In The Name Of Groove - How James Brown Gave Us The Funk And Saved Boston

The word funk is first recorded in the English language in 1620, four years after the death of William Shakespeare, as meaning "smelling of smoke". The word was derived from the Old French 'fungiere', which in turn comes from the Latin word 'fumigare'. A century and a half later, in 1784, the word 'funk' appears in the sense of "musty", as in an old piece of cheese. By the early 1900s the meaning morphs slightly to mean "earthy" and is adopted by jazz musician as an expression of deeply felt emotion, popularized by a founding father of New Orleans blues, Buddy Bolden, in tracks such as "Funky Butt" and others. In the early 1920s the word is mostly used to describe bad odors, particularly body odors of sweat or old age. In the 1930s, the word undergoes a vernacular meaning-inversion similar to that of 'bad,' 'wicked,' 'ill,' and others, and becomes a signifier of excellence. However, it carries an implication of carnality, connected to its meaning of "sweaty" and the heated dance halls of the Crescent City (as well as sounding similar to the F-word), and thus the use of the word itself was considered somewhat risque and even crude.

A modern arrangement of "Funky Butt" (aka "Buddy Bolden's Blues" - the first known track with the word "funk" in it.)

In the early 1940s, the music of New Orleans was infused with strong Afro-Cuban rhythmic influences, which was about to turbo-charge an already dance-oriented style, but the explosion is put on hold for a few years, as many of the best players are abroad, fighting Nazis and saving democracy for a nation that still treats them as barely human. When they come back, their horizons expanded by a European population more appreciative of their talents than their own homeland was, they are bursting with creativity and in no mood to keep their voices bottled up.

In the late 1940s, pioneers such as Dave Bartholomew, Henry Roeland Byrd (aka 'Professor Longhair') and drummer Earl Palmer began cooking up the brew described so well by Rick Danko of The Band in Martin Scorsese's "The Last Waltz": "A combination of country, bluegrass, blues music... show music..."
(Scorsese:) And what's that called...?
(Danko:) "... Rock'n'roll."

Professor Longhair - Misery (1957)

Bartholomew and Byrd began to use lots of Afro-Cuban instruments and rhythm structures in their recordings, whereas Palmer was the first to use "funky" as a musical instruction, exhorting his bandmates to match his beat and make their music more syncopated and danceable. For now, these currents were still mostly underground; the first iteration of mass-marketed Rock and Roll, while plenty alarming to straight-laced White America, was still on this side of the simmering, sensuous, African-inspired grooves of Nawlins.

TIMES ARE A-CHANGIN'

Music wasn't the only avenue of expression younger black people in America were intent on fully utilizing. The generation that spilled blood and lost friends in the battlefields of Europe and the Pacific refuses to go back to a pre-war reality of stark inequality. They begin to agitate for change, and a country that has positioned itself as the global defender of equal rights for all is ill-positioned to deny that demand any longer. Deep in the segregated south of the U.S. a movement rises to challenge all facets of "Jim Crow", "Separate but Equal" and all other charades formulated to hide the reality of the discrimination and subjugation of one ethnic group by another.

In 1955 this movement bursts on the scene with the Birmingham bus boycott, from which a charismatic leader, full of faith and conviction is born. Two years later this movement would end legal segregation in schools, and within a decade of the start of the bus boycott it would see the vast majority of outright legal discrimination against black people (and by extension, all ethnic minorities) abolished in America. By 1965 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is the most widely-known black man America has seen since Frederick Douglass a century earlier, and is the object of feverish hate for those who live in terror of equality with the 'other'. Meanwhile, those aforementioned underground musical currents were about to burst up, flow out, and drench the land in groove.

