Ah! Even if “different strokes” wasn’t originally a direct reference to “different drummer,” people’s familiarilty with that other phrase may have helped it to catch on.
When I first heard it as a teenager, I assumed that it was a sexual innuendo, referring to people preferring different styles of coitus. I was a little puzzled about it being used in very G rated contexts.
Everything is a euphemism if you think about it too much.
Among the R-rated possibilities, you really assumed coitus?
Here’s an interesting theory. “Strokes” means ‘comforting gestures of approval’
There are so many possible explanations out there - it seems like different theories appeal to different people. I wonder if there is an aphorism for that phenomenon? The only one I can think of is “How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?”
It would be pretty clever if that was the intent. “Let’s use a word ambiguous enough that it really drives home the point!”
Ali said it in 1966.
So that is before Sly in 1968.
The Champ for the knock out!
Or see Post 2.
Don’t worry, it happens to the best of us!
In fact it refers to the wide diversity of brushstroke styles in Chinese calligraphy, it’s a translation of a Chinese proverb dating from 2700 BCE. Interestingly, the straightforward literal translation rhymes in both languages.
No, I read that. But naita didnt give a date. And Exapno_Mapcase claimed it was from “Everyday People” by Sly and the Family Stone … 1969.
So, thus I looked up the dates and Ali came two years earlier.
This settled which came first.
But don’t worry, it happens to the best of us! 
@Exapno_Mapcase never denied that Ali originated the phrase; he just claimed that the phrase became widlely known thanks to the song.
Yep, and not reading all of a post also happens to some of us.
I did read all of it. I just wanted to quantify whether if it was Sly or Ali said it first, with actual dates.
As was already established by the link in post #2. Nobody - certainly not I - claimed that Sly said it first.
None of which invalidates the idea that it could have originated with different strikes, or “strokes” of a drumstick by that “different drummer” of the Thoreau aphorism.
Even though Ali’s intent was very different from Thoreau’s, if it were street slang, it could have originally risen from the Thoreau saying, but then reinterpreted to mean what Ali used it to mean.
Sayings change meaning all the time. In the thread about bullying kids with glasses, people are (mis)quoting Dorothy Parker’s “Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses,” and many are misunderstanding Parker’s original intent, which was a lamentation of what she perceived, not a dictum. Some people seem almost gleeful in calling her wrong, because times have changed, not realizing that she would probably be the most gleeful of all to see the change.
But my point is, what people, the majority of people, get out of this phrase in modern times, is in a very real sense, what it means. If nearly everyone understands it that way, and there’s not a word or grammar feature one can point to, to invalidate that interpretation, than we have to accept that this is what it means now, especially since Parker is not around to defend it.
The phrase “Different strokes for different folks” may have (or may not; I haven’t done the research-- it just strikes me as a too huge a coincidence to be merely random) been a take on Thoreau, but then people not familiar with Thoreau, and unable to put the phrase into context, gave it the belligerent meaning Ali gave it. But, it shifted back again, this time toward Thoreau, when it appeared in the song, which definitely is not about beating people up by tailoring your punch to your opponent.
Given that “stroke” could mean a lot of things, it works well in the song.
Mike Nesmith wrote “Different Drum,” which was Linda Ronstaadt’s first hit. So a Thoreau reference in 60s popular culture is a known occrrence. He wrote the song in 1964, so it wasn’t in response to either Ali or Sly Stone. By then, of course, Thoreau’s line, " If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer, had been famous for a century and was commonly used as a title, both as “different drummer” and “different drum,” especially in the 1950s, when it was used by civil rights advocates.
Different strokes, according to ngrams, had been a more common phrase than either up through about 1950. All of those uses were practical: different strokes of a pen or pencil, of a typewriter, of a piston, in racquet sports, golf, rowing, and swimming.
Ali therefore could have picked up the phrase through black writers or through sports metaphors (or simply invented it). He was not a reader; indeed, he made literacy a cause later in life because he was dyslexic and hated books as a high school student, when he was near the bottom of his class. He may have heard others use the phrase, certainly, but it was mostly used in literary circles rather than in common speech.
The sports metaphors were frequently used in instruction books. The problem there is that Google doesn’t find any uses in references to boxing. Clay was a fine high school athlete and may have played in these other sports and heard the phrase there, but no evidence exists.
The larger problem is that “different” is itself an extremely common word. When put into ngrams, “different drum” and “different strokes” flatline compared to “different.” That two, um, different phrases both contain “different” as a modifier says virtually nothing about a connection or shared source.
Sound etymology demands that the sourcing must be demonstrable. Nothing in the historical record connects Ali to Thoreau, or to any other person, place, or thing. (Sorry, Mike.) He was good with phrasemaking. Why not credit him with originality, at least at the doggerel level?
Not a reader; but a hell of a poet. Like you, I don’t think it’s beyond the realm of possibility that Ali formulated the phrase entirely on his own with no explicit outside influence.
I hate that song. It doesn’t parse well.
I thought it was about golfing…