What is "stand!"

Stand! is the fourth studio album by soul/ funk band Sly and the Family Stone, written and produced by lead singer and multi-instrumentalist Sly Stone and released on May 3, 1969 on Epic Records, just before the group's celebrated performance at the Woodstock festival. Stand! was the band's most commercially successful album to date, with over 500,000 copies sold in the year of its release: it was certified gold in sales by the Recording Industry Association of America on December 4, 1969, went on to sell over three million copies and became one of the most successful albums of the 1960s. By 1986 it had sold well over 1 million copies and was certified platinum in sales by the RIAA on November 26 of that same year.

Stand! is also considered an artistic high-point of the band's career. In 2003 the album was ranked number 118 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. It includes several well-known songs, among them hit singles, such as " Sing a Simple Song", " I Want to Take You Higher", " Stand!", and " Everyday People".

It was published in US as an LP record with gatefold cover, and was reissued in 1990 on vinyl and CD and in 2007 as a remastered numbered edition digipack CD with bonus tracks and, in the UK, only as a CD with bonus tracks.

In 2015, the album was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the Library of Congress and selected for inclusion in the National Recording Registry.

"Stand!" is a 1969 song by the soul/ rock/ funk band Sly and the Family Stone. The song's title and lyrics are a call for its listeners to "stand" up for themselves, their communities, and what they believe in. Like nearly all of Sly & the Family Stone's songs, Sylvester "Sly Stone" Stewart was credited as the sole songwriter.

The original mix of "Stand!" garnered a warm, yet unenthusiastic, reaction when Sly Stone had an early acetate of the record played in a San Francisco club. As a result, Stone went back into the studio and had the song's final section, a fevered gospel music-styled break, rerecorded. Most of the Family Stone was unavailable for the session, and Stone resorted to using mostly studio musicians for the rerecorded section.

" I Want to Take You Higher", the b-side of "Stand!", was also a hit single in 1969/1970.

In 2004 the song was ranked #241 on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.