Funk Blog #3

Other Funk Pioneers

Other Soul artists started to try out Funk music like Joe Tex, Johnny Taylor, Dyke & the Blazers. Soul giants Otis Redding, Wilson Picket and also Aretha Franklin had incorporated funk styles into their songs in the late 1960s. Then Sly & the Family Stone and George Clinton’s Funkadelic took funk music to amazing and popular heights in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Sly Stone would make Funk music mainstream as Funkadelic would also propel Funk music and mix it with Rock music.

 

Funk Triumvirate

Generally, the Funk Triumvirate is first James Brown (the God Father), then Sly & the Family Stone and Funkadelic as the three groups that made Funk music become the mainstream music of the early 1970s. With the exception of Sly, Brown and Clinton never really achieved the mainstream number one status they deserved yet they have had enormous influence on other Funk acts that went on to shape the 1970s.

Popular music was forever changed by Funk music in the 1970s as a pure rhythmic form of music that didn’t adhere to the usual structures of pop rock and soul music. You can hear it, not only in the drums and percussion but very much so in the role of the Bass Guitar. The Bass propelled by Larry Graham of Sly & the Family Stone would be influential on the music of the seventies, be it all the Rock genres (Funk Rock, Hard Rock, Light Rock & Country Rock), Soul Music, R&B, but also Broadway musicals and light popular. The Funk rhythms would forever eclipse the old swing styles of music so prevalent in the early 20th century in pop music.

 

The term “Funk” 

What Is “Funk”? Funky as in a strong odor, as smoke, fumar in Spanish or Fungiere in French; Funky as in musty, earthy, something deeply or strongly felt, get down, get funky, “Put some stank on it!” Like the choicest, greenest, sticky bud that everyone on the bus can whiff and the smell never gets out of your clothes. Like the dance floor, or a small rundown rock, blues or bebop club where the air lingers after a whole bunch of humans have been smoking, drinking and sweating it out.

 

The New Style

The rhythm sections new style “on the one”, the bass players new role as the lead instrument with the new sound fidelity and low frequencies, the rhythm guitars utilizing the vamp, the new rhythm brass section complete with stabs  and ornamentation, the quintessential funky drum solo and what I call the Diddley effects of syncopated rhythms.