Creativity Quote by Eddie Floyd

In Eddie Floyd's line, you can hear the backstage truth of an era that likes to pretend it was one long, clean rivalry. "Everybody had their fans" starts as a shrug - a practical acknowledgment that every singer, every group, every label had a built-in crowd. But the second half quietly flips the script: "and they were fans of all of them". It's not just diplomacy. It's a portrait of a music ecosystem before taste calcified into identity.

Floyd came up in the Southern soul and Stax universe, where the scene was competitive but also deeply communal: musicians shared studios, bands backed multiple artists, and audiences treated shows less like brand warfare and more like a rolling party. The subtext is that allegiance wasn't exclusive. A person could love Otis Redding and Sam & Dave and Carla Thomas without performing loyalty tests. That kind of cross-fandom mattered in a segregated, radio-gated America, where access itself was political and music traveled through word of mouth, jukeboxes, and live rooms.

The sentence is also a subtle defense of professionalism. If "everybody had their fans", then nobody needs to be inflated into a singular genius to justify success. If "they were fans of all of them", then the win isn't domination; it's circulation. Floyd is pointing to a time when soul was less a battlefield of stans and more a shared language - one where the crowd's breadth, not its purity, was the measure of cultural power.