And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels
—Walt Whitman

There is noe body but consistes of partes and that which knitts these partes
together gives the body its perfeccion, because it makes eache parte soe contiguous
to other as thereby they doe mutually participate with eache other.
—John Winthrop, “A Modell of Christian Charity”

When John Winthrop spoke in Anno 1630 to those still or recently assembled on the good ship Arrabella, in a speech titled “A Modell of Christian Charity,” he began with, in his mind, the following truth: “God Almightie in his most holy and wise providence hath soe disposed of the Condicion of mankinde, as in all times some must be rich some poore, some highe and eminent in power and dignitie; others meane and in subjeccion” (qtd. in the Library of America’s American Sermons). It’s as if he’s set up the opening of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby another three hundred years later, in which the narrator Nick Carraway, in the novel’s second paragraph, quotes his father’s words directly, “‘Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone. . . just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.’” That sounds fair enough—wise father’s counsel. Then, at the end of the next, lengthier paragraph, Nick interprets his father’s words in the following paraphrase: “I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth”—an interpretation that seems preposterous in relationship to the father’s actual words. Decencies? Really? Nick has jumped from economic and social advantages and capital to character and behaviors and motives, from external advantages to internal qualities—wiping clean the myth, and maybe it’s only a democratic myth, that any American might, if he or she merely worked hard enough, achieve her or his heart’s desire. (That promise certainly doesn’t play out for Fitzgerald’s title character.) Nick suggests it’s less that some have and some have not; instead, a person’s very character is “parcelled out unequally at birth.” This revision of the Declaration, this edit of the self-evident truths of equality, then, accounts for and justifies a decade of roaring economic rapaciousness that has only been approximated again in the economic excesses of the recent pandemic.
There are hints of Nick’s perspective in these opening words to Winthrop’s address, though his words seem to account more for what Nick’s father actually says. What did Winthrop’s audience hear as Winthrop began his talk—inclusion? Maybe they all patted themselves on their backs as “highe and eminent in power and dignitie.” But what about the other folks?
These to whom Winthrop speaks are, he tells them, God’s “elect because they are like himselfe,” and then references God’s Son and the love a mother feels for her child in terms of the mother’s seeing “a resemblance of herselfe in it.” Love, then, is something of a mirror, our self actually reflected in the being in front of us. It’s only that reflection, seeing one’s likeness, that leads then to love. (And does this Winthrop concept provide the foundation for the increasingly hermetic echo chambers of social media, in which we interact online only with those who reflect our political and social views back at us, an eternal baby’s gurgle of self-satisfaction?)
Winthrop partially redeems his opening with his notion of a Covenant struck between God and these voyagers to the New World—one that binds them to fulfill their obligations both to God and to one another. In fact, in one of the most concrete analogies ever conceived in terms of the spirit of communitarianism, this new community, Winthrop argues, is “one body”: every ligament and joint working in harmony, so that “[i]f one member suffers all suffer with it, if one be in honor, all rejoyce with it.” Just before Winthrop moves to his famous image of a “Citty upon a Hill,” he beseeches his audience to understand that they “must be knitt together in this worke as one man.” They are in it, he says, as one communal entity, for better or worse, richer or poorer. Although his opening words claim divine rationale for inequality, he tempers those words with a nod toward one for all, all for one—a democratic dream or aristocratic sleight of hand?
That tension lies at the critical heart of this country’s promise, from those initial European settlers through the preamble of the Constitution and America’s motto (e pluribus unum) to Nick Carraway’s haughty rewording of his father’s admonition. And those tensions continued to resound in popular music as the Sixties decade moved to its end.
The day after Valentine’s Day, 1969, “Everyday People” moved to #1, an apt moment, given the song’s theme of accepting differences, a rejection of the carnal valentine that was Tommy James and the Shondells’ “Crimson and Clover.” “Everyday People” is one of my favorites of ’69 for the lyrics that epitomized the decade (“we got to be together!”—those words played on repeat on my 45 single) and for my memories of this integrated (racial, gender) band (I loved the occasional television appearance and the costumes as loud as the sound). (And even its influence on the pop music I continued to enjoy: for example, the Jackson Five’s “ABC’s” teasing piano tinkle is an accelerated riff on the statelier piano in Sly’s intro.) When the song came on the radio, the volume went up without objection from my parents. The band and the song transcended generational divisions.
