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Funk was formed through a mixture of various music genres that were popular among African Americans in the mid-20th century. Musicologist Anne Danielsen wrote that funk might be placed in the lineage of rhythm and blues, jazz, and soul.
With the rise of rap music in the 1980s and its “sampling” of 1970s funk songs, funk grew in stature and significance in hip-hop culture. It became associated with ancient mysteries in the Black tradition, providing hip-hop with a historical link to artists and cultural movements of the past.
Nov 24, 2021 · While sitting down with SPIN magazine in 1988, Brown shed some light on how his electric style of R&B eventually morphed into the bare bones sounds of funk that we know and love today. “Funk is the root of the blues,” Brown explains.
Nov 6, 2019 · With the rise of rapmusic in the 1980s and its “sampling” of 1970s funk songs, funk grew in stature and significance in hip-hop culture. It became associated with ancient mysteries in the black tradition, providing hip-hop with a historical link to artists and cultural movements of the past.
Sep 15, 2023 · It was in the mid-1960s that James Brown and his band, The J.B.’s, began to craft a sound that was unlike anything heard before. They took the rhythmic complexities of African drumming and combined them with the energy of gospel, the swing of jazz, and the rawness of the blues.
Funk music, labeled “happy music” by drummer Hamilton Bohannon, reunited African Americans “one nation under a groove.”. Its emergence parallels the transition from a segregated to a “desegregated” post–civil rights society in the late 1960s and early-1970s.
It existed in an early form in New Orleans since the mid-1900s. Over the decades it has influenced jazz, R&B and soul music in return, and it gave birth to the entire genre of hip-hop. But despite its multiple points of origin, funk is often traced back to the work of one man.
