Pride and pain: The story of the Funky Drummer
by Lou Papineau
February 11, 2020
Every February, The Current honors Black History Month. We'll be celebrating by spotlighting artists whose voices and songs changed the world, throughout the decades and across genres. This is the second of four essays delving into a rich, enduring and ever-evolving body of work.
The story of Clyde Stubblefield — aka the Funky Drummer — spans a half-century of music history. Here's a close look at a 20-second drum break, its modest originator, and the effect it had on a generation of music-makers.
Stubblefield was born in 1943 in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He was inspired to start drumming after seeing a marching band in a parade and from absorbing the rhythms of the machines in his hometown's factories. He went pro in his teens and toured with Otis Redding before working for James Brown from 1965 to 1971 (the singer employed two drummers in that era — Clyde Stubblefield and John "Jabo" Starks).
In a 2016 interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer, Stubblefield explained how many of Brown's iconic tracks originated: "We'd just start jamming. And everything came from those jams. James wrote there, in those jams. We'd get on it and keep jamming until Brown would walk in — he traveled in separate planes from us — but when he'd get there, hear it, and dig it, he'd say, 'Let me put some words to it.' It was always like that. We knew what we were doing, and it felt good, so it was all very easy, natural, and came together quickly … Once we got going, he'd put his hand up as if to 'break here,' as if he was driving a car. He gave the direction, but it was our rhythm."
Stubblefield was the bedrock of many of Brown's greatest hits: "Cold Sweat," "I Got The Feelin'," "Say It Loud – I'm Black and I'm Proud," "Mother Popcorn," "Ain't It Funky Now," "Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine," and "Get Up, Get Into it, Get Involved." But Stubblefield's legacy is largely built on what was initially a minor entry in Brown's canon: "Funky Drummer," which contains perhaps the most-sampled beat in hip-hop music (and other genres).
"Funky Drummer" was recorded on November 20, 1969, at Brown's King Studios in Cincinnati. The midtempo groove is peppered with the singer's injections, with Brown on organ and tenor saxophonist Maceo Parker providing most of the musical flavor for the first few minutes. Sixty seconds before the break that would pulse through the decades, Brown turns the spotlight on Stubblefield: "Fellas, one more time, I wanna give the drummer some of this funky soul we got here… You don't have to do no soloing, brother, just keep what you got … Don't turn it loose, 'cause it's a mother … When I count to four I want everybody to lay out and let the drummer go, and when I count to four I want you to come back in…" After another half-minute of comping, the soon-to-be-ubiquitous 20-second, eight-bar break occurs at 5:34, topped by Brown's grunts, a chuckle, and four repetitions of the rhetorical question, "Ain't it funky?" A minute later, Brown is hit with a bolt of defining inspiration: "The name of this tune is 'The Funky Drummer'" (he chants the title five more times; this title stretch is not heard on the edited single version.)
TotalDrummer.com got technical about the ubiquitous breakbeat: "'Funky Drummer' is built upon a challenging single-handed 16th-note hi-hat pattern… Around that hi-hat part, Clyde adds syncopated bass drums and snares, open hi-hats and the use of ghost notes as well as accented snares. It creates a thick funky layered groove." A ghost note is defined by BangTheDrumSchool.Com as "snare drum strokes/notes that are much lower in volume than the 'backbeat' ('2' & '4') drum stroke." When he was told that his distinctive style incorporated that technique, Stubblefield said, "I had no idea what the ghost note was."
Clyde Stubblefield explains Funky Drummer
"Funky Drummer" was released in March 1970 (the A side had the 2:36 Part 1; Part 2 on the flipside ran for 2:55). It didn't make much of a dent, peaking at No. 51 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 20 on the R&B chart. The full 9:13 take was issued in 1986 on the compilation album In the Jungle Groove, which became the primary source of the two-bar loop which was adopted as the fundamental breakbeat by the turntable mix-masters, producers and hip-hop artists who launched the sampling craze, which ran rampant from the late 1980s through the early '90s, when a series of high-profile copyright-infringement lawsuits curtailed the practice.