Sly’s everyman/everywoman is just folks, “everyday people.” “Everyday” implies ordinary, common—the norm. Everyday people are those we pass on every sidewalk, those we wave to from every shady porch or sunny stoop. It’s the person delivering today’s mail. It’s the neighborhood baker greeted when we buy our weekly loaf, the checkout cashier. Sly enumerates everyday people to include “a butcher, a banker, a drummer.” (The reference to the drummer suggests Sly’s attempt to bring the players of pop and rock music into the fold of everyday professions—to be a musician in ’69 was as everyday as cutting meat for the family around the corner. The song works against alienation and division across generational and labor lines.) More: skinny and fat ones; long hairs and short hairs; rich and poor. Everyday people are also the colors of the world: yellow, black, red, and white—channeling Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” in which he writes, “I. . . / acknowledge the red yellow and white playing within me[.]” As with Whitman in “Song of Myself” (“Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same” and “Of every hue and caste am I, of every rank and religion, / A farmer, mechanic, artist, gentleman, sailor, quaker, / Prisoner, fancy-man, rowdy, lawyer, physician, priest” and “I am large, I contain multitudes”), Sly’s song encompasses them all, the multitudes of everyday people in all of their ranks and roles. Whereas Whitman’s song is about the identity of an American loafer in this democratic new world, Sly’s epic looks not to the 19th century self but toward Americans in their 20th century teeming multitude, reminding them of their democratic human origins. In a song that clocks at a little over two minutes, a musical concoction that is miracle enough to convert sextillions of audio infidels in a promise of hallelujah common glory, Sly provides a variant reading of Whitman’s near-epic poem—and a nod in favor of Winthrop’s “one body” that is “knitt more nearly together in the Bond of brotherly affection,” “ligamentes . . .knitt together [in] love.”
“Everyday People” was #1 within a month of Nixon’s inauguration. Sly’s everyday people image resonates with the image of the Nixon/Agnew silent majority, yet there is an acceptance at the heart of the song for community and love and respect that trumps the divisive rhetoric of the Nixon Administration—and of our current political era. The paranoia of Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” and the apocalyptic events of ’68 are replaced by a dead-on vision of the world and a desire to change the way things are, a change that comes through mutual respect and the offer of a helping hand rather than a bullet by the river or a fusillade at political leaders or a massacre in My Lai. Yet the song is of the streets, the streets walked by everyday people, not porn star visions in crimson bedrooms, those myopic fantasies that remove people rather than engaging them in the affairs and blemished skin of the world.
The song’s opening line, “Sometimes I’m right, and I can be wrong,” suggests a humility lacking on our political stage. Even the vocal is pitched at an everyday, conversational level, a man explaining himself to a listener: “the butcher, the banker, the drummer and then / makes no difference what group I’m in.” Effects are kept at a minimum, the tone casual. Then, the chorus: “I-I-I-I-I-I-I” (almost a howl of affirmation—AYE!)—drawn out and shouted, time to be proud, but the ego of the self is translated into the humility of the communal chant: “I am everyday people / yeah yeah,” the affirmation a shrug—so what?, so are we all—after the sudden volume of the communitarian claim.
Throughout the song, empathy reigns. In the third verse, for example, Sly talks/sings, “I am no better and neither are you / We’re all the same whatever we do.” These words bind rather than separate, bring together rather than tear apart, serve to include rather than exclude, even as they go on to posit a human mystery at our core: “you can’t figure out the bag I’m in.” It’s a riff off Whitman: “I am large, I contain multitudes.” “Everyday People” is just as inexhaustible.
These sentiments in “Everyday People” are fire retardants on the ghetto explosions, flowers in the rifles of Guardsmen at the antiwar demonstrations. The lines are reflecting the facts of human biology: human beings share over 99% of their genetic makeup. Gender and ethnic differences are genetically miniscule, though their social ramifications play out in much larger ways on the political and national stage. Human beings are almost one hundred percent the same, “whatever we do.” Nonetheless, there is an acknowledgement that some people do struggle to understand other people: “You can’t figure out the bag I’m in.” What’s your deal? What is your bag, man? The singer responds, “I am everyday people”—but it’s a response that gathers volume, a cry that affirms the human urge, human call to belong. Immediately following is a little rhythmic chant, similar to grade school kids teasing someone about attraction to a boy or girl (“there goes Jimmy in the baby carriage”), a teasing that may cut or else make public a certain affection, depending on the source of the words.
