About this user
Joscelyn Eve Stoker, was born at Buckland Hospital,in Dover,Kent, and spent her teenage years in Ashill, a small village in Devon. She is the third of four children born to Richard and Wendy Stoker. Her father owns a fruit and nut import/export business; her mother, who used to manage holiday cottages,worked as Stone's manager until October 2004.Stone made her first public appearance at the Uffculme Comprehensive School—which she attended—in Uffculme, Devon, with a cover of Jackie Wilson's 1957 song "Reet Petite". Because of her dyslexia, Stone left school at age sixteen with only three GCSE qualifications. "It wasn't that I was stupid. I'm just a little bit dyslexic and I wasn't very academic. I'm more artistic", she says =)
Stone grew up listening to a wide variety of music including 1960s and 1970s American R&B and soul music performed by such artists as Dusty Springfield and Aretha Franklin; as a result, she developed a soulful style of singing like her idols. "My first CD that I owned was Aretha Franklin: Greatest Hits. And I saw the advert on TV and it was just like little clips of her songs. I had no idea who she was—I was only like 10 so. I said, 'Oh yeah, that looks really good', so I wrote it down and I said to my mum, 'Can I have that for Christmas?' So she told my friend Dennis, who always gets me good music anyway, and he got that for me. So that was one of my first albums that I loved." She would later tell MTV News: "I kind of clicked into soul music more than anything else because of the vocals. You've got to have good vocals to sing soul music and I always liked it ever since I was little."
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