Chapter 1
A Survey of the Funk Genre
The most important figure in the development of funk music was James Brown. As I will discuss, funk’s origins lie in rhythm and blues (R&B), and by the mid-1960s, Brown was already famous as an R&B singer, having had hits with songs such as “Please, Please, Please” and “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag”; indeed, it is this latter song, from 1965, that shows how Brown’s musical style was changing, gradually morphing into the style that would come to be known as funk. It is not possible, of course, to pinpoint a foundation date for funk, but it is fair to say that the genre blossomed around 1966–67. The first James Brown song that can truly be called funk is the seminal “Cold Sweat” from 1967. Another group, who are little known today, Dyke and the Blazers, are also credited as originators of funk; their song “Funky Broadway,” from 1966, was “the first song ever to take the word ‘funk’ into the R&B chart.”1 Indeed, in the extended version of “Cold Sweat,” James Brown ad libs the words “funky, funky Broadway” seemingly as a reference and a tribute to the Dyke and the Blazers’ record. To be clear, there are three reasons why I consider both “Cold Sweat” and “Funky Broadway” to be funk music and not R&B: first, both songs lack harmonic change (although “Cold Sweat” has chord changes at the bridge); second, both tracks use the ensemble as a single, heavily syncopated unit; third, both feature drum breaks (as opposed to solos; I will look at the difference later). I will examine these three elements later in the chapter.
Funk continued to change throughout the late 1960s and 1970s and influenced many different types of popular music. Eventually, in the late 1970s, funk was almost absorbed by the ubiquitous genre of disco, a style that, ironically, was deeply influenced by funk. Like jazz and blues before it, funk is a music of African-American origin, but
1 Dave Thomspon, Funk (San Francisco: Backbeat Books, 2001) 29 1

Bettison Chapter 1
unlike those other genres, funk, throughout the course of its existence, was not appropriated by white musicians (with a couple of notable exceptions), and thus funk is still seen as primarily a black musical genre.
There have been many definitions of funk, but for the purposes of this dissertation I will claim that funk was a style that existed for quite a short period of time, between 1966–67 and 1976–77. Arguably, there are funk albums that were made after this latter date, and certainly funk’s influence is still being felt even today, especially in hip-hop. I am aware that my very strict definition is controversial. Certainly, both Ricky Vincent’s and Dave Thompson’s books give a much more inclusive and far-reaching definition of funk, but mine is more of a purist’s definition. It is a definition born out of the feeling that something started to happen to funk in the mid- to late 1970s—a feeling that funk, always a genre that thrived on addressing difficult social issues, began to lose its edge. Disco, as I have said, became the defining genre of the time, and (with the exception of punk) managed to take over virtually all popular music. By the late 1970s, almost every mainstream recording artist had recorded a disco song; even James Brown made a disco album. Funk, which was not so very distinct from disco to begin with, became heavily influenced by the latter style. The relationship between the two genres was quite incestuous, as I will describe in Chapter 4, but it is important to recognize that disco was an off-shoot of funk.
Funk started as the music of small urban venues, and the relationship between the performers and the audience was of central importance to the genre. Disco, on the other hand, started as and remained the music of discothèques, large night clubs where excesses were de rigueur. From the beginning, disco was a recorded genre. By contrast, funk was a music that, at least in its early days, tried to sound as live as possible even in studio recordings, immediacy being crucial to the funk aesthetic. The rise of disco,
2
Bettison Chapter 1
combined with the interest of large record labels in certain funk bands,2 meant that the gritty realism and rebellious spirit that characterized funk in its beginnings were lost by the end of the 1970s. In later chapters I will examine this in greater depth.
My purist definition is not meant to denigrate any of the music that I have not included due to reasons of chronology, but rather to reflect the palpable change that occurred in popular music at some point in the mid- to late 1970s, after funk had developed and evolved for ten years. To allow myself to fully explore what funk had become in its heyday, and what it was moving toward, I will primarily focus on one year, 1971, and two albums released during that year There’s a Riot Goin’ On by Sly and the Family Stone, and Maggot Brain by Funkadelic. Before doing so, however, I will discuss the general musical characteristics of funk music, using the earliest examples of the genre as a starting point.