The chants acknowledge social divisions of the time: “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.” Winthrop’s idea of love, that we merely love the mirror image in front of us, is challenged in “Everyday People.” Dislike is predicated more on the fact that those who have are seemingly unwilling to help those less fortunate, classic class warfare, yet the song’s gospel-like shout out, “We got to live together,” affirms a need to mend insignificant differences (“wee must be,” Winthrop writes, “knitt together in this worke” of humanity), not to fight one another because of them. Passion drives the inflection of those five words. A brass double beat applauds the words, Cynthia Robinson’s trumpet and Jerry Martini’s sax blowing down the walls of class separation and social indifference, Sly’s song a curse on any who might try to rebuild them.
There is another gospel quaver just before the shout out: “Ooh sha sha,” nonsense words that are every bit as unintelligible as the classic lyrics of Little Richard. This choir-like set of syllables issuing forth before the preacher’s holler for harmony, of living together, follows a little nursery rhyme ditty: “And so on and so on and scooby dooby dooby.” The first half of the line hints that racial and social intolerance have existed forever, that the list of separation could be extended ad infinitum—but now’s the time to repair the one social body. But what about “scooby dooby dooby”? —with its pause, on the last word, after doo, a hesitation that makes the close of the word sound, more emphatically and significantly, be. To do or to be, that is the question. Or: to do and to be, better question?
There was a cartoon dog who premiered on CBS several months after this song’s release (for the fall ’69 television season), who would rasp, “scooby dooby do!” as he and his cartoon human cohorts revved into classic cartoon detective action. (A show my sisters and I enjoyed as kids.) A doobie, as in Doobie Brothers, a remarkably popular bland Seventies band, signified a joint (“Let’s light up a doobie.” If only the same flame had burned their vinyl records. Okay, okay—maybe there was a song or two to save.). Is the drug the way to the love that will bind people together? Is Sly playing with syllables, having childish fun, making a new day for the moment everyday people are reborn and prove able to live together? Is he playing off Didion’s dark 1967 essay “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” about the Haight-Ashbury scene, in which she worries about the inarticulateness of drugged youth, “an army of children waiting to be given the words”? Unlikely. “Different folks,” the singer concedes, have “different strokes.” Nonetheless, “we’re all the same whatever we do”—profession or personality, age or appearance. We’re all children at some time, God’s children or children together loved by a parent or parents or guardian, part of the human social fabric.
Later that ‘69 summer, children of God would gather at Woodstock, where Sly and the Family Stone would perform. Joni Mitchell, who turned down an invitation to appear at the festival because her manager ironically thought she’d have better exposure from a scheduled television appearance, wrote the classic song about the event, even though her boyfriends in CSNY earned the money for their amped up electric version. “Woodstock” references a “child of God” on a pilgrimage to Woodstock, who’s “going to join in a rock ‘n roll band.” The girl, Mitchell’s version, joins him on his quest for this grail. (Think of the gender politics of Mitchell singing the song as opposed to Stephen Stills singing the same line. Bring on the riot grrrls and down with the cock rockers.) Genders join in the quest for transcendence in Mitchell’s version, a message realized at Woodstock when Sly and his family took the stage. Mitchell’s song imagines a return to an Eden that was “half a million strong” rather than one Adam and one Eve, an Eden of long hairs and short hairs, skinny ones and fat ones—Whitman’s multitudes moved to upstate New York. The fabric of the community created for those few days, amidst mud and lack of amenities, might have been an enactment of the message in Sly Stone’s single.
“Everyday People” has been covered by a diverse range of performers, including the Staple Singers and Aretha. (Arrested Development’s debut album uses the title chorus in “People Everyday,” from the 1992 debut album 3 Years, 5 Months & 2 Days In The Life Of....) Joan Jett’s 1983 version, from Album, was recorded at the height of Reagan’s first term in office, with the Federal Reserve fighting inflation by taking interest rates to historically high levels and with the first reports of a gay disease, later named AIDS, an earlier, serious, and ongoing (though today, thankfully, less fatal) world pandemic, finding their way into media reports, though not acknowledged or named by Reagan and his administration for years. It was an administration lauding Winthrop’s vision of America as a City on a Hill, seemingly intent on recreating a Puritan society (remember “Just say no,” the famous anti-drug message from Nancy Reagan) that accepted “some must be rich some poore, some highe and eminent in power and dignitie; others meane, and in subjeccion,” without accepting the communitarian strain undergirding Winthrop’s Christian message. That Jett, a woman, gay or bisexual, takes this single and makes it her own Jett/Blackheart rocker, might confirm the inclusive message in Sly’s single.
