James Brown's "Funky Drummer" (Part 1)

One Song

In this first part of a two-part episode, hosts Diallo Riddle and LUXXURY explore James Brown's seminal track 'Funky Drummer,' examining its

Key takeaways

• James Brown's 'Funky Drummer' is considered a cornerstone of funk music and one of the most sampled tracks in history.
• The song's drum break, performed by Clyde Stubblefield, became a foundational element in hip hop production.

Main topics

• Origins and legacy of James Brown's 'Funky Drummer'
• Influence on hip hop and sampling culture

Notable quotes

"Hit me now. That's actually not just a James Brownism. It's not just a Shamone. Hit me. It literally is functional to tell the band."

Conclusion

Part one sets the stage for an in-depth exploration of 'Funky Drummer,' highlighting its

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:00) Carry in the change. Take me in the change. Take me in the change. Speaker 2 (0:07) And you can hear the change in the bleed right here. Speaker 3 (0:11) Ha! Speaker 2 (0:12) And then he's going to say, hit me now. So hit me now. That's actually not just a James Brownism. It's not just a Shamone. Hit me. It literally Speaker 1 (0:22) is functional to Speaker 2 (0:23) tell the band. It's an instruction. Go back to the head. Go back to the hits. And the hits are those percussive, pre Speaker 1 (0:29) -planned. I beg your pardon, but to the people on the dance floor, he's just rapping. But suddenly, he's making things happen. Speaker 3 (0:41) Is that cold? Speaker 1 (0:43) It's 1969. Is that Speaker 3 (0:44) cold, bro? Right Speaker 1 (0:45) there. Speaker 3 (0:45) There you go. Speaker 1 (0:47) Luxury, today we are going way back to the song that some would argue gave birth to at least three musical genres. Speaker 2 (0:54) That's right, Diallo. This song didn't even crack the top 50 when it came out, but its legacy is enormous. Countless producers have sampled the song, or we were told to give the drummer some, but... Did the drummer get enough Speaker 1 (1:05) or even any? Yeah, exactly. Well, today we're going to find out because the drummer ain't had any in a long time. We're talking one song, and that song is Funky Drummer by the Godfather of Soul, the hardest working man in showbiz. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. James Brown. One, two, three, four, hit it. Speaker 1 (1:40) I'm actor, writer, director, and sometimes DJ, Speaker 2 (1:42) Diallo Riddle. And I'm producer, DJ, songwriter, and musicologist, Luxury, aka the guy who whispers, Interpolation. And this is One Song. The show where we break down the stems and stories behind iconic songs across genres, telling you why they deserve one more listen. You will Speaker 1 (1:57) hear these songs like you've never heard them before, and you can watch One Song on YouTube and Spotify. While you're there, please like and subscribe. All right, well, we're happy to say that this is part one of a two-part episode that we are doing on James Brown's epic funky drummer. You know, James Brown is one of those artists you can know before you actually know what a record is. You know the hair, you know about the footwork, you know the screams, you know the cape, you know the whole routine where James looks completely exhausted. Somebody puts the cape over his shoulders and helps him towards the side of the stage, but no, then James throws off the cape like, Speaker 2 (2:28) you Speaker 1 (2:28) thought I was finished? Speaker 1 (2:42) It Speaker 2 (2:43) pulls me every time. It pulls me every time. Speaker 1 (2:46) And then the band has to perform for like another 45 minutes, but luxury. Do you remember where you were the first time you were introduced to funky drummers? I would 100 % say this is a classic, a sample, took me back in Speaker 2 (2:57) time to find the source kind of song. And by the way, by the way, we mentioned it's a two-part episode because we will be going into depth and detail on the extent to which this song has influenced genres, perhaps even birthing, arguably, a single genre that changed the world. 100%. We're Speaker 1 (3:13) going Speaker 2 (3:13) to talk about that in great detail on this two-part episode, but I definitely, for my first example of hearing the song, would have been tracing back a Public Enemy song probably, or maybe it was an LL Cool J song, or maybe it was an NWA song. This song has been sampled 2,000 times Speaker 1 (3:27) and counting. And counting, and counting. Even when we just played the burst here in the studio, it felt like when that break comes in, you feel like you're hearing something plucked from the primordial... you know, musical ooze that will give Bird to like a million different life forms. Funky ooze. It's Speaker 2 (3:45) the Speaker 1 (3:45) funky Speaker 2 (3:45) ooze. Funky Speaker 1 (3:46) ooze. That's absolutely right. We're Speaker 3 (3:48) going Speaker 1 (3:48) to talk about greasy grooves later. But look, I think a lot of us learned about older music. We didn't start with like a box set and read the liner notes. We heard something on a rap record and thought, yo, what