FINISHING FIRST AT AUGUSTA

On May 3rd, 1933, a baby boy was born in a wooden shack in Barnwell, South Carolina, to Susie Behling, of African-American and Asian descent, and her husband, Joseph Gardner Brown, of African-American and Native-American origin. He was supposed to be called Joseph James, but the clerk mixed up his first and middle names, and so he was christened James Joseph Brown. The family moved to Elko, SC, where they suffered extreme poverty, as well as all the indignities and privations reserved for black Americans in the South at the time, and eventually split up. Mother Susie moved to New York, whereas Papa Joseph and his son James moved to Augusta, Georgia, where their first home was in a brothel owned by a great-aunt.

The young boy managed to stay in school until the sixth grade, when he dropped out to help put food on the table and pursue his twin passions of singing and boxing. At age 11 he entered his first talent show, at Lennox Theater in Augusta, and walked away with the first prize following a rendition of the ballad "So Long". Even before that, he began to earn pocket-change dancing for troops passing through town in their convoys from Camp (now 'Fort') Gordon outside Atlanta en route to the Port of Charleston.

At age 16 he was convicted of robbery and sent to a youth correctional facility, where he formed a gospel group with four other inmates. He was released on parole in 1952 at the joint intercession of a local musician named Bobby Byrd, who befriended the young Brown upon meeting him at a friendly baseball game at the juvenile prison, and a local motor company owner named S.C. Lawson, and upon his return to the world outside of prison began to work for his benefactor, while supplementing his income as a school janitor, and deepened his friendship and musical collaboration with Byrd.

DRUMMER TO FRONTMAN, MEMBER TO LEADER

When Byrd changed the name of his band from The Gospel Starlighters to The Famous Flames in 1953, he granted Brown's request to join them. Brown was originally added as a drummer, but soon found his way to the lead singer role, to which he was driven by the belief that lead singers get more action from the ladies. Three years later, (after the band's sound was bolstered by some of the horn blowers from Little Richard's band, who left secular music to find God) the group recorded a smash hit with "Please Please Please," selling over a million copies of the single under the King Records' Federal label. By 1957 Brown was running the band, dictating a replacement of the band's manager and renaming it "James Brown and The Famous Flames."

"Please Please Please" - Nothing like a million copies sold to give a man some industry juice.

A year later, the first hit came of the new regime came, with "Try Me", and they kept on coming. By 1962 Brown had enough juice and enough money to finance a recording of one of his performances at the Apollo Theater. Despite everyone telling him that too many of the songs on the album failed as singles and that live albums don't sell well, 'Live At The Apollo' was a big hit.

So live albums don't sell, huh? Live At The Apollo, 1962

James Brown knew well that a black man gotta fly to get to where a white man walks, but he was determined to grind however hard it may take to get there. By 1963, as Dr. King led the March on Washington and shared a dream with America, James Brown was relentlessly pursuing his own dreams of being the biggest star in music, and was publicly acknowledged for the first time as "The Hardest Working Man in Show Business" - a title he took immense pride in. A year later, while Dr. King was seeing a large part of his agenda realized with the passage of the Civil Rights Act, (followed a year later by the Voting Rights Act) Brown began his "Magical year," in which he began to change from just a multi-talented, insanely committed professional entertainer into a seminal figure in the annals of popular music, and the progenitor of an entire genre.

In July of 1964 he released "Out Of Sight," a driving blues hit which was the first indication of the direction his music was taking. In October, he blew the Rolling Stones - the big new British Invasion sensation of the time - off the stage at the Teenage Awards Music International show. The upstaging was so dramatic that Keith Richards of the Stones acknowledged the decision to follow Brown's act as the biggest mistake of the band's illustrious career. In 2006, shortly before Brown's death, the recording of the show was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant," and was selected for preservation in the Library of Congress. In December of that year he released "Papa's Got A Brand New Bag," which was
a) The first of his songs that broke out of the R&B "ghetto" and entered the pop chart top ten, and
b) The song that got Brown his first of an eventual fifteen Grammy awards, including five Hall of Fame awards and a Lifetime Achievement Award.

Out Of Sight. First harbinger of things to come.

Good luck following THAT, Mick and Keith.