Jett might make an album of covers. Her albums are filled with them—“I Love Rock n Roll,” with its great line “put another dime in the jukebox, baby,” to “Crimson and Clover,” another cover of a #1 ’69 hit—including covers of her earlier work with the Runaways. Her version of “Everyday People” is all guitar: growling, loud, gruff—like her singing of the lyrics. The volume is amped: vocal and music. Percussion marks the time. After Jett exclaims, “We got to live together,” the percussion (mixed with claps?) is brought up in the mix with the third verse: “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 / Still can't figure out the scene I'm in.” Her voice is perfect for the teasing taunt of the next verse: “Then it's the new man / That doesn't like the short man / For being such a rich one / That will not help the poor one / Different strokes for different folks.” It’s a tone that suggests she’s remembering all those critics making fun of her and the gals in the Runaways (even though “Cherry Bomb,” lyrics a foxy update of the Who’s “My Generation,” catchy stutter on cherry an ear worm as insidious as in Bowie’s “Changes,” is as fine a single in the mid to late 70s as any radio tune, the single that both exploded sonically and fizzled commercially off the band’s debut), all those who saw her as mere sexpot, who masturbated in secret thinking of her latex-clad body, and here she is, everyday people as rock star, two years after the anthemic success of “I Love Rock ‘n Roll,” all those dimes and quarters feeding every jukebox in America to play her songs.
She finishes the verse, “We got to live together,” and then Jett, too, aligns herself with America’s Bard in “Song of Myself,” when he writes, “I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, / I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world”—and there’s Jett, leading into a little instrumental, guitar break, extending Sly’s version some twenty seconds beyond the original, giving a yawp/grunt to urge on the guitar, laughing at the disbelievers—chuckling all the way to the bank. And for the final verse and title refrain, she’s got her voice and the band locked into Sly’s rhythm, her band and family rocking as Sly and the Family, bringing the song home. It’s an homage and it’s a raspberry.
Jett’s image amidst the male cock rockers, her songwriting (“Bad Reputation” is one of the best singles of the 1980s), and her barbaric yawp proved inspirational to a number of riot grrrl bands, especially Bikini Kill—extending the musical message of inclusivity, those beliefs in song that Sly Stone once shared with the world before drugs and perhaps other issues broke apart the musical family he had created.
     In Summer of Soul, Questlove’s recent documentary about the earlier Harlem summer ’69 equivalent of Woodstock, until his documentary an almost unknown event, vaporized from the historical record, blacked out of Sixties histories because of the very blackness of the attendees and performers, Sly and the Family Stone play. The crowd’s energy, enthusiastic and respectful for all other performers, surges for Sly, and the crowd palpably rushes toward the stage, to be closer to the charge of Sly and Family. It’s a moment that reminds us of what this music meant as the decade came to an end—and would continue to mean to start the next one. The crowd’s enthusiasm as the band enters and settles to play reminds me of the ending of the great Sarah Vowell essay, “What He Said There,” about Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (collected in The Partly Cloudy Patriot). In November 2000, Vowell attends a reenactment of the 1863 ceremony. The essay both depicts the day’s events in the present and reflects on the historical events of that moment in the nation’s history. In the essay’s final paragraph, she remembers her elementary school lessons about the Presidents, and she closes with words that move me every time I reread them: “The teachers taught us to like Washington and to respect Jefferson. But Lincoln—him they taught us to love.” And what we see in that crowd on the Harlem stage in 1969—what we see, in the faces and in the physical movement and in the desire to get just a little bit closer to the magic—what we see is an audience’s love for the musical magic that “Everyday People” and the songs of Sly and the Family Stone unleashed under Whitman’s and Lincoln’s dream banner of the red white and blue, drawing in all the people, yellow, black, red, and white. Sly’s covenant was a red white and blue flag that draped over every American.
“Everyday People” was the first of three number one records for Sly and the Family Stone, and the single held the top spot four weeks. As Fred Bronson, in The Billboard Book of Number 1 Hits, notes, the “message of brotherhood” helped the band—a musical family of black and white, male and female, rock and soul, psychedelia and funk—reach a broader audience. Bronson quotes Sly, words that speak to the essence of this single: “‘What I write is people’s music. I want everyone, even the dummies, to understand what I’m saying. That way they won’t be dummies anymore’ “—and finally figure out the bag we’re in.

J. W. Bonner writes frequently for various journals. He has published previously in March Xness about “Suspicious Minds” and “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.” He teaches at Asheville School (Asheville, N.C.) and enjoys Maine’s charms in all seasons.