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

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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...