is that? Speaker 2 (3:58) Yeah. That's incredible. Whatever it is, this song is infused with not just the funk and the stank and the dusty grooves of it being sampled, Speaker 1 (4:05) but Speaker 2 (4:06) it also has history in many, many layers. And that's one of my favorite parts about, like, that's why we're doing a two-part episode, because it's so important to modern music. What about you, Diallo? When did you first hear about the Godfather of Soul? Speaker 1 (4:19) Honestly, I think that my first exposure to James Brown, just because of when I grew up, was probably like in a movie trailer. Like, I feel like every movie trailer in the 80s is like, I feel good. It's like, what happens Speaker 2 (4:29) when he loses his job? Oh, my God. I'm moving and I would now. A memory is being triggered. I may have heard James Brown before all the sampling stuff from a movie trailer. Specifically. Oh my God, I think you know where I'm going with this. You just triggered a memory, a very pleasant one. It's Rocky IV, Living in America. Oh my God, that song is so tight. It's really silly too. And Speaker 1 (4:51) he's Speaker 2 (4:51) decked out in the all-American fit. All-American flags. It's all-American. It's all high Hollywood production values. Yeah! Speaker 2 (5:08) But that might have been the first James Brown song where I was like aware because I was watching him sing it and perform it where I was aware of the full package. You're like, who's Speaker 1 (5:17) this? He was the very definition of an uncle. I mean, Speaker 2 (5:21) because even the hair in 1985 or whenever the song came out, like that hair was already kind of like to my young mind throwback. I knew it wasn't modern hair. And it's James Brown doing living in America. Great song. Speaker 1 (5:35) Listen. Speaker 2 (5:37) I Speaker 1 (5:37) always thought it was funny if someone was like, hey, Speaker 2 (5:39) what's your favorite James Speaker 1 (5:40) Brown song? You know, it might be Living in America. Speaker 2 (5:42) I don't Speaker 1 (5:42) know who's going to answer that. I think that would piss people off. Speaker 2 (5:44) But it's a good solid Speaker 1 (5:46) tune, you know? I think the other place I got early exposure to James Brown, ironically not James Brown, it was Eddie Murphy's Celebrity Hot Tub sketch on SNL. Speaker 2 (5:55) 100%. Oh, my God. I quote that to this day. Speaker 3 (6:17) Oh my Speaker 1 (6:18) God. That might be one of the funniest SNL clips of all time. Oh, the best of Eddie Murphy was the first piece of content, if you want to call it that. I remember it was the first time I ever cried from laughing so much. And like that one, I mean, come on. He's like, I put my toe in. Ah! I hurt myself. Is it going to make me sweat? Ah! I can watch that. It Speaker 2 (6:37) is the greatest entrance of all Speaker 1 (6:40) sketch comedy time. I mean, like, he just comes in so hot, no pun intended. And I could watch that thing for days. With Speaker 2 (6:47) a little Speedo on. Speaker 1 (6:49) And, like, guys who you see in the background of other Eddie Murphy movies, but they're all fake pretending to play the trombone and trumpet. And it's such a weird place in his catalog, too, because this is the guy who was kind of like a revolutionary. Yeah. in the 60s like he does famously say it loud i'm black and i'm proud Speaker 1 (7:16) James is a cultural figure in many decades, not the least of which is his questionable interview where he kind of showed up, I'm going to say not sober, and tried to answer the nice young lady's questions on air. The women love you when you get out there. Why is that, ladies? Speaker 3 (7:34) Well, Speaker 1 (7:35) I'm asking you. Huh? Because Speaker 3 (7:37) I look good. I smell good. I feel good. And you sing good. And make love good. Oh. Speaker 3 (7:46) Well, there we are. We don't have to ask anybody else. We got that from the source. Speaker 1 (7:52) But let me ask you this, because that's a conversation we were having in preparing the show. Is James sort of the creator of funk? I mean, like, it's a legit conversation to have. Speaker 2 (8:01) Look, we just have to, like, James Brown is such an important, iconic cultural figure. We are going to have to reduce his importance to just for the sake of this song, we're going to talk about the funk aspect of James Brown. His earlier material is absolutely R &B and soul, but it's more there's a lot of ballads like Please, Please, Please. Speaker 2 (8:31) Try Me. There's a lot of the 6-8 ballad, kind of slower. There's also faster songs, but in this era, we are, this is a James Brown that leads to the funk era, but we're not there until the mid-60s. Yeah, we're not Speaker 1 (8:56) there yet. And I think that like, it's important to say that even when he starts making music that you'd have to at least call proto-funk, if not just funk. you know, having talked to people who were alive that nobody was using the word funk in 1965 like that. Like, if anything, funk was a word used mainly by jazz musicians going back a long, long time. That's right. To describe, like, sort of taking something