Everybody loves the sunshine, eventually: The enduring appeal of Roy Ayers’ 1976 song

On a sunny afternoon in the spring of 2023, my phone lit up with texts from several friends sharing a video of Vice President Kamala Harris leaving a Washington, D.C., record store. Dressed in a navy blue suit and flanked by stone-faced Secret Service agents, Harris casually approached a cluster of reporters, one of whom asked enthusiastically, “Madam Vice President, what’d you get?”

“Do you know music?” Harris responded confidently, rustling with an LP-sized paper bag. After teaching a quick lesson on Charles Mingus, she produced a bright yellow record jacket with a photograph of a bearded man with an Afro, wearing a tight yellow T-shirt and beaming confidently.

“One of my favorite albums of all time,” the vice president stated, maintaining eye contact while proudly showing off her record. “Roy Ayers, ‘Everybody Loves the Sunshine.’ You know this one? It’s so good. It’s a classic.”

Indeed, the 1976 Roy Ayers Ubiquity album “Everybody Loves the Sunshine” is a classic. But a classic doesn’t necessarily have to be a hit. While the album received R&B and jazz radio airplay, it wasn’t a mainstream smash, peaking at No. 51 on the Billboard charts. The title track, however — with its soothing, hypnotic energy, its slinky synthesizer melody, and a chorus that’s impossible to disagree with — “My life, my life, my life, my life in the sunshine / Everybody loves the sunshine” — has circumvented industry norms, taking on a life of its own and persevering for half a century.

But my phone didn’t blow up that day because of a classic song. It was because Roy Ayers — the bearded man with an Afro on the album cover — was my biological father. Roy and I met only a handful of times during the 53 years between my birth in January 1972 and his death in March 2025. “Everybody Loves the Sunshine,” on the other hand, has been with me the entire time.

Some songs embed themselves so deeply in our lives that they become part of our emotional fabric, pieces of inextricable connective tissue that lift us up or mark milestones through a lyric or a melody.

For many people, “Everybody Loves the Sunshine” is one of those rare songs. Its elements have been duplicated, sampled and reimagined so many times that it now exists in countless forms, offering endless ways in. While the original Roy Ayers recording is 50 years old, the song is a perennial, and especially alive in the summer — because it is a quintessential summer jam. Every year brings new versions and contexts, each one extending the song’s reach. “Everybody Loves the Sunshine” has been sampled nearly 200 times, and covered by everyone from R&B innovator D’Angelo to Brazilian singer-actor Seu Jorge. The song can just as easily soundtrack a montage of smiling faces in an Apple or Coors commercial as it can bring warmth to an austere hotel lobby, or blast from a slow passing car on a hot afternoon in my Brooklyn neighborhood, as it often does.

But why have generations of people continued to turn and return to the song for 50 years? What accounts for its timeless appeal?

Roy Ayers, U.S. funk, soul and jazz composer and vibraphone player, during a live concert performance at the Kool Jazz Festival, at the Riverfront Stadium in Cincinatti, Ohio, USA, in July 1976.

(David Redfern/Redferns)

Maybe it helps to start at the beginning. Roy Ayers was born in Los Angeles in 1940 and by his mid-20s had become an in-demand sideman as a vibraphonist. After releasing four instrumental jazz albums under his own name, he moved to New York in 1970 and adopted the band name Roy Ayers Ubiquity — signaling his intent to be everywhere at once. In the early 1970s, though still rooted in jazz, his music leaned increasingly toward funk and soul, with heavy grooves and commanding vocals driving songs like “We Live in Brooklyn Baby” and “Coffy Is the Color,” from his soundtrack to the classic blaxploitation film “Coffy.”

And then he came up with the song for which he would be best known. “It was a beautiful, hot, sunny day,” Ayers told the Guardian in 2017, “And I just got this phrase in my head: ‘Everybody loves the sunshine.’ I started singing: ‘Feel what I feel, when I feel what I feel, what I’m feeling.’ Then I started thinking about summer imagery: ‘Folks get down in the sunshine, folks get brown in the sunshine, just bees and things and flowers.’ It was so spontaneous. It felt wonderful.”

