Everyday People - Sly and the Family Stone

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUUhDoCx8zc

Every time I say I'm back on it, I'll catch up, I then get swept off on a thousand other projects

Sylvester Stewart, who died just over a year ago on June 9th, started out as a San Francisco California radio deejay and record producer, before forming Sly and the Family Stone with his brother Freddie and sister Rosa, the pair changing their surname to Stone to emulate Sly who adopted it as his deejay name.

Although the rest of the group didn't like "Dance to the Music" the always canny Sly deliberately released the song as their second single as a way of introducing the band to the world. The others thought it was too "pop-py" and unrepresentative of their usual material. But it did the business, reaching number 8 in the US charts.

Their follow-up single, "Life", more like the rest of their music, bombed relatively, scraping into the charts at 93. Their next single, the 1968 "Everyday People", signals a reversion to mainstream pop in a musical sense, but the words are unequivocally progressive, spot on for the time and place, extoling the virtues of racial equality and tolerance for everyone, no matter who they are, butcher, banker or travelling salesman, exhorting opposites rich and poor, long-haired, and short, yellow, black, red or white to bury their differences and accept one another. The universality of the message is emphasised by the use of a catchy playground skipping tune and a childhood image that resonate in our unconscious memory, making the whole listen a warm, innocent experience. Yup, it's Sly stealing a trick from the commercial marketing world of Vance Packard and sixties America, using a bit of hidden persuasion to sell peace and love and send the Family Stone to the top of the American charts:

"Sometimes I'm right and I can be wrong.

My own beliefs are in my song.

The butcher, the banker, the drummer and then

makes no difference what group I'm in -

I am everyday people, yeah, yeah

There is a blue one who can't accept

the green one for living with,

a fat one trying to be a skinny one.

Different strokes for different folks

and so on and so on and scooby-dooby-dooby -

We got to live together

I am no better and neither are you.

We're all the same, whatever we do.

You love me, you hate me,

you know me and then

you can't figure out the bag I'm in -

I am everyday people

There is a long hair

that doesn't like the short hair

for being such a rich one

that will not help the poor one.

Different strokes for different folks

and so on and so on, scooby-dooby-dooby -

We got to live together

There is a yellow one that won't

accept the black one

that won't accept the red one

that won't accept the white one -

different strokes for different folks

and so on and so on and scooby-dooby-dooby -

I am everyday people."

As he says, "different strokes for different folks". Maybe 1968 was the moment when it was actually happening, when it was all possible. Certainly, in this current world of greed, legalised prejudice and cynically orchestrated divisiveness, we seem to have gone a long way backward since and Sly's vision seems further and further away as each day passes.