And I'm like, no, why? ‘Because you need to get one. We're going to Europe, you're hired.’ It was like something like a dream. I thought he was full of crap, and I was super young, but he was serious.” Sheila scrambled to get a passport and climbed aboard the mothership for Parliament-Funkadelic’s 32-date One Nation/“Anti-Tour” in 1978.
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Citizenship in the P-Funk Nation lasts a lifetime, and Sheila Horne (now Sheila Brody) rose through levels of governance. Originally a bridesmaid – a back-up singer for the Brides of Funkenstein – Sheila became a Bride in 1979 and was the unofficial (but hotly contested) lead singer on the group’s sophomore LP, Never Buy Texas From a Cowboy. She’d dip in and out of the band, touring with Rick James as an original Mary Jane Girl, swooping back in to write tracks for George’s solo projects, then taking flight on her own pop efforts before coming back into the P-Funk orbit as an All-Star. Operating under a number of monikers, Sheila unleashed dance hits, house and even recorded with Public Enemy.
Much like her stage names, Sheila Brody’s voice is both distinct and transmutable. Sheila has the enviable ability to sing in a variety of styles without sounding forced, and will make it sound like she’s been doing so for years – a trait that caught the ear of Dr. Funkenstein himself. “Sheila first showed up at United Sound and…[was] perfect vocally,” Clinton says from his home in Tallahassee. “Perfect at the time for the sound. Sheila had very good tone.”
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That Sheila wasn’t already hip to Parliament Funkadelic by ’78 isn’t entirely without reason – even if the band had recorded at least part of the popular Mothership Connection at the same studio she met George Clinton in. Sheila grew up in Syracuse, New York; not too far from Detroit as the crow flies but a world away from the musical epicenter of the Motor City. Syracuse “was generic. There were no R&B stations; it was all rock and pop and that’s what I sang.” Sheila came of age on Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix and the odd song from Tina Turner that would creep through the ether. By the time her family moved to Detroit’s Highland Park neighborhood circa ’72, her world was less about freeing your mind and more about climbing the stairway to heaven.
In high school, she started singing with a rock band called Holden Caufield that rehearsed in toney Grosse Point. “I went to Cass Tech downtown and gas was crazy through the roof at the time, so [the band] decided that I could stay at their home,” Sheila recalls. “No Blacks lived in Grosse Pointe. Their little brother was amazed by me because he'd never seen a Black person in the flesh.” In a bit of what would become her trademark drive and extraordinary ability to see the bright side, Sheila wasn’t put off. The rock band was one of a number of “beautiful experiences” that took Sheila from club to club around town, and eventually into the Funkadelic family.
But before Sheila could get knee deep with P-Funk in Europe, George Clinton had to ask permission from Mom. “She said ‘OK, as long as you look after my daughter. You got to give me your word.’ And he promised,” says Sheila. “I think that little extra thing is important. He was very, very protective of me. He let [the other girls] do whatever they wanted to do, but he would not let me get away with anything.” Adds Clinton, “Sheila has a big mouth, so you had to take care of her!”
Sheila joined the Bridesmaids as the larger band (Clinton had three at the time: Parliament, Funkadelic, and Booty’s Rubber Band, with varying levels of distinction onstage) was hitting one of its heights. The Anti-Tour coincided with the introduction of the Brides of Funkenstein (whose 1978 debut Funk or Walk, featured Dawn Silva and Lynn Mabry, former background singers for Sly and the Family Stone) and Funkadelic’s first commercial break. Having briefly retired the mothership after serious touring, Funkadelic was not ready for the sheer response to One Nation.
“We had no limos, no roadies. You had to go in and set up the shit yourself,” Clinton later told Rolling Stone. “We didn’t have time to get a production behind it. We just said, ‘Get a flag and some fatigues,’ and the band went out as an army.” P-Funk were truly a small platoon: there was George Clinton, Bootsy and his crew, the Brides and Bridesmaids, sometimes a comedian, and a cast of players supporting everyone. “On the stage, we was harder than anybody else,” Clinton states. Describing a November 1978 gig in West Hollywood, writer Scott Goldfine noted “the Brides…were a feast for entranced eyes and dancing feet.” Around midnight, Clinton strolled “on stage amid a deafening and orgasmic collision of electrified sound and roaring hollers. The place rocked for three hours until the wee hours of the morning.”
