The One
In most popular music of the early 1960s, the rhythmic emphasis sat on the backbeat: beats two and four. James Brown flipped it. He pushed the accent onto beat one, the downbeat, and demanded every musician in his band lock to it. He called it “The One,” shouting it as a cue during performances. That single shift reorganized the relationship between rhythm, harmony, and melody in Black American popular music. Everything that followed, from disco to hip-hop to house, inherited the change.
The first clear document is “Out of Sight,” recorded in 1964. Brown’s guitarist Jimmy Nolen had developed a technique called “chicken scratch”: pressing the strings lightly against the fretboard, muting them, and strumming rapid sixteenth-note patterns near the bridge of his Fender Jazzmaster through a Fender Twin. Nolen deployed it on “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” in 1965, scratching out a sizzling one-chord break after the first verse. That riff turned the guitar into a snare drum.
By May 1967, Brown and his bandleader Alfred “Pee Wee” Ellis had written “Cold Sweat.” They recorded it at King Records Studios, 1540 Brewster Avenue, Cincinnati, in a single take, the band arranged in a semicircle around one microphone, no overdubs. It reached number one on the R&B chart and is sometimes cited as the first true funk record. More importantly, it was the first Brown recording to feature an unaccompanied drum break from Clyde Stubblefield, the tradition that would become the foundation of sampling two decades later.
Drums as Architecture
Stubblefield, from Chattanooga, Tennessee, had never taken a drum lesson. He said he learned rhythm from the clatter of factory machinery near his childhood home. He joined Brown’s band in 1965 alongside John “Jabo” Starks of Mobile, Alabama (also self-taught, raised on church music), forming the twin-drummer engine that powered Brown’s output through the early 1970s. Stubblefield played loose, syncopated patterns full of ghost notes, barely audible snare taps that gave the groove its texture. Starks was the clock: steady, unshakable, impossible to pull off center.
Their most consequential recording arrived in 1969. “Funky Drummer” was a studio jam, and Stubblefield’s eight-bar unaccompanied break, entirely improvised, became one of the most sampled recordings in music history. By 1986, hip-hop producers had begun looping it: KRS-One’s “South Bronx,” Eric B. & Rakim’s “Eric B. Is President,” then hundreds more. The break has appeared on well over a thousand records, from Public Enemy and N.W.A. to George Michael and Ed Sheeran.
Parallel Mutations
Funk was never a single scene. While Brown was building his sound in Cincinnati, Sly Stone in San Francisco was building something else entirely. Sly and the Family Stone were racially and gender-integrated, played psychedelic rock and soul simultaneously, and featured Larry Graham on bass. Graham had come up playing in his mother’s band, a duo with no drummer. To compensate, he started thumping the lower strings with the side of his thumb to simulate a kick drum and snapping the higher strings with his index finger for the snare. He called it “thumpin’ and pluckin’.” The world called it slap bass. Its first recorded appearance was on “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)” in 1969.
In New Orleans, the Meters formed in 1965: Zigaboo Modeliste on drums, George Porter Jr. on bass, Leo Nocentelli on guitar, Art Neville on keyboards. They fused funk with second-line parade rhythms, a syncopated polyrhythmic tradition rooted in the city’s brass band culture. Their 1969 instrumental “Cissy Strut” reached number four on the R&B chart and entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2011. Modeliste’s drumming on those early records is as influential as Stubblefield’s, though less sampled.
The Gear
Funk’s sonic palette relied on specific instruments. The Hohner Clavinet, an electromechanical keyboard manufactured in Trossingen, West Germany, from 1964 to 1982, became the genre’s defining keyboard sound. Its hammered steel strings produced a percussive, nasal tone that sat perfectly in a funk mix. Stevie Wonder played a Clavinet model C on “Superstition” in 1972, layering two separate parts panned hard left and right. The bass line on that track came from TONTO (The Original New Timbral Orchestra), a room-filling assemblage of Moog and ARP synthesizers at the studio of Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff.
The Mu-Tron III envelope filter, first manufactured in 1972, became essential. It produced a watery, auto-wah sweep controlled by playing dynamics rather than a foot pedal. Wonder ran his Clavinet through one on “Higher Ground” in 1973. Bootsy Collins, who joined Brown’s band as a teenager in March 1970 after the original lineup quit over a pay dispute, later used the Mu-Tron extensively with Parliament-Funkadelic, coupling it with his star-shaped bass guitars.
The Mothership
George Clinton took funk somewhere Brown never intended. Where Brown ran a tight operation with fines for missed notes, Clinton ran a sprawling collective across two overlapping projects: Parliament (vocal, conceptual, horn-heavy) and Funkadelic (guitar-driven, psychedelic, raw). Both drew from the same pool of players, including Collins and his brother Catfish, drummer Frankie “Kash” Waddy, keyboardist Bernie Worrell, and guitarist Eddie Hazel.
Parliament’s Mothership Connection, released on Casablanca Records in December 1975, was the commercial breakthrough. Clinton built a mythology around funk as alien transmission, with Afrofuturist imagery and a stage show centered on a spaceship that lowered from the ceiling. Former James Brown sidemen Maceo Parker and Fred Wesley joined the horn section. “Give Up the Funk (Tear the Roof off the Sucker)” became their first million-selling single. The Library of Congress added the album to the National Recording Registry in 2011.
Afterlife
Funk’s commercial peak ran roughly from 1967 to 1983. Disco borrowed its rhythmic foundation and added strings and four-on-the-floor kicks. The Ohio Players, Kool and the Gang, and Earth, Wind & Fire moved toward polished, horn-driven arrangements that crossed over to pop audiences. Rick James brought a harder, synthesizer-driven edge; his 1981 Street Songs produced “Super Freak,” later sampled by MC Hammer for “U Can’t Touch This” in 1990. Prince synthesized funk, rock, pop, and new wave into something entirely his own.
But funk’s deepest legacy lives in hip-hop’s DNA. Nearly every foundational element of sampling culture traces to James Brown’s catalog. The breaks, the one-chord vamps, the rhythmic vocabulary: producers in the Bronx, in Compton, in Atlanta built new genres on grooves first laid down at King Records in Cincinnati. Stubblefield never received royalties for any of it. He died in 2017 in Madison, Wisconsin, largely unknown outside drummer circles. The groove he improvised in a few seconds in 1969 has generated more music than most composers produce in a lifetime.
Essential Listening
- James Brown – Live at the Apollo (1963)
- Sly and the Family Stone – Stand! (1969)
- James Brown – Sex Machine (1970)
- The Meters – Look-Ka Py Py (1969)
- Stevie Wonder – Innervisions (1973)
- Herbie Hancock – Head Hunters (1973)
- Parliament – Mothership Connection (1975)
- Funkadelic – One Nation Under a Groove (1978)
- Bootsy’s Rubber Band – Ahh…The Name Is Bootsy, Baby! (1977)
- Ohio Players – Fire (1974)
- Rick James – Street Songs (1981)
- Prince – Dirty Mind (1980)