Music Traditions, Cultures, and Contexts

11 Funk and James Brown: Re-Africanization, the Interlocked Groove, and the Articulation of Community

I t is interesting to note that the three dominant styles of AfricanAmerican popular music in the early and mid-1960s—Motown, Stax, and Chicago soul—were all in their own individual ways products of the central social/political facts of integration and the civil rights movement . The story of Motown and Berry Gordy Jr., for example, was predicated on the rise of large-scale Black capitalism partially inspired and made possible by the momentous changes of the times, while Stax and southern soul, on the other hand, can be seen as a product of the civil rights movement, as it was founded squarely on the collaboration of Black and White musicians. To paraphrase Peter Guralnick, southern soul music, purely and simply, grew out of the impulse toward integration (Guralnick 1986, 5). (In the South at the time, this was a political gesture, whether conceived of as such or not.) Finally, much Chicago soul in the mid-1960s, such as the Impressions’ “We’re a Winner” and “People Get Ready,” tied directly to the civil rights movement via both lyric content and mode of performance. The civil rights movement clearly brought about substantial and profound legal and social changes for Black and White Americans. For many, the tenor of the time was optimistic—A New Day Was Dawning. It was easy to believe that very soon all people would be free and equal, and most of the garbage that had infected American life for close to four hundred years would shortly be a distant, half-remembered relic of an earlier , less civilized place and time. 261 Funk and James Brown Re-Africanization, the Interlocked Groove, and the Articulation of Community rob bowman ELEVEN Such a dream had a lot of resonance, but proved ultimately to be naive. By 1967 there may not have been legally segregated washrooms and drinking fountains, Blacks may not have had to ride at the back of the bus, and, theoretically, the same schools were open to all, but the reality for the vast majority of African-American people was that their lives remained basically the same. They lived in segregated housing in areas of cities with the least social amenities, the schooling their children received was markedly inferior to what White children received, and they continued to be the last hired and the first fired in the job market, earning wages substantially lower than their White counterparts. In other words, equality wasn’t even remotely at hand. Ironically, in some unforeseen ways, legal desegregation affected the majority of Black Americans negatively. Once the opportunity presented itself, large numbers of Black Americans with money moved out of socalled “ghetto” areas, in the process denuding the community of economic resources, leadership, political influence, and role models of achievement. Similarly, a number of the most intelligent minds within the community could now take their ideas and talent to whoever was willing to pay the highest price rather than having to employ these skills within the community . To some degree, the civil rights movement unintentionally created a brain and money drain for the African-American community. This process continues to this day. A small percentage of African Americans achieve great financial success, but, that said, all leading economic indices indicate that the position of the majority of Black Americans vis-à-vis White and Latin Americans has steadily gotten worse over the last thirty years. As this reality slowly made itself manifest, the tenor of parts of Black America began to change. In 1966, during the James Meredith march in Mississippi, the former Stokely Carmichael coined the phrase “Black power.” A year earlier Watts had burned in the first of the modern-day socalled “race riots.” In 1967 Newark and Detroit would also burn. This new militancy no longer asked for equality and strove to achieve it by adopting mainstream (read “White middle-class”) standards of deportment . Instead equality was assumed and demanded, and Black Americans were encouraged to celebrate and embrace everything Black. Phrases such as “Black is beautiful” emerged at this point in time. Africa was taken up psychologically as the motherland. African garb and African names achieved cultural currency, as did the “Afro” or “natural” haircut. Not surprisingly, these changes in beliefs and ideals, this re-Africanization of Black culture, were reflected musically. In popular music the most 262 Rob Bowman radical example of these impulses was the development of funk by James Brown. In...