Eddie Floyd

Perhaps best known for his 1966 hit “Knock on Wood,” singer and songwriter Eddie Lee Floyd (1937- ), together with artists like Otis Redding, Booker T. and the MG’s, and Autauga County native Wilson Pickett, helped create the signature southern soul sound that emerged from Memphis’s Stax Records in the 1960s and 1970s. He was inducted into the Alabama Music Hall of Fame in 2003, the National Rhythm and Blues Hall of Fame in 2016, and the Memphis Music Hall of Fame in 2018. 

Floyd was born in Montgomery, Montgomery County, on June 25, 1937, to Florence West Floyd and Prince Edward Floyd. With his father absent from the home, Floyd spent his early years in Montgomery with his mother, who worked as a nurse. Floyd had four siblings. The family made frequent visits to Detroit, Michigan, where Floyd would stay with his uncle Robert West and aunt Katherine West.

Floyd’s family encouraged his musical interests from an early age. On childhood visits to Detroit, his mother took him to see performances by Ella Fitzgerald, William James “Count” Basie, and Lena Horne, often at Detroit’s famous Fox Theatre. After fighting with his school principal at age 13, Floyd spent three years at the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children, a reform school known locally as “Mt. Meigs.” It was an experience that he recounts as deeply transformative in that it pushed him to take his future more seriously and led him to see music as a possible life path. The institution’s music teacher, a Mr. Wilbur, saw his potential and provided him with some of his first formal music training. While there, Floyd and the other children were taken to church each Sunday, and Floyd sang in the choir. When Floyd returned home from the institution in 1953, he was sent to live with his aunt and uncle in Detroit.  

In the 1950s, Robert West established several small record companies, most notably, the labels Lu Pine and Flick. In addition, he helped encourage his nephew’s musical career by sending him to voice lessons. In 1955, Floyd formed the group The Falcons. The following year, the band signed with Mercury Records to produce their first recording, “Baby, That’s It.” Although the single received little commercial success, the band gained local popularity through frequent live performances. Around this time, Floyd married his wife Rachael; the two had three children before separating. 

After a change in membership when two of its original members joined the military, the Falcons recorded for West’s newly formed record companies. The band’s new iteration featured Joe Stubbs, older brother of Levi Stubbs of the Four Tops, as lead singer. The Falcons’s first hit, the 1959 single “You’re So Fine,” peaked at number 17 on the Billboard charts. In 1960, Wilson Pickett, of Prattville, Autauga County, replaced Stubbs as the band’s lead singer. Pickett sang the Falcons’s 1965 hit song “I Found a Love,” which reached number 80 on the Billboard Hot 100. The Falcons disbanded when both Floyd and Pickett launched successful solo careers.

Beginning in 1965, Floyd worked with the iconic Stax Records in Memphis, Tennessee, to create his most famous music. Prominent around the same time as Motown Records, Stax is often viewed by critics as Motown’s “grittier” southern counterpoint. Central to the success of Stax Records was the session band Booker T. and the MG’s (sometimes M.G.’s), comprised of Booker T. Jones (piano), Steve Cropper (guitar), Al Jackson Jr. (drums), and Donald “Duck” Dunn (bass). Much like the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, the renowned session band at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Colbert County, the distinctive southern soul sound of Booker T. and the MG’s helped define the music of Stax. The band featured prominently in the songs that Floyd wrote and sang.

Frequent collaboration and creative generosity were essential to the culture at Stax Records. From the beginning of his days there, Floyd often worked with MG’s musician Steve Cropper to write songs for other performers. Cropper and Floyd wrote the 1965 song “Comfort Me” for Carla Thomas. The duo then wrote the songs “Ninety-Nine and a Half (Won’t Do)” and “634-5789 (Soulsville, USA)” for Wilson Pickett. All three songs became hit records.

Floyd wrote his most enduring song, the 1966 hit “Knock on Wood,” with Cropper in a room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. Now best known as the site of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, the Lorraine Motel was then a frequent destination for Black entertainers, athletes, and professionals who were often unwelcome in the businesses of segregated Memphis. According to Cropper, an evening storm inspired the song’s lyrics. The chord progression is an inverted version of the one used in Steve Cropper and Wilson Pickett’s earlier song “In the Midnight Hour.” “Knock on Wood” was originally intended for Otis Redding, but producer Jerry Wexler advocated for Stax’s release of Floyd’s version. The song peaked at number 28 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1966.

“Knock on Wood” has since been covered by dozens of artists, most famously by Amii Stewart, whose 1979 disco version of the song became a number 1 hit. Other notable covers include versions by Otis Redding and Carla Thomas, Eric Clapton, David Bowie, and Ella Fitzgerald.

Throughout the next decade, Floyd would write numerous songs for Stax records, both for himself and for other performers. Most often, Floyd wrote with fellow Stax artists Steve Cropper and Booker T. Jones and Stax producer Alvertis Isbel (Al Bell). In collaboration with other artists, Floyd produced modest hits for himself, including the 1967 song “Raise Your Hand” and the 1968 song “I’ve Never Found a Girl (To Love Me Like You Do).” Floyd also cowrote Johnnie Taylor’s 1966 hit “Just the One I’ve Been Looking For,” Otis Redding’s 1967 hit “I Love You More Than Words Can Say,” Sam and Dave’s 1968 hit “You Don’t Know What You Mean to Me,” and Rufus Thomas’s 1971 hit “The Breakdown.” 

Although many of Stax’s most famous artists left for other labels in the ensuing years, Floyd remained with Stax Records until the company went bankrupt in 1975. (It has since been reconstituted.) After its dissolution, Floyd signed on with Malaco Records, for whom he recorded the 1977 album Experience, a sexually charged foray into disco music. Although Floyd released several more albums over the years, his subsequent recordings didn’t achieve the same level of commercial and critical success as his earlier work with Stax Records.

Throughout the decades, Floyd continued to tour regularly. He performed for at least two U.S. presidents, first, at the 1989 inauguration of Pres. George H. W. Bush, and later at a 2013 Memphis soul event hosted by Pres. Barack Obama and his wife Michelle. He appeared in the 1998 film Blues Brothers 2000, in which he sang a duet with Wilson Pickett, and later toured internationally with the Blues Brothers Band several times.  

When Stax Records reemerged decades later, Floyd returned to record the 2008 album Eddie Loves You So. The Stax legacy remains important to him, and he has frequently gone back to visit and partner with Stax in various ways.

In December 2019, Eddie Floyd was one of several renowned Alabama artists who performed at a Montgomery concert commemorating Alabama’s Bicentennial, the 200th anniversary of Alabama statehood. In 2020, Floyd released his autobiography, Knock! Knock! Knock! On Wood! My Life in Soul. The book was coauthored with Tony Fletcher, who has previously written books on Wilson Pickett, Keith Moon, and the band R.E.M. 

Mostly retired, Floyd currently resides on a farm in the Montgomery area.