Hearing “Sunshine” makes me feel wonderful too. But it didn’t always: I did feel pride when I first saw my father perform it live when I was 7, and hope when we finally met as adults and shared our powerful connection; but a hot chest and the metallic taste of pain came later, after my calls to him went unanswered. I eventually returned to pride — after coming to terms with our relationship, and after telling that story in my 2022 memoir, “My Life in the Sunshine.” Now, I hear it simply as a brilliant piece of music and I end up in the same happy place where so many other listeners reside.

The lazy, hypnotic groove moves with jazz chords and slinky synth melodies that feel like bright rays of light. The track fuses West Coast serenity with East Coast grit: Lush keys evoke California’s glow while steady rim clicks and a sticky piano hook capture the rhythm of 1970s New York. With the chorus, it becomes communal, a feel-good jam that empowers eyes to close gently, smiles to form instantly, and hips to sway while hands reach slowly toward the sun.

In 1977, Roy Ayers Ubiquity made its “Soul Train” debut, performing “Sunshine” on the legendary musical variety show, and gaining a new level of exposure for the song. Over the next decade, Ayers continued releasing popular albums, and “Sunshine” continued to spread. As it turns out, many of the people the song inspired were musicians, and they figured out a new way to demonstrate their love for it. In 1990, a sped-up sample of the vocals and piano from “Sunshine” injected light into the New Jersey hip-hop group Brand Nubian’s “Wake Up (Reprise in the Sunrise).” As sampling grew in popularity, even more artists used “Sunshine,” and while no two songs sounded exactly alike, they all contained the same DNA.

(Some musicians, especially older ones, don’t like being sampled. Not Ayers. “I didn’t plan in the ‘70s to be sampled,” he told the British television host Sonya Saul in a mid-’90s interview. “And all of the sudden it starts happening on massive levels. So it’s great, it’s wonderful. I’m honored that they pick my music.”)

In 1994, “Queen of Hip-Hop Soul” Mary J. Blige released the song “ My Life” — an homage to the recurring phrase in the Roy Ayers song — the first 32 seconds of which are a nearly exact re-creation of “Sunshine.” The song and album it came from, also called “My Life,” became major international hits. “I don’t know what’s in that record,” Blige said about “Sunshine” in her 2021 documentary “My Life,” “but it was something in it that just cracked open everything in me.”

As the new millennium approached, digital technology once again helped give the song renewed life. The introduction of Napster in 1999, iTunes in 2001, YouTube in 2005, and music streaming services in the late 2000s greatly increased people’s exposure to music, old and new. Music became easier than ever to buy, stream or steal, and, in turn, the floodgates opened for musicians to record and share their music.

Roy Ayers of the Jazz in the Gardens Allstar Band performs onstage at the 10th Annual Jazz in the Gardens: Celebrating 10 Years of Great Music at Sun Life Stadium on March 22, 2015 in Miami Gardens, Florida.

(Aaron Davidson)

Many of these musicians covered “Sunshine,” and while high-profile artists like the rapper and producer Dr. Dre and the Japanese trumpeter Takuya Kuroda paid tribute, so did lesser-known artists, who shared interpretations from the most relaxed to the most energetic. Grammy-winning pianist Robert Glasper’s live performance from 2010 is particularly enlightening: the audience becomes audibly excited the moment they recognize the song’s iconic piano hook, a scene that demonstrates “Sunshine’s” immortality.

Now, true to Roy Ayers’ band name, “Everybody Loves the Sunshine” is ubiquitous. But all the exposure in the world can’t guarantee classic status. Ultimately, people need to love a song. They need to connect with it and feel it in a way that’s often difficult to put into words.

“I’m almost tearing up, here,” said Diallo, co-host of the “One Song” podcast, as he broke down “Sunshine’s” individual tracks in an April 2025 episode. “I feel connected to the people who came before me and the people who will come after me. Why am I so connected with everything?”

There really is something undeniably moving about the track’s three opening chords: their warmth, the unhurried tempo, the gentle tone of the Rhodes electric piano. They feel welcoming — almost beckoning.

“It’s three minor 9th chords in parallel motion — it’s carrying you,” says original “Everybody Loves the Sunshine” keyboardist Philip Woo. “Roy loved to have things bouncing at you from all different directions. Each part was a hook, with things calling and answering each other.”

Few songs establish a mood as quickly, and in those opening moments — and throughout the tune — we’re not just hearing but feeling what Roy Ayers channeled on that sunny ‘70s afternoon.