AFFORDING A HAMBURGER

In 1965 Brown continued to evolve musically and dominate the music scene with "I Got You," (better known perhaps as "I Feel Good", his second #1 R&B, Top-10 Pop single in a row.) By this point, Martin Luther King had achieved most of his basic civil rights agenda, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his non-violent resistance to discrimination, and was turning to issues of socio-economic justice.

Most people who are thrown by circumstance into revolutionary action tend to cling to the issues, methods, and trappings of their heyday, turning them from a means into sanctified ritual. Not Dr. King, who around this point was daring to dismiss the legendary Greensboro lunch counter sit-ins as insufficient to the goal of a life with dignity. As he so eloquently put it: "What good is it for a man to have the right to sit at the lunch counter, if he can't afford a hamburger?" He also began to oppose the Vietnam War, which was producing massive profits for the military-industrial complex, and in general working for a world in which EVERYBODY could afford a hamburger.

This version of Martin Luther King was even more alarming to the rich, the powers that be. Civil rights for black people was something only Southern rich and powerful people opposed. The kind of systemic change in the way the nation's wealth was spent, which King was now clearly advocating, was opposed by virtually all of them.

ON THE ONE

By 1967, the musical revolution James Brown had been cooking for three years was ready to eat. In July of that year, James released what is considered the first true funk song - "Cold Sweat." Funk is a relatively simple musical style, with the distinction in it being that rather than the accent being on the second and fourth beat (up-beat), the accent of the drums and the base were on the first and third beat (down-beat, or as Brown put it simply in his instructions to the band - "On the one!") The guitars, meanwhile, were instructed to syncopate, but in a dance-oriented way, rather than contemplative or abstract as in much of the jazz tradition. The new style heavily emphasized beat and rhythm. You wanted complex melodies and harmonies, you listened to The Beatles. This here was about the boogie.

The Funk is born. Cold Sweat, 1967

Concurrently, JB also changed his vocal style from the crooning that is the bedrock of R&B, to "a kind of rhythmic declamation, not quite sung but not quite spoken, that only intermittently featured traces of pitch or melody." This, as Wikipedia's James Brown entry adds, "would become a major influence on the techniques of rapping." Thus, James Brown not only founded funk, but in so doing became a major influence on hiphop in two different ways.

Without JB (and Bootsy) there's no hiphop and no Snoop Dogg.

As Brown was becoming more accepted and acknowledged than ever, Dr. King was "squandering" much of his crossover appeal by coming out against the Vietnam War in terms even those inclined to pretend otherwise could not ignore. In 1968, Brown was perfecting the funk with further releases, gaining the establishment's stamp of approval as a distinctly black man, recording a prestigious TV special and touring the country, arguably the hottest act in the land. Dr. King was further alienating his rich white liberal supporters by working on a second mass protest in Washington DC, only this time under the banner of the "Poor People's Campaign." Verily, the specter of "communism" was haunting America.

A SPECIAL TV SPECIAL

Early morning, April 4th 1968, a single Remington 760 shot rings out in the sky of Memphis, Tennessee, where Dr. King was staying in his usual suite at the Lorraine Motel. The bullet entered through his cheek, severed a few vertebrae, the jugular vein, and other major arteries before lodging in his shoulder. King is rushed to St. Joseph's Hospital in Memphis, but never regains consciousness and is pronounced dead 13 hours after being shot - a year to the day after the "Beyond Vietnam" speech. Riots break out in black communities throughout the country.

Months before, a concert had been scheduled for James Brown on Friday night, April 5th, 1968, at Boston's fabled arena, The Garden. Boston, perhaps the most racially-divided large city in the northeast, was no exception to the riots following Dr. King's murder. However, the riots on April 4th were limited to the Roxbury and South End ghettos, and a repeat in the white downtown area was the last thing Mayor Kevin White - at the time only 38, a mere four months in an office he won with a black-Italian-white liberal coalition - could have wanted. White was going to cancel the concert, even though that would only further infuriate the city's black population.