that was, you know, sort of negative, you could say, in normal American parlance. You know, like, it was, oh, man, the funk, the musty smell, the stench. Literally, the Speaker 2 (9:27) word is coming from smell, stench, but associated with... maybe something between sex and dancing and having fun. It's associated with kind of like the fun part of life, but the unspoken of, you know, the elite classes don't talk about the funk. It Speaker 1 (9:43) was polite enough that like to put the word funk in the title of your song was not really acceptable. It was considered a dirty word in the early 1900s. Yeah. But I think that we can trace basically the use of the word funk to jazz musicians. I Speaker 2 (9:57) think so. Speaker 1 (9:58) take something that had a negative connotation, but then to describe a certain, for the lack of a better term, a certain blackness to syncopation. That's sort of the first time we see it. And you found a great song from 1907. So one of the early Speaker 2 (10:12) songs with the title, with funk in the title, it's unrecorded, but in 1907, there was a Buddy Bolden song, which at the time, again, unrecorded, but existed and documented that people heard it would have been called Funky Butt. Which we believe... Which is really just too on the money for my twist. I mean, it's literally the funky butt. It says it all right there. But obviously with a positive connotation about like this, jazz is a sexy musical form and also very important, you know, to Black culture and would soon be important to all musical culture. So in this moment, it's coming into being as an expression that is associated with the new music of the time. Speaker 1 (10:51) By the way, again, they didn't want to put that song on a plate. Right. It's 78 RPM or whatever. Right. So it goes by the name. You can still find a version by Jelly Roll called Buddy Bolden Blues. Let's hear a little bit of Buddy Bolden Blues. I love it. Speaker 3 (11:08) I thought I heard Buddy Bolden shout. Open up that window and let that bad air out. Open up that window. And let the fowler out, Speaker 1 (11:24) I thought Speaker 3 (11:25) I heard Buddy Bowlin sing. Speaker 1 (11:29) By the way, I love all the connotations that we're talking about in there. Even a lot of people don't realize, Jelly Roll, Morton Jelly Roll was a euphemism for the female genitalia. Speaker 2 (11:39) Yeah, they're doing all kinds of things behind the scenes, and yet right in front of your face. It's a shared code, right? If you're in the know, you know what's going on. Speaker 1 (11:47) If Speaker 2 (11:47) you know some Speaker 1 (11:47) hot jazz cat. That's right. But Speaker 2 (11:49) it's right there in the lyrics, too, that there's the correlation between you're at a hot, sweaty jazz club, and it's sexy music, and people are feeling sexy and drinking, and it's nighttime. and it's infused with the music, but it's also, as he puts it in the song, stents in the air, open that window. Speaker 1 (12:04) It's funny because doing Sherman Showcase, we had a cartoon character on our show that was sort of like the Soul Train train, but it was called the Funk Monster. And when we were translating the word funk into other languages so that the show could go out. across the world. It was really hard to figure out, because it's not like the word funk means the same thing in any of these other languages. By its nature, it's slang, so we had to find other words that sort of gave the connotation of funk. In fact, in most, you know, like in Japan, they still just call it funk, but we wanted it to come across as like a local word, and it was tough to do. The word funk just, it's taken on its own life. Speaker 2 (12:43) You know, it's really tricky and elusive in a wonderful way to try to like... define what funk is. But for the purposes of this song, The Funky Drummer, and what we're talking about, which is James's funk era, then we'll give a real quick musical definition now that we've gotten sort of the broader kind of cultural context. And of course, it's important to say that like, in... the very famous Fats Waller story where a lady said to him, I think a white lady said to him, Mr. Waller, what is jazz? This is in 1947. It's from the Washington Post. A very famous line. Mr. Waller, Mr. Fats Waller, what is jazz? And he replies, lady, if you gotta ask, you Speaker 1 (13:15) ain't got it. Speaker 2 (13:17) Or alternatively, as it's been reported, madam, if you have to ask, you'll never know. So this line right there kind of sums it up. Jazz, what is jazz? Well, you can kind of define it as the swing. It has an element of blues to it. It is generally performed with some amount of improvisation mixed in with some amount of preparation. And that's important for our song today. We'll be talking about that a little later, that balance. Because some people mistakenly Speaker 1 (13:40) think that all jazz Speaker 2 (13:41) or all funk is all Speaker 1 (13:42) improv all the time. Of course it's not. Of course not. Speaker 2 (13:44) So with that said, a little bit of a breakdown musically as to what funk is. You