Indeed, “Sunshine” creates a palpable feeling. “Synesthesia hits you first,” says musician-director Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson. “Like, all I think is blue and green. I think of an aerial view of a park. And some grass and a blue sky at prime 11 a.m. sunshine.”

As smooth as it sounds, the song’s arrangement is actually somewhat unorthodox, opening with the chorus, and its verses are sparse, the first simply repeating the phrase, “Just bees and things and flowers.” A muscular female soprano — Chi’cas Reid — dominates the vocal mix, with Ayers’ mellow baritone in a supporting role. But the track has a notable omission: the very instrument Roy Ayers was known for, the vibraphone. So Roy Ayers’ biggest song doesn’t prominently feature his voice or his main instrument. Which makes one wonder whether his greatest strength was not his musicianship in the usual sense but instead his ability to bring people together to create something unique and special, something that came from him, that surrounded him — but that wasn’t completely him.

Maybe the absence of a clear frontperson makes “Sunshine” less of a personal statement, and more of a song that allows space for everybody — listeners and musicians alike — to become part of and make their own. Maybe that’s why I find the song so alluring and why I’m able to connect with it so easily, despite my conflicting personal feelings. So even though “Everybody Loves the Sunshine” was never a big radio hit, there’s no music video, and it hasn’t had a viral TikTok moment, it’s omnipresent in a way that feels unforced and personal, and that’s the secret to its slow-burning success. People feel ownership because they’ve come to it on their own. While I came to the song in a different way, I share that ownership — a fan who feels it as part of me.

Questlove compares the words to the populism of Sly and the Family Stone’s “Everyday People” and the music to the benign psychedelia of the Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,” and cites the infectious synths on “Sunshine” as an early example of Afro-futurism. But ultimately, words fail. “I don’t know,” he says, “It just … it just feels good.”

Musician Roy Ayers performs on the Willow stage during Arroyo Seco Weekend at the Brookside Golf Course at on June 24, 2017 in Pasadena, California.

(Rich Fury)

The lyrics might be even more significant than the music itself. Sunshine is a timeless theme in pop songs. The 1939 song “You Are My Sunshine” is a standard, having been covered by more than 350 artists. Cream’s psychedelic “Sunshine of Your Love” was one of the biggest singles of 1968. The Fifth Dimension’s inspirational medley “Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In” reached No. 1 in 1969. In 1973, Stevie Wonder had a No. 1 hit with the opening lyrics, “You are the sunshine of my life, that’s why I’ll always be around.” The next year, John Denver reached No. 1 by singing, “Sunshine on my shoulders makes me happy, sunshine in my eyes can make me cry.” All of these songs carry the common themes of warmth, happiness and the elementally symbolic power of sunshine.

Not coincidentally, 1939, the late ‘60s, and the early ‘70s were all hard times. 1976 was no different. America was in a post-Nixon, post-Vietnam War recession. Crime and unemployment were up and people were in need of positivity, warmth and assurance. “Everybody Loves the Sunshine” thrived through dark times when it was new, and it thrived in recent years during the pandemic, a time when people not only loved the sunshine, they craved it. Maybe it’s kind of like “Happy Days Are Here Again,” which was a hit during the Depression and used as FDR’s 1932 campaign song, and experienced a revival — 90 years later — as COVID-19 began to wane and a sense of optimism dawned on the horizon.

Now, in its 50th summer, “Everybody Loves the Sunshine” has achieved a level of musical equity that makes the song’s themes as relevant as ever.

On July 21, 2024, Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race. That same day, Kamala Harris announced her candidacy, and suddenly her year-old record store video resurfaced — flooding my phone with messages once again. “Sunshine” was having yet another moment, ushering in a new sense of hope. It was summer, and the video felt like an annual reminder to give the song its due: to get down, to get brown, and to feel — once again — what Roy Ayers was feeling.

I’ve had half a century to think about “Everybody Loves the Sunshine” — to live with the ups and downs of my feelings about my father and reconcile them with his music; to walk into rooms sensing it was about to play and still feel pleasantly surprised when it did; to watch others lose themselves in its welcoming chords and hooks and connect with its instantly relatable lyrics, knowing I wasn’t alone; and finally, to find redemption after Roy’s death, realizing that although he was gone, I’d have his music forever. Everybody would.

Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: latimes.com