WhoSampled.com lists an astounding 1,572 songs that feature Stubblefield's breakbeat. The first citation is in 1985, for "The Classy M.C.'s," by MC Quick Quintin and M.C. Mello J, and the parade of songs that sampled the "Funky Drummer" magic spans 35 years. Standouts include these hip-hop classics: Bell Biv DeVoe's "Poison"; De La Soul's "The Magic Number"; Geto Boys' "Mind of a Lunatic"; Ice T's "O.G. Original Gangster"; Kris Kross' "Jump"; LL Cool J's "Mama Said Knock You Out"; and N.W.A's "F**k tha Police." Public Enemy used the beat on seven tracks, including "Bring the Noise" and "Fight the Power"; Run-DMC looped it four times; and it came full circle when it appeared in James Brown's 1988 effort, "She Looks All Types A'Good." The track also got shout-outs in LL Cool J's "Boomin' System" ("The girlies, they smile, they see me comin, I'm steady hummin/I got the Funky Drummer drummin' ") and Public Enemy's "Fight the Power ("1989 - the number, another summer/Sound of the Funky Drummer").
Beyond hip-hop, Stubblefield's beat has graced Fine Young Cannibals' "I'm Not the Man I Used To Be," Sinéad O'Connor's "I Am Stretched On Your Grave," and Kenny G's "G-Bop"; and, more recently, Ed Sheeran's "Shirtsleeves" (in 2014) and Madonna's "Funana," a bonus track from her 2019 Madame X album.
But Stubblefield's essential contribution to the development of hip-hop was largely uncredited — and uncompensated due to the royalty-free use of samples in that pre-litigious era.
In 1971, Stubblefield left Brown's employ and moved to Madison, Wisconsin, where he performed at a club on most Monday nights with his band. In 1997, he released his first solo album, The Revenge of the Funky Drummer. In the ensuing years, Stubblefield's reflections in the wake of the "Funky Drummer" sampling boom and his lack of fame — and fortune — were a mixture of pride and pain. In Copyright Criminals, a 2009 documentary about the artistic, legal, financial, and ethical morass surrounding sampling, Stubblefield noted that Brown "didn't tell me what to play … I played what I felt but he owned it." In 2015, he said, "My drum patterns are used on so many songs. No credit feels almost worse than no cash for it at this point." And in a 2016 Philadelphia Inquirer piece, Stubblefield was forthright: "I can dig that others try to do what I do, and am happy when people try to play what I play, but I do not appreciate not getting paid."
Stubblefield also endured a series of health woes. In 2001, he had $90,000 in unpaid medical bills, amassed after he received chemotherapy for bladder cancer. After Prince's death in 2016, Stubblefield revealed that the bills were paid by Prince (who used "Funky Drummer" samples on "Gett Off" and "My Name Is Prince"). The drummer's wife, Jody Hannon, said, "Prince's people [called] and they said, 'Prince wants to take care of the complete balance of your medical bills. Clyde is one of his drumming idols … Just name the number and we will send it to the hospital."
Stubblefield died on February 18, 2017, due to kidney disease.
Stubblefield's influence has been widely celebrated. "Clyde is the one who made James even go to the next level, and he expressed that in those songs very clearly," said Chuck D. of Public Enemy to HIpHopDX in 2017. "He let the world know how much Clyde was the funk in his bone." Fellow drummer Questlove, in a 2011 interview in the New York Times, declared: "There have been faster, and there have been stronger, but Clyde Stubblefield has a marksman's left hand unlike any drummer in the 20th century. 'Funky Drummer' has done miracles for hip-hop. It's the traffic cop. [Stubblefield]'s like the ghost in the machine.
"When you talk about the most perfect beat, it's not even that 'Funky Drummer' wins in a technical aspect," Questlove continues. "But in an artistic aspect, it's hands down the most perfect beat you can loop — it's very lyrical, very melodic, very rhythmic. It's perfect. It's magical. Everyone I know as a producer, that's gotten their start hip-hop production, they all have their story about the first time they heard 'Funky Drummer.' "
10 Hours of the Funky Drummer breakbeat
External Link
James Brown - official site
