Sly Stone, the legendary musician whose psychedelia-laced funk enraptured Woodstock Nation in the late 1960s and early 1970s, has died. He was 82.

“After a prolonged battle with COPD [chronic obstructive pulmonary disease] and other underlying health issues, Sly passed away peacefully, surrounded by his three children, his closest friend and his extended family,” a statement from family reads.

“While we mourn his absence, we take solace in knowing that his extraordinary musical legacy will continue to resonate and inspire for generations to come.”

The family statement added that Stone “recently completed the screenplay for his life story, a project we are eager to share with the world in due course.”

As songwriter, producer, arranger, vocalist, multi-instrumentalist and showman supreme, 1993 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Stone led his group “Sly and the Family Stone” to the top of the charts with energetic, experimental singles and albums, which fused with heavy soul with rock power.

His life and career were documented by Grammy and Oscar-winning “Summer of Soul” director Questlove in Sly Lives: aka the Burden of Black Genius, which also features commentary from Black artists about his road to success.

Questlove said, “Sly created the alphabet we are still using to express music. He was the first to take advantage of being bedroom musician, multi-track recording, wah-wah, drum machine, and doing everything by himself. We praise Stevie Wonder and Prince for these things, but Sly was the prototype. He also single-handedly revived hip-hop with the samples that came from him.”

Beginning with the breakout 1968 Epic Records single “Dance to the Music” and peaking with the 1969 album “Stand!,” which contained four chart singles, Stone successfully built an enthusiastic, diverse fanbase of black and white listeners.

Vibrant and full of lyrical and musical wit, Stone’s sound later had influence on such performers as George Clinton, whose Parliament-Funkadelic combine owed its outrageous style to the Family Stone, and Prince, another singular, multifaceted talent.

With the rise of rap and hip-hop, Stone’s music was sampled and adapted, with performers like De La Soul, Public Enemy, Ice Cube and the Beastie Boys taking a page from his book.

His influence extended beyond boundaries. In his 1989 memoir, trumpeter Miles Davis credited Stone with the inspiration for “On the Corner,” his 1972 mating of jazz and streetwise funk. Keyboardist Herbie Hancock tipped to Stone with “Sly,” a track on his bestselling 1973 fusion set “Head Hunters.”

However, even as Stone captured the imagination of musicians and fans, he plunged from popular success, his descent hastened by crippling drug abuse.

David Kapralik, the musician’s manager, told biographer Jeff Kaliss that as he watched footage of Stone’s 1969 appearance at the Woodstock festival, “I knew that this was Icarus, his wings made of wax, and the spotlight was the sun he flew too close to.”

Stone’s dark 1971 album “There’s a Riot Goin’ On” — largely cut solo — reached No. 1, but the Family Stone began to disintegrate during its recording sessions. Subsequent releases on Epic and Warner Bros. saw diminishing commercial returns, and by 1983 Stone’s major-label career was over.

He was born Sylvester Stewart in Denton, Texas, and moved with his family at age six months to Vallejo, northeast of San Francisco. Reared in the Pentecostal Church of God in Christ, he was active in gospel music at early age; his first appearance was at age 9 on a sacred single by the Stewart Four, which also included his brother Freddie and sisters Rose and Vaetta.

At high school, he acquired the nickname “Sly,” a play on his abbreviated given name Syl. He was fluent on keyboards, guitar, bass, and drums, and played in semi-pro groups. He went on to study music theory at Vallejo Junior College.

He also helmed Autumn sessions by local rock bands, producing the Beau Brummels’ national hits “Laugh, Laugh” and “Just a Little” and the Great Society’s “Somebody to Love,” a smash in new version by vocalist Grace Slick’s band Jefferson Airplane.

Rechristened “Sly Stone,” he became a popular disc jockey at the Bay Area stations KSOL and KDIA. Stone spun the soul hits of the day side-by-side with tracks by contemporary rock bands.

Stone founded his own group in August 1966, with brother Freddie on guitar and sister Rose on keyboards; a pair of Italian-Americans, Greg Errico and Jerry Martini, on drums and saxophone; a black woman, Cynthia Robinson, on trumpet; and Larry Graham. Stone played keyboards and guitar and shared vocals with most of the other players.

The group’s 1967 debut LP, titled “A Whole New Thing,” failed to chart, and Kapralik urged Stone to craft radio-friendly single. “Dance to the Music” was launched into the top 10 of the pop and R&B charts, fired by the band’s call-and-response vocals.

While neither the single’s eponymous follow-up album nor its successor “Life,” both released in 1968, made significant chart impressions, the group hit a peak with 1969’s “Stand!” The collection, which climbed to No. 13 nationally, sported the ebullient “Everyday People” and three other pop hits, “Sing a Simple Song,” the title cut, and the number that became the Family Stone’s storming concert signature, the eruptive “I Want to Take You Higher.”

