"Different folks different strokes:" British, American, or other?

Question

"Different folks different strokes" Is this British, American or other country's idiom? I once consulted this to a British friend and she admitted had never heard it before

Answer 1

Tom Dalzell & Terry Victor, The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (2015) has this entry for the phrase:

different strokes for different folks

different things please different people US

Singer Syleena "Syl" Johnson released the song "Different Strokes" (J. Cameron and J. Zachary) with this line in it in 1967; Sly and the Family Stone's 1968 mega-hit ["Everyday People"] put the phrase on the map.

• Yes, I realize that 'times have changed' and that, as a jitterbug friend told me the other day, "one has different strokes for different folks." — Philadelphia Tribune, p. 5, 19 May 1945

• "I got different strokes for different folks." {Quoting Cassius Clay} — Great Bend (Kansas) Daily Tribune, p. 6, 11 November 1966

So the phrase appears to go back to 1945 at least. The Muhammad Ali quotation suggests that in 1966 (at least in his milieu) the phrase was already familiar enough in the sense of different people having different tastes and interests that he could apply it as a kind of pun to his boxing tactics. You can hear Syl Johnson's (heavily James Brown–influenced) recording of "Different Strokes" here.

Answer 2

Both the British and North American Oxford dictionaries contain the phrase, so it is understandable in more than one dialect.

The phrase was notably used in the popular 1968 Sly and the Family Stones song Everyday People.