The vibe was overwhelming, completely foreign and a serious educational experience for Sheila Horne. “There was a lot of drugs going on, but I never did acid. I was so corny! I've seen giant blank pages [of blotter acid], but I just never really desired to have that feeling,” she recounts, adding that she did free her mind with psychedelic mushrooms. “George used to crush them up like really, really fine with a coffee grinder and put it in organic honey, and then stir it up really good.” The singer was naïve, and also felt pressure to please her boss – often lending Clinton money for crack or holding drugs. “I didn’t know what speed balling was, I didn’t know what heroin was. George used to call me Miss Trouble Blind – I didn’t look for trouble, but it was definitely there.”
Still, that naivete kept Sheila on a fairly straight path, allowing her to learn from other musicians. “I have lot of positive memories. I love watching George perform; I learned a lot from him on the stage, like the way he gets when he gets off the stage and into the crowd,” Sheila says. “I remember a lot of camaraderie. Back in the day we were cliquish; there were just little quirky things that we would do to know that we were all together as one. We were actually one nation under the sun.” Family bonding aside, Sheila was determined to make her mark.
“Sheila was really driven. In P-Funk, that that becomes a thing; it’s like being at Motown. There's so much talent around you, that the competition makes you have to stay on toes,” Clinton remembers. “Sheila was one of the ones who was definitely on her toes all the time for whatever the new sound was. She was able to adapt to whatever the new booty shaking music is; Shelia was definitely one of the girls that I appreciated.”
With such a massive band, a changing of the guard is to be expected. “When somebody leaves, somebody else'll take your place really quick,” Clinton notes. Sheila and Jeanette McGruder graduated from Bridesmaids to proper Brides of Funkenstein and headed into the studio to record the band’s sophomore effort, Never Buy Texas From a Cowboy. Later deemed one of Rolling Stone’s top 50 albums of all time, the Atlantic Records release is all over the place – part spoken word funhouse and part disco romance, with a heavy dose of synth and traditional Parliament funked-out guitar. Clinton brought a handful of Detroit heavy-hitters into the studio, including prolific soul keyboardist Rudy Robinson and guitarist “Blackbyrd” McKnight (of Headhunters fame).
The variety of sounds on Texas (perhaps a result of being produced by Clinton, Bootsy and Ron Dunbar) required a singer with range, and Sheila’s background in rock and indoctrination into the world of funk were the perfect blend. Horne sang lead on the album’s title track – one of Clinton’s favorite songs. “It was mixing that Supremes sound in with the Funkadelic sound, in with the rock sound of the guitar solo. I'm really proud of that song, and Sheila really did come through,” he says. “Sheila was able to bounce from that Diana Ross sound to the rock sound very easy, so she was pretty dominant in that particular song.”
Sheila sings lead on much of the record, her ability to hit high notes in a scratchier, rock style and tap a deeper R&B register in the same song a compliment to McGrubber and Silva. “We spent a lot of time on all those songs, but ‘Mother May I’ was one that turned me on to how varied [Sheila] could be,” recalls Clinton. A one-take queen, Sheila believes that her skill -- and perhaps the sweet-but-pushy attitude that seemed to have a particular sway with George -- caused much friction with OG Bride Dawn Silva, who long considered herself the group’s leader.
“One of them could really sing and control the stage, and one didn't have the same kind of talent but she was extremely beautiful and graceful,” says Archie Ivy, Clinton’s right hand man and long-time P-Funk publicist/manager. “It was almost like a Diana Ross - Mary Wilson thing.” Sheila remembers Silva trying to sabotage her and McGrubber’s ascendance to the Bridal altar, later presenting the other Brides with a book of performance “rules” that stated Silva was the only singer to move from behind the mic. Despite pleas from Ivy, Sheila and McGrubber refused.
“She was so mad that she didn’t get to be her lead singer thing, she had to be in a three-girl act. I think she hated me ever since,” Sheila says, though Clinton chalks it up to normal competition. “There was always competition between Sheila and Dawn, between the Brides and Parlet too, but they all was P-Funk. But they all dug each other; you have to have a healthy competition. I mean, that’s the way it was at Motown. If you wasn’t on your toes, the next producer or writer was gonna have some other singer do your part.” Sheila is quick to note that the OG Brides “dropped the ball. If nobody picked it up, that ball would have just been lost. We picked the ball up and we ran with it.”
As a trio, the Brides of Funkenstein put up a united and seriously sexy front – the army fatigues of the Anti-Tour long gone in favor of bright, skin-bearing costumes; Sheila dressed as the dancehall girl among a cowboy and Indian. “It was hard to come on stage after they finished,” Ivy notes. “First of all, the Brides had a crazy good band. [Combined with] the production and the glamor of the ladies’ outfits and their stage presence. Sheila has a big voice and a big attitude on stage; it was just so obvious the power of her performance.”