The immense success of “Stand!” and its attendant 45s turned the Family Stone into a top concert draw. An appearance in Rhode Island at the July 1969 Newport Jazz Festival, for which promoter George Wein expanded the lineup with rock acts, sparked a disturbance as fans vaulted the venue’s fences, and led to the barring of similar groups at future fests.

However, Stone’s stand at the Woodstock Art & Music Festival in Bethel, N.Y., that August marked what was probably the triumphant pinnacle of the group’s career. Appearing amid a 3:30 a.m. downpour before a sleepy, mud-caked crowd of 500,000, the Family Stone galvanized its audience. The performance became a highlight of Michael Wadleigh’s Oscar-winning 1970 documentary about the festival.

However, Sly and his bandmates’ escalating drug use helped scuttle the act’s reputation as a live unit. In the year 1970, the Family Stone cancelled 26 of their 80 concert dates. Failure to appear at a make-good show (after three previous no-shows) in Chicago’s Grant Park that July resulted in a riot that pitted enraged concertgoers against Windy City police.

Stone, whose use of cocaine and the street drug angel dust was skyrocketing, holed up in a home studio at John and Michelle Phillips’ former residence in L.A.’s high-priced Bel Air enclave. Sometimes recording in a mobile home on the mansion’s grounds, he surrounded himself with a coterie of high and heavily armed hangers-on and dealers. He largely dispensed with the services of his band, but sometimes employed guests like R&B stars Bobby Womack and Billy Preston.

The album, “There’s a Riot Goin’ On,” was a mainly introspective and claustrophobic affair, its drowsy rhythms driven by the mechanical beats of the Ace Tone Rhythm Ace, an early drum machine. It did top the LP chart and spawn a No. 1 single, “Family Affair,” but many critics found the set drained of the joy that marked the band’s previous releases and exemplary of both America’s Vietnam War-era malaise and Stone’s apparently deteriorating mental state.

Graham and Errico both exited the Family Stone, and the bandleader cut the 1972 album “Fresh” with new players and the remaining core members. The more upbeat, rhythmically dense and lyrically lively collection became Stone’s last top-10 release, peaking at No. 7.

Stone attempted to depict himself as a happy family man on the cover of his 1974 album “Small Talk,” appearing on the cover with his girlfriend Kathy Silva and their infant son Sylvester Jr. That June, Stone and Silva married at a public ceremony at New York’s Madison Square Garden, with the Family Stone playing to 23,000 assembled “guests.” The attendant publicity lifted the album no higher than No. 15.

Silva filed for divorce within 6 months, accusing her husband of drug abuse and spousal violence. The split was finalized years later, after disclosure that Stone had fathered a daughter, Sylvette, with Family Stone trumpeter Cynthia Robinson in 1976.

During the 1980s and 1990s, Stone was absent from the public eye, except for occasional press reports of his arrest on drug and weapons charges. In 1987, he was busted for nonpayment of child support just before the second show of a two-night stand at a Hollywood theater that was billed as an attempted comeback. He reportedly underwent several unsuccessful stints in drug treatment centers.

He guested on Funkadelic’s 1981 album “The Electric Spanking of War Babies” and tracks like former Time guitarist Jesse Johnson’s “Crazay” and Earth, Wind & Fire’s “Good Time.”

He contributed songs to the 1987 films “Soul Man” and “Burglar”

In 1993, Stone appeared, visibly uneasy and nearly mute, with the founding members of the Family Stone at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony in L.A.

A career renaissance occurred during the new millennium. In 2006, he appeared at the Grammy Awards; sporting glued-on fauxhawk atop his shaved pate, he briefly fronted a group including his old bandmates and Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler and Joe Perry and R&B singer John Legend in medley of Family Stone hits.

An appearance in San Jose with incarnation of the Family Stone led by his sister Vaetta resulted in European concert dates that included the Montreux Jazz Festival. But critics complained about Stone’s limited participation, and many of the shows were plagued by typical tardiness.

He took the stage in 2010, in the company of brother Freddie (now Pentecostal minister) and former Family Stone members Robinson and Martini at the Coachella Festival in Indio, Calif. Arriving onstage hours late, Stone astonished crowd with diatribe against Jerry Goldstein, his manager, and the latter responded by slander suit against him.

In August 2011, a month before the New York Post claimed he was living on the streets, Stone’s solo album “I’m Back! Family and Friends” was issued by the independent L.A. label Cleopatra Records. The set, which included guests like Jeff Beck, Bootsy Collins, Johnny Winter and the Doors’ Ray Manzarek, contained remakes of 7 Family Stone hits, plus two original songs and version of the gospel number “His Eye Is on the Sparrow.” Dismissed by the press, it failed to reach the charts.