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A recent New York Times memoriam of James Brown, who died this past Christmas morning, posed the question "What did James Brown do?... that's a surprisingly difficult question to answer."

Well, not really, if you know anything at all about pop music history! It isn't hype to say that James Brown was one of the most significant (top ten) figures in 20th Century music, not just as a performer or sociological icon, but as a musical innovator. James Brown, bottom line, created probably the last truly American, truly original form of pop music. James Brown invented funk.

Brown himself wasn't shy of telling people this, so much so that it may have dulled its impact and inspired skepticism. But it's true nevertheless, and it's meaningful.

So where did funk begin? "Papa's Got A Brand New Bag," the single that shot to the top of the R&B chart and reignited Brown's career in the summer of 1965, has long held the unofficial designation as the starting point.

"I was still called a soul singer—I still call myself that," Brown said in his 1986 autobiography. "But musically I had already gone off in a different direction." The song is so well known now, some 41 years later, that it's sparse urgency has little impact. But just to emphasize how unique it was, some of the top hits of that summer were Herman's Hermit's "I'm Henry VIII I Am," the Beach Boys' "Help Me Rhonda," the Supremes "Back In My Arms Again," the Four Tops "I Can't Help Myself," the Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction," and the Beatles' "Help!"

"I had discovered that my strength was not in the horns," Brown continued, "it was in the rhythm. I was hearing everything, even the guitars, like they were drums." This was a revelation.

Still, like any musical form, JB's funk had its sources. The farthest back one might trace it is about as far back as you can go in musical history altogether—to the rhythmic music of Africa, particularly West African mbqanga. In the modern era, the first stirrings of what would lead to Funk can be found in the rolling and tumbling rhythms of Pinetop Perkins' barrel-house piano in the late 1920s, which led to the full band arrangement boogie woogie of the '30s and '40s: Louis "Caledonia" Jordan, Roy "Good Rockin' Tonight" Brown, and Wynonie Harris, all credited influences of James Brown. By dropping out every other beat, and emphasizing the ones left in, it isn't hard to see the transition.

"James Brown got it from the blues," former Funkadelic bassist William "Billy Bass" Nelson proposed in Musician magazine. "Elmore James had this jam called 'Fanny Mae.' Man, that shit was funky. Or Hank Ballard and Etta James doing 'Annie Had A Baby': oh man, stoopid funk!"

It's equally likely that Brown heard something in the boogie woogie men of New Orleans—a city with a fine tradition of mixing musical styles in the name of pleasure—particularly Professor Longhair, Huey "Piano" Smith and Fats Domino. Or the 1954 disc "Mardi Gras Mambo," credited to a band called The Hawketts (led by future Meter Art Neville). The legacy of so-called second line bands—musicians who followed the "first line" of Mardi Gras dancers (Black creoles who dressed up in feathers in tribute to their Amerindian ancestors), they smoothed over boogie and added stress on the "one," the first beat of a meter, to give it a marching rhythm.

Other early '60s efforts leaned hard in the right direction, including those of Stax's MGs, Rufus Thomas, Triumphs ("Burnt Bisquits") and Eddie Kirk ("Them Bones," a song Brown's lifelong collaborator Bobby Byrd acknowledged when this author mentioned it to him); Motown's Norman Whitfield-produced Velvelettes ("Needle In A Haystack" and "He Was Really Sayin' Somethin'") and Junior Walker (all propelled by the drums of Benny Benjamin, the bass of James Jamerson, Earl Van Dyke's piano and the guitar groove of Joe Messina, soon to be known as the core of the "Funk Brothers"); as well as Ike & Tina Turner ("It's Gonna Work Out Fine"), Fontella Bass ("Rescue Me," a #1 R&B/#4 pop hit played by the Chess house band, which included future Earth Wind & Fire leader Maurice White on drums), the Five Du-Tones ("Shake A Tail Feather") and so on.

None of this, of course, was called "Funk," which at the time was a ghetto epithet referring to the results of hard work—or sex—including and especially the smell it produced. It came to the music world through Jazz.

Brown, who called it "Boogaloo" in the early '60s, found himself trying to reconcile what some might consider two entirely different career directions: his vocal-based group (The Famous Flames) was working the route of gospel/doo-wop style rhythm and blues, but he also connected with jazz. He wanted pop hits, but also sought "adult" respectability. And another King Records artist, Earl Bostic, had showed how that was (moderately) possible: instrumentals. In February of 1960, Brown enjoyed one of his few hits to that date with "Do The Mashed Potatoes (parts 1 and 2)" an instrumental, with sparse singing of the title, released under the pseudonym "Nat Kendrick and the Swans" on Henry Stone's Dade label because King's Sid Nathan didn't see any potential in the track. Nathan was wrong, as he would be many times in the future when it came to Brown's music—"Mashed Potatoes" reached the R&B top ten.

That same month, Brown first recorded "Think," with a soft emphasis on "the one," which shows the direction he was headed. "Think' is a combination of gospel and jazz," Brown said in his '86 autobiography, "a rhythm hold is what we used to call it." The record, which was a revision of a song by King labelmates the Five Royales, turned out to be Brown's third million-seller, reaching 33 on the pop chart. Brown had actually been working "boogaloo" grooves as far back as '59's "Good Good Lovin.'" But after "Mashed Potatoes," he focused more on instrumental boogaloos, many of which were transitional vamps used in the live show, including "Hold It," "The Scratch" (the fast guitar/horns riff which introduces Live At The Apollo) "Sticky" and "Cross Firing."