While Texas was a hit among P-Funk fans, that popularity didn’t translate to charts or sales and the Brides only released two studio albums. Sheila continued to sing backup for P-Funk, including on the smash “Atomic Dog,” (which Sheila contends she was never paid for) but by the early ‘80s George Clinton was heavily into crack. Around the same time, Sheila got a call from Rick James, who was working with her friend Val Young. “He was so cool. He says, ‘You on a sinkin’ ship. You should get on my ship, ‘cause my ship sailin’.”
Sheila joined Rick James’ 1981 tour as an original Mary Jane Girl, singing backup for the man she describes as a “rock star, all the way.” The tour might be a blur, but Sheila remembers visiting Rick’s massive home where he had a gray and white sheep dog, a tennis court and maze-like corridors. She also recalls introducing the woman who braided the whole band’s hair -- “She made so much money that she was able to get married in Hawaii. And I wasn’t even invited!”
George Clinton and Sly Stone would see the band live, clowning a starstruck Rick and teasing Sheila. “ I felt a little let down because Rick James had a few hit records and I was out there smoking crack,” Clinton says. “But I knew whenever I got ready to go to studio, I could call her or the other members and they will be in the studio in 5 minutes.” Sheila would find herself back in Clinton’s studio soon, but her break with Rick wasn’t planned.
Like many women in music, Sheila experienced significant verbal and sexual harassment. Decades ahead of the #MeToo movement, unwanted touch and threats were par for the course. “If they can't have you, they get hostile and violent,” Sheila says, adding that the Brides and Parlet were often referred to as “in-house mouf” by male musicians. “I used to walk around with a beer bottle to crack it and break it if I needed to,” she said. “[The guys] were frustrated and any woman that was out there, you're gonna get that frustration.”
Archie Ivy concedes that he incorrectly sided with the musicians who thought Sheila – who was kind but could often be loud, pushy and intensely driven -- was exaggerating the scope of the harassment. “I don’t want to downplay the nature of assault, but it was unfortunate because she never spoke to the level [of the issues] at the time. Everybody was tired of Sheila by that time [and] …their reading of the situation was incomplete.” Some of Sheila’s complaints were heard, others not. “That's not nothing that was any different than anybody else. Sheila would assert herself to do what she wanted to do, and that caused a lot of friction, but I don't think it was nothing heavy.”
Such heaviness existed outside of George’s band. Sheila recalls an incident with Rick James’ longtime friend and Mary Jane Girls manager Aaron Dublin. He “had this serious desire for me. He was our manager, and he was paying us, and there's no way I'm sleeping with this guy. My boyfriend came out and we spent some time together when we were in Detroit; [Dublin] was so frustrated after that.” One night, the two got in an argument and Dublin started calling Sheila names, implicitly threatening her with sexual violence. “I told him to kiss my ass, then he kicked me like a dog. Right in the back, in the tailbone. I went flying across the gravel.” Sheila had to leave the Mary Jane Girls to rehabilitate; “I took acupuncture, I had therapy. My career went off the radar for a minute.” She then sued Rick James, and won.
But incidents of assault weren’t isolated to those bands. Music journalist Toni Sallie alleged that she was raped by Russel Simmons in the fall of 1998, and Sheila corroborated her friend’s story to authorities and The New York Times. More recently, Sheila says she was groped by P-Funk singer Steve Boyd outside a dressing room in Grand Rapids in 2019. A meeting with a prominent R&B artist manager went sour when Sheila returned from the bathroom to find the manager naked and erect. “I started screaming. I think a lot of times girls may go over there and just service him. [These men] just want to figure out where you are at.” Prior to and through the #MeToo movement, a lot of women have been afraid to speak up, or are dismissed when they do. “You just keep moving,” Sheila says. “You can’t hold onto all those injustices in your body. There's so many that you literally cannot afford to.”
Still, time off after the Dublin incident turned out to be a blessing; Sheila was able to be thoughtful about her next move, and briefly live a “normal” life before getting back into the music business. She married Slave co-founder Steve Washington in the early ‘80s (“he went after me like 90 going north!” Sheila recalls, laughing) and the two embarked on a successful songwriting career that would bring her back into the P-Funk nation.
