Sly and The Family Stone – Everyday People

It would take a lot of work not to like this song. It’s very meaningful and it’s catchy. They even shared a line from a new cartoon…Scooby Doo “And so on and so on and scooby dooby dooby.” The song was written by Sly Stone. 

Sly & the Family Stone was a great band. This song was released in 1968 and it peaked at #1 in the Billboard 100, #2 in Canada, and #36 in the UK Charts in 1969. Sly arranged this song perfectly with great dynamics for the chorus. A great piece of songwriting and arranging. It would have been a hit whenever it was released.

It was this song that broke them into a larger audience and Stone into stardom. Billboard later ranked it as the #5 song of 1969, and the single’s success helped power the album Stand! to sales of three million copies.

Sly and the Family Stone really made their presence known at Woodstock with a great set. Carlos Santana has remarked that they were the standout band. They recorded songs in many genres, including funk, psychedelic soul, rock, soul, pop, funk rock, and R&B.

Billy Preston played organ on this single and the song has been used in many movies, TV shows, and commercials.

Everyday People

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
Oh sha sha
We got to live together

I am no better and neither are you
We are 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, yeah yeah

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
And scooby dooby dooby
Oh sha sha
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
Oh sha sha
I am everyday people

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Author: Badfinger (Max)

Power Pop fan, Baseball, Beatles, Alternative music, old movies, and tv show fan. Also anything to do with pop culture in the 60s and 70s... I'm also a songwriter, bass and guitar player. Not the slightest bit interested in politics at all.

34 thoughts on “Sly and The Family Stone – Everyday People”

  3. Great song for a Sunday morning! This was just a song I liked as a kid, and I don’t recall connecting the reference in the song with the cartoon! Duh!! Anyway I grew to appreciate Sly a lot more and Scooby Doo a lot less!

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  4. Sly and the Family Stone put their money where their mouth is, so to speak. An integrated band(both race and gender), when they weren’t common. A family band. A band that shared the spotlight. And a band that got everyone up and dancing.

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    1. Yea it’s so classic that it’s not much to say about it. During their windows…they pumped out classics left and right.

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  8. “Stand” is a standout album. Had it on 8-track so listened while tooling around town. Such a cool piece of trivia that Billy Preston plays on it. There is such an easy-goingness to the music but the lyrics always inject golden wisdom into them.

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  10. Rock steady with nicely loose stream of consciousness lyrics. ‘Shooby Scooby dooby,’ it all just flows together, though it ain’t no Shakespeare- but who needs Willy’s classic stuff all the time?
    I recall Suzuki Motorcycles using the ‘Different strokes for different folks’ tag line at the time. Strange, as the entire range was two-strokes back then!

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    1. There is a documentary by Bruce Brown called “Any Given Sunday” that is a treat to watch about motorcycles back in the early seventies.
      I never liked the two stroke engines…I guess it was laziness of having to mix it.

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      1. The Japanese blue smoker bikes of that era had an automatic oil/petrol mixer thingyamebob doohickey. It was great, just fill the oil tank and Mr KawaYamaSuki did the mixing for you. No stinky oily hands for the rider. Just remember to not forget to top up the oil tank!

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      3. I had one of those with oil injection. One day the oil injector quit, the engine seized, and I pushed it home a few miles. I rebuilt the engine, tested the oil injector (which magically started working) and was back on the road – until it did it again. After the second rebuild I mixed gas and oil myself. I never trusted it again.

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    1. Wow….that is really cool. The coolest teacher I had…always had a record player in his classroom…and one album is the only one I remember seeing and hearing….The Beatles White Album.
      That may be one of the reasons I like it so much.

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  13. I forgot to say that The Staple Singers did a fine version of this. The song would seem to be made for them.

    I’m not sure the scooby-dooby line was anything to do with Scooby Doo, it was just a popular late sixties hippy phrase, man – adapted from “dooby-dooby” – from which the legendary Great Dane got his name. Any true Scooby doo aficionado will know, of course, that his birth name was Scoobert Doo.

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      1. Could it be the other way around then? That is why I only said shared…probably not…it was probably the Sinatra song.

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    2. Yea they only shared the line…who knows… Scoobert Doo huh? Well he should have went by his propper name! Now I want to watch another episode.

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      1. It was said to be the “dobby-dooby” bit from Sinatra’s Strangers In The night, as NewPicAuthor said right back at the beginning of the comments, so why I started going on about I don’t know! 🙂

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