mentioned it is something to do, it's got something to do with time. So syncopation to a certain degree, literally the use of 16th notes in an unexpected way. So in this song, for example, we have in the beat, those unexpected percussion things, even though it's a loop and we hear it repeated, every time it's sort of, it's outside of the downbeat. And having these wonderful unexpected syncopated moments is very much a new thing in jazz through funk. The modern music of the 20th century, mostly created by black musicians, has this particular element that doesn't exist quite as much in sort of the classical tradition. So that's an important thing. It's about rhythm. It's about time. And then it's about this kind of another vague word, but pocket. That's a very hard word to define. But we love the pocket. Like, oh, he's in the pocket. He's in the pocket. What does that mean? It's hard to say. It's a little bit of a looseness mixed with strictness. Like the time is strict in that you're going to, it's on beat. It's not mistakenly like wobbly, like a child trying to play an instrument. And yet there's a looseness between the notes. Speaker 1 (15:00) I don't want to jump the gun, but I do want to say there's usually one note out of those 16 notes that we always hit in funk music. Speaker 2 (15:07) Yeah. We are going to talk about that one note, and that is the downbeat, the one of the measure, the one very important part of today's story. Lucy Speaker 1 (15:14) famously said, you know, George couldn't find the one. Speaker 2 (15:18) That's absolutely right, y'all. And the pocket, again, hard to define, but there's an element where there is space between the notes. Sometimes that groove is a little behind the beat. Sometimes it's Speaker 1 (15:27) a Speaker 2 (15:27) little ahead. Go back to our Speaker 1 (15:29) Farsight episode where we talk about Dilla. Dilla always going a little bit behind. You're Speaker 2 (15:33) simultaneously doing something where it's unmistakable. the groove is. Timbaland, by the way. Also always a little bit behind where you think it should Speaker 1 (15:41) be. Speaker 2 (15:41) A little bit behind, a little bit ahead. So part of what makes that possible in funk is that a lot of the songs are slower because when you have slower BPMs, you can subdivide the bar into those 16th notes. A Speaker 1 (15:52) little Speaker 2 (15:52) more space there. There's a little more space to have those syncopated moments. You can't really do it at 130 BPM. No, not Speaker 1 (15:57) at all. It can happen. All Speaker 2 (15:59) you Speaker 1 (15:59) DJs out there know everything is a wavelength. And if you stretch that wavelength out at a slower tempo, then you're just going to have more spaces in there. You can have funk in disco music, but the sort of BPM Speaker 2 (16:09) continuum, when you start getting into 110, 115, 120, it's harder to fit those 16th notes into the bar, basically. So anyway, it's infinitely vampable. It's got a sense of repetition and trance. All of these kind of ideas are part of what makes funk funk, but there's no... single thing that you can point to. You just kind of know it when you hear it. Speaker 1 (16:31) You kind of know it when you hear it. You know, I had someone tell me that if you were DJing at a party in the 60s, then all you ever really had to do, like you could have all the Motown songs, you could have like all the big songs that we know, but you always had to have one James Brown record. Speaker 3 (16:46) Oh yeah. Because Speaker 1 (16:47) that was the record that you could put on and the party would always dance to it. I forgot the most Speaker 2 (16:52) important thing and you just reminded me of it. It keeps people dancing. It keeps you moving. Punk is about movement. It's about making your body move, perhaps against its will. And that's a big part of what makes something funky is that you just can't help but jerk your body to it and dance. Speaker 1 (17:05) James was the kind of guy who had his ear to the street, so to speak. You know, they always said that, like, he always wanted to know what was coming next. And we've already played a little bit of, like, you know, the balladeer that James Brown was. But as early as a song called Out of Sight, he's already moving the rhythm to the forefront. Let's hear a little bit of Out of Sight. Speaker 3 (17:23) And you're slipping you, you know you're out of sight. Simply figure mama. Speaker 2 (17:36) So this is a blues structure, you know, it's 12 bar blues. And you can hear already in that elements of what become his arguably the first true James Brown funk moment. So that song is 1964's Out of Sight. It's 1960. It was actually written under the pseudonym Ted Wright, but it's James Brown. And in his autobiography, James says, Out of Sight was another beginning musically and professionally. My music changed with Papa's Got a Brand New Bag, but it really started with Out of Sight. Now let's listen to Papa's Got a Brand New Bag the next year. It's the same song basically, but the funk is dialed up. And I would argue like Out of Sight is close to funk, not