Sheila, Washington and Clinton wrote George’s 1986 fly girl ode “Do Fries Come With That Shake” and multiple tracks on Federation Of Tackheads – a spin-off act fronted by Clinton’s brother Jimmy Giles. “That was a really good time because Steve and them had a sound…they were really good together,” Clinton says. Adds Archie Ivy, “[Sheila] was just creative by nature. She slows down to listen to things that you say. Some people have that colorful manner and when you isolate those statements out, they make good lyrics.”
Sheila had also recorded with Washington’s Aurra, lending her vocal breadth (hitting both disco highs and rock gravel) to an album called Satisfaction. The eight-track disco-funk album was recorded for Quincy Jones’ Quest Records between 1983 and ’84 but was ultimately dropped due to ownership squabbles around the band’s name. Although Satisfaction would be released through Family Groove Records in 2013, it represented the last of Sheila funk-infused output for a while. She and Washington had a son (Tse-Mach, who played the youngest sibling in Spike Lee’s coming of age classic Crooklyn; Sheila was an extra), took time off to parent, then briefly sang back-up for Cyndi Lauper.
But it was a chance encounter with Bruce Willis – whose debut record Sheila respected – that set the singer on a course to truly do her own thing. After a performance, Willis told her “you should have your own stage; you're that good.” “I said, this is a bonafide star who thinks I’m that good, then who am I to say anything different? And I went for it.” Much as P-Funk’s naming convention had evolved, Sheila Washington (nee Horne) transmuted herself into Blackwood: a serious dance singer.
Euro pop and Italodisco was no stretch for Sheila, who pivoted the funk and rock intonation from her Brides days into powerful club vocals. As Blackwood, she released a well-received album called Friday Night in 1998 and knocked Madonna off the Italian charts with the No. 1 single “Peace” -- a pumping and exceedingly positive dance track. “I didn’t even know it was dance music, I just did it from my heart,” Sheila says, adding, “I was a huge success in Italy. I was royalty over there. It's pretty scary actually, when people are chasing you… I literally ran out of my shoes.” Back stateside, and following a few tours with the P-Funk All Stars, Sheila transformed from Blackwood into Amuka -- another dance persona.
“I did [Amuka and Blackwood] on my own,” says Sheila, noting a desire to separate herself from P-Funk. “I knew I could create and be myself and I didn't need the help of George Clinton or the notoriety. George came with me as I did go and create different entities and different things…[but] there’s something inside me; I was driven to do more.”
Amuka’s first big single, 2003’s “Appreciate Me,” was written about an incident with George Clinton. “We found the stars together/The sky was so right/You take her shopping/ And you don't remember me...Now she's walking down the runway/How wrong can you be?” The track, as well as her first U.S. No. 1 track, the jungle-house “I Want More (Cling On To Me)” were a showcase of Sheila’s innate songwriting skills and vocal flexibility.
“The dance market is hard and it’s real work to get above that constant dance beat,” Ivy notes. “All of her success is rooted in the fact that she is very intense and she’s passionate about whatever it is she believes in at that point. For someone her age to succeed in basically a young people's media speaks volumes.”
As Amuka, Sheila released music through the mid 2000s and performed with Public Enemy on The Evil Empire of Everything and Man Plans God Laughs. In 2015, she reconnected with producer Kamal Humphrey de Iruretagoyena (known in hip-hop circles as Radioinactive), who had mixed her Aurra reissue for Family Groove Records. The two had instant musical chemistry and Sheila penned an EP’s worth of material in studio, then harnessed her one-take skills. She would “come up with a top line on the spot and then just improvise the whole rest of the song. She would write all these songs with invisible ink basically,” says de Iruretagoyena of Flying Carpet Records. “What a skill to be able to be in the present to the point where you can just create a song, right there.”
Recorded as Sheila Brody, the Flying Carpet EP reflects the spectrum of Sheila’s talent, moving from Chaka Khan-style R&B ballads to new wave-influenced dance and raw, early ‘70s style soul tracks. Slipping back into her Amuka identity, Sheila released a house single in 2021 called “Music Takes Me” on Spain’s Vamos label – its message that “music makes me whole” poignant through her throaty wail.
Sheila Brody is a refreshing example of perseverance and kindness – a still excitable woman who managed to not become jaded after years on and off the mothership, circling pop echelons. She’s working on a memoir, tentatively titled Dancing In Heels, and has no plans to slow down. “I've been blessed in that I've been allowed to live a pretty much normal life and still have notoriety and some stardom and celebrity -- but I haven't had my total 15 minutes!” she says. “I've been riding this thing for years… [but] I think my time to rise is definitely now.”