King Floyd (February 13, 1945 – March 6, 2006) was a New Orleans soul singer, best known for his top 10 hit from 1970, "Groove Me".
King Floyd III was born in New Orleans in 1945and raised in nearby Kenner, LA. He began singing on street corners while in his early teens, befriending local musicians like Earl King and Willie Tee. With the aid of New Orleans blues legend Mr. Google Eyes, Floyd landed his first paying gig at the Bourbon Street club Sho-Bar in 1961, although his fledgling career was soon put on hold by military duty. Following his army discharge in late 1963, Floyd migrated to New York City, signing with booking agents Shaw Artists and regularly performing throughout Manhattan.
He also began writing songs, encouraged by the likes of Don Covay and J.J. Jackson. After about a year he resettled in Los Angeles, befriending another New Orleans expatriate, composer/arranger Harold Battiste. Through Battiste, Floyd met DJ Buddy Keleen, who in turn brought him to the Original Sound label, which in 1965 issued his debut single, "Walkin' and Talkin'." Floyd's debut LP, the Battiste-arranged King Floyd: A Man in Love, followed on the Mercury subsidiary Pulsar in 1967; the album went nowhere, and as he was barely making ends meet as a songwriter, he finally returned to New Orleans in 1969.
Now a family man, Floyd accepted a post office job upon returning home, but within a month he ran into producer Wardell Quezerque, then a staffer at Malaco Records. On May 17, 1970, they traveled to Malaco's Jackson, MS, studios to cut "Groove Me," recorded in just one take at the same session that would also yield another Quezerque-produced blockbuster, Jean Knight's "Mr. Big Stuff." Floyd wrote "Groove Me" while working in an East L.A. box factory in honor of a young college girl on staff. He was set to give her the lyrics on the morning she abruptly quit, and he never saw her again.
With Quezerque's assistance, he transformed the song into a deeply funky, percolating jam somewhere between the best of James Brown and Otis Redding, but ironically, the song first appeared on the Malaco subsidiary Chimneyville as merely the B-side of Floyd's soulful "What Our Love Needs." Only when New Orleans DJ George Vinnett flipped the record over did "Groove Me" begin meriting the attention it deserved, and as the record emerged as a local smash, Atlantic scooped up national distribution rights.
"Groove Me" went on to top the Billboard R&B charts and hit number six on the pop charts, going gold on Christmas Day of 1970. Needless to say, Floyd quit his job at the post office to perform a U.S. tour. His follow-up single, "Baby Let Me Kiss You" climbed up to number 29 on the Billboard top 40 charts in 1971.
However, differences with Quezergue soon emerged and his 1973 follow-up album, Think About It, failed to make a commercial impact. However, Atlantic released a song from the album, "Woman Don't Go Astray," as a single which became a minor hit in 1974 as King Floyd, billed "The Soulful Highness" because of his high, occasionally raspy, tenor voice, toured Europe. He also travelled to Jamaica, where Bob Marley and Peter Tosh introduced him to reggae. His 1975 album, Well Done, was released through TK Records with Atlantic distributing. "I Feel Like Dynamite" from the album, written by Larry Hamilton, was released as its single.
After the album Body English (1976), King Floyd's career tailed off and he left the Malaco label the following year. "When the disco thing came in, that just about terminated my writing," he said. He attempted a comeback in 1982 before moving back to California. He spent the remainder of the next two decades drifting in and out of the music industry. He had credits for "Boombastic," recorded in 1995 by Shaggy, which became a big hit. Floyd reunited with Malaco Records in 2000 for the Old Skool Funk album, but it failed to make an impact. However, his song "Don't Leave Me Lonely" was prominently sampled by the Wu-Tang Clan for the song "For Heaven's Sake" off their album Wu-Tang Forever.
He died
in Jackson, California on March 6, 2006, from complications of a stroke and
diabetes (aged 61).
(Edited from Wikipedia & AllMusic)