In February of '61, he recorded the semi-instrumental "Night Train," a logical progression. This time, the boogaloo really paid off: a #5 R&B hit (that is, when King finally released it, over a year later). Sid Nathan's reluctance to back Brown's new direction was probably based on the fact that, up to that point, most of his hits had been gospel-tinged soul ballads. This is true, for the most part, even of his monumental '63 Live At The Apollo LP.

But Brown would not be deterred. In the wake of 1964's British Invasion (which was what finally established Blues as the basis for standard Pop Rock), Brown seemed to be one of the few pop artists to feel only inspired, and not threatened. In March of that year, beginning a new "Fair Deal productions" contract with Mercury/Smash records, he recorded "Out Of Sight," another watershed moment.

"You can hear the band and me start to move in a whole other direction rhythmically," Brown said in his autobiography. "The horns, the guitar, the vocals, everything was starting to be used to establish all kinds of rhythms at once... I was trying to get every aspect of the production to contribute to the rhythmic patterns... I had been doing the multiple rhythm patterns for years on stage, but Mr. Neely [Brown's manager] and I had agreed to make the rhythms on the records a lot simpler."

"Out Of Sight" hit #24 on the Billboard pop chart, Brown's biggest hit to date. He planned to follow that with "I Got You," a song he'd had since 1962 (originally recorded as "I Found You," with the Chantels' Yvonne Fair singing). But that, and the Out Of Sight album, had to be withdrawn as Brown was effectively forced into silence by a court injunction King brought against Mercury/Smash for contract infringement. (Brown signed the Smash deal after King had even delayed the Apollo LP, which Brown had been forced to finance himself.) At this crucial moment, Brown's only new releases while the case was adjudicated would be instrumentals.

Nevertheless, in the breach, two events cemented Brown's future: one was his appearance on the T.A.M.I. show, a live revue filmed for television and cinema release, in which he upstaged the headlining Rolling Stones, the other was the addition of some vital new players to his band. These included bandleader Lewis Hamlin ("Lewis is the forgotten man in setting the musical course for the band," says Brown's longtime sax player St. Clair Pickney in the liner notes to Soul Pride), guitarist Jimmy Nolen (from Johnny Otis' band), drummer Melvin Parker and his brother Maceo on saxophone. From the instrumental album Grits And Soul (recorded only two weeks after they joined) onward, the latter three players all deserve their names etched in the monolith of Funk for their performances on some of the most vital tracks Brown ever cut.

The court injunction, creatively speaking, turned out to be a blessing in disguise. After the case between Mercury/Smash and King was resolved in October '64 (Brown's contract with the former was valid—as an instrumentalist and producer—and his contract with the latter was also valid—as a vocalist), Brown claims he recorded his first new vocal for King out of guilt in an "underground" situation, sneaking the tape to Nathan. The song, "Papa's Got A Brand New Bag," was derived from an instrumental vamp the band played live (and radically divided into two parts over both sides of the single).

Recalling the February '65 session, Brown said: "We stopped to listen to the playback to see what we needed to do on the [second] take. While we were listening, I looked around the studio. Everybody—the band, the studio people, me—was dancing. Nobody was standing still."

"It's hard to describe what it was I was going for," said Brown in his autobiography, "the song has gospel feel, but it's put together out of jazz licks... You can hear Jimmy Nolen starting to play scratch guitar, where you squeeze the strings tight and quick against the frets so the sound is hard and fast without any sustain."

"Music is written on two-and-four," said Brown in Number One Rhythm & Blues Hits, "On the upbeat. But when you think of something, you pat your foot. That's on the downbeat. And you pat your hand in church, that's on the downbeat. So I put the music on the downbeat. And then it's on one-and-three, not two and four, in anticipation."

"Still, it nearly gave Mr. Nathan," Brown recalled in 2005, "a heart attack! He simply didn't want to put it out. He couldn't see how it could be a hit..." The single release, which didn't come until July (in a remixed and sped-up version) charted at #1 R&B (staying there for eight weeks), and #8 pop.

"That delayed back beat thing, where one is on, and two and four is a little behind," says MGs guitarist, songwriter and Stax producer Steve Cropper in Number One Rhythm & Blues Hits, "we used that on a lot of records." Cropper was describing his own studio's parallel evolution, which hit a watershed moment that summer with Wilson Pickett's chart-topping "In The Midnight Hour," it's chanking rhythm picked up from watching Atlantic producer Jerry Wexler demonstrate "The Jerk" dance in the studio. "It really did open us up to a different way of thinking."

Jazz players clearly had similar notions, including "rival" organists Jimmy Smith and Richard "Groove" Holmes, as well as Ramsey Lewis' newly emancipated rhythm section, Eldee Young (bass) and Isaac "Redd" Holt (drums), who formed the Young-Holt Trio with pianist Don Walker and hit it with the hip-swaying "Soulful Strut" (actually an improv on Barbara Acklin's "Am I The Same Girl" backing track) and eternal "Wack Wack" (R&B #12/ pop #40).

After "Papa's Bag," Brown rerecorded a more aggressive version of "I Got You" for King, the version which deservedly became not only a classic, but Brown's lifelong calling card. "I was sleeping one night," Brown told reporter Bruce Pilato, "and I called my band director Nat Jones. I said 'Nat, this song is too hip... It's too sharp. We're taking some of the funk out of it and making it too jazz. And the groove is really laid-back funk'" (According to his 2005 memoir, he had manager Charles Bobbitt rush the entire band from Jacksonville to Miami's Criterion studios to re-record it immediately). The single charted at #1 R&B (staying for six weeks), and #3 pop.

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