A black city councilman named Tom Atkins came up with a solution: Let the concert take place, but convince the city's public TV station to broadcast it for free in the hope that folks who were hurt and mad by the murder of a man they loved would stay home and watch the show, rather than go out and burn shit down. But there was a snag: James Brown, whose relentless pursuit of greatness was entwined, in a not-uncommon way, with a single-minded determination to look out for #1 first and foremost, had an exclusive TV deal with one of the commercial networks. Breaking it would cost him 60 large, which is almost half a mil in today's money. All due respect to Boston's problems, JB was NOT taking that hit. Luckily, young Mayor White understood that a brilliant solution wasn't gonna come free, and he came up with the cash.

James Brown's tunnel-vision when it came to money was to alienate lineup after lineup of backup musicians - which was perversely a good thing. These musicians learned the funk from the master, and then went forth to do they own thang, and populate the airwaves with booty-shakin' licks that would help a nation dance its way out of its constrictions. From drummer Melvin Parker to sax blowers Maceo Parker and and Alfred "Pee Wee" Ellis, to trombonist Fred Wesley and bassist Bootsy Collins and others - James Brown not only created the sound, but trained like 80% of the founding generation of the genre.

One Nation Under A Groove - and its father is James Joseph Brown

SAY IT LOUD

But that was in the future. Right now there was a gig to play, under insanely tense circumstances. At first it seemed as though the plan was working like a charm. Crime levels throughout Boston were markedly lower than your average Friday night, cause ERRYBODY was at home watching the show ('cept for the lucky folks watching it live at the Garden). But then, midway through the performance, it looked like all the good intentions would lead to hell. Some young guys in the audience, carried away by the music and everything else going on, started swarming the stage. The police, who were at the concert in massive numbers, began to push them off. The match was this close to the powder keg.

Some guys freeze, laugh, or simply don't register wtf is going on when bad shit happens as they're onstage. (I'm looking at you, Sexy Lips.) James Brown was different. He pleaded with the cops to take a step back, stood between them and the crowd, and addressed them as follows:

“Wait a minute, wait a minute now WAIT!” Brown said. “Step down, now, be a gentleman….Now I asked the police to step back, because I think I can get some respect from my own people.” Brown gave a few more remarks to the effect of "everybody just chill out and let's enjoy the show," and such was his charisma and the love and pride the African-American community had for his art, that thousands of hot-blooded young people, who would have loved nothing more than to avenge their immense and justified frustrations upon the blue-clad symbols of their oppression, took a breath, stepped back, and allowed the funk to rule for the rest of the night. There's no telling what would have happened to downtown Boston had a bloody riot broken out inside the Garden (and inevitably spilled out), but thanks to James Brown, that didn't happen.

Four months later, shaped by all these events, James Brown released the defiant anthem "Say It Loud (I'm Black And I'm Proud!)". Not that he was ever apologetic about being black, but this was the first time he said it with words and not just with the music. After Boston, he had moral authority to back the statement with, and not just musical chops.

James Brown would go on to be draped in the title of "Soul Brother #1" (and later "Godfather of Soul") and be acknowledged as one of the most seminal figures in the history of popular music. Martin Luther King's loved ones and admirers would live to see him turn from a divisive, polarizing, status-quo-jeopardizing figure, to one so far beyond debate that he is the only non-President American whose birthday is a national holiday (something, incidentally, that happened not long after James Brown met with then-President Ronald Reagan to advocate for it,) and his name is used by the very same "white moderates," whom he recognized and excoriated back in 1963's "Letter From A Birmingham Jail," to attack his spiritual successors in non-violent resistance to injustice. I'd like to think that had he lived long enough, not only would he be able to tell such people to "Keep my name outta yo mouth," but we'd have a tape of him somewhere, at some point in time, shakin' what the good lord gave him to some stanky-ass funk. In the name of Love, of course.