With one raw, irresistible song, James Brown found the sound of the racial unrest of 1967
‘Cold Sweat’ broke one genre and helped create another
In early July of 1967, legendary producer and songwriter Clyde Otis penned a letter to radio DJs around the country. “It appears that this certainly will be a long hot summer,” he wrote, “unless something can be done to alleviate the situation.” Otis was imploring them to play the kind of music that might be “a stimulus to introspection.” His solution was solemn ballads with vague exhortations to love and unity that might soothe the passions that were burning in the streets.
A month earlier, riots had broken out in cities from Buffalo to Cincinnati to Tampa Bay and Otis thought he might be able to help. His campaign inspired the release of Aretha Franklin’s “Take A Look” (which Otis wrote) and Dinah Washington’s “This Bitter Earth,” both reflective laments, as “public service disks,” sent to DJs as a kind of subliminal PSA. However, both his civic and musical efforts wound up moot. Otis was right about the fact that what was played on the radio could have a direct impact on the way African Americans reacted to their situation. But he was wrong about how. All the glimmering string sections in the world could not have prevented what happened that year. By the summer’s end, 159 riots would bloody the country’s cities, and a radio revolution would rise in the opposite direction of Otis’s lush, glossy singles. It came in the form of James Brown’s unchained, genre-breaking 1967 hit “Cold Sweat,” the surprise single that broke the rules of popular music, captured the growing fury of America’s cities, and catalyzed an uprising — in other words, it was the beginning of funk.
To whatever extent “Cold Sweat” sounds to modern ears like just another James Brown song is only because it so perfectly crystallizes what would become canonical traits of funk: extended polyrhythmic grooves, instrumental breaks, guttural ad libs. But for listeners in the late 1960s, “Cold Sweat” was something entirely unprecedented: the moment Brown stepped outside the box that had defined R&B and never looked back. “It only had one change, the words made no sense at all, and the bridge was musically incorrect,” recalls trombonist Fred Wesley in his memoir. But Wesley would eventually join Brown’s band and the song would become one he “looked forward to every night.” It was one of the biggest hits of Brown’s entire career, and the moment, right as America seemed like it might implode on its cities’ streets, when pop music found a new beat.
Pinpointing the moment funk was born (or even where it came from) is about as difficult as explaining what exactly it is. A seminal moment, however, was two years earlier with James Brown’s 1965 hit “Papa Got A Brand New Bag.” Here is where his band began emphasizing the first beat of every measure (the “one”), making the entire groove more danceable, and new guitarist Jimmy Nolen turned himself into a part of the percussion section. Nevertheless, that track remained firmly rooted in R&B — it relied on a familiar blues structure and at a curt 2:06 was still a concession to existing radio formats. Brown’s new bag laid the groundwork for a sea change, but wouldn’t prompt one on its own.
For the next two years, Brown and his all-star band would maintain a near scientific focus on pushing the boundaries of pop, knocking off numerous hits along the way to achieving funk actualization. But even in 1967, a year that would eventually be best known for both its unprecedented violence and its peace- and love-oriented hippies, Brown’s work would largely be seen as apolitical. He was busy crystallizing his brash new aesthetic, one that eschewed concessions to pop radio in favor of extended grooves, inimitable ad-libs, and riffs that would become the backdrop to hip-hop and R&B hits for decades to come.
James Brown & the Famous Flames released “Cold Sweat” the first week of July — Billboard admitted it was a “dynamic performance of strong material,” and it soared up the charts, spending almost the rest of the summer in the top 40. But “dynamic” and “strong” are understatements when you consider how severely the song, sometimes cited as the “Ground Zero of funk,” rejected R&B’s highly composed aesthetic in favor of something simple, raw, and spontaneous. Instead of being rooted in blues or Tin Pan Alley like the vast majority of R&B at the time, it was based on jazz, according to then-bandleader Alfred “Pee Wee” Ellis. “You could call it subliminal, but the horn line is based on ‘So What’,” he remembered later. “I wrote it on the bus between New York and Cincinnati…The band set up in a semicircle in the studio with one microphone. One take.” Like the similarly revolutionary Kind of Blue tune it references, “Cold Sweat” has just two chords, providing ample room for the kinds of extended vamps that Brown had long favored in his live shows. But when combined with the complex, African-inspired polyrhythms Brown had been experimenting with, the outcome was something transcendent.
The song is built on a groove stripped bare, with drummer Clyde Stubblefield, Nolen, and bassist Bernard Odum creating layers of rhythmic push and pull that would soon become funk’s signature. Every instrument, including Brown’s voice, becomes percussion serving the beat’s tireless push forward. It’s somehow both taut and liberated, as saxophonist Maceo Parker delivers a lengthy, unconstrained solo and Brown grunts and riffs in time. Then comes arguably one of the first foundation stones of the house hip-hop built: James yells “Give the drummer some!” for the very first time on wax, prompting Stubblefield to do his first drum break (the track has since been sampled 141 times, according to WhoSampled.com). Eventually James and his insistent horn section return for the song’s final climax, his wailing distorting in the microphone. It’s catharsis and endurance in one, as the beat loops and loops and loops.
“Cold Sweat,” basically a random single recorded while the band was on tour, exploded, spending two weeks at no. 7 on the Hot 100 and prompting his label King to release an LP of the same name that placed the track among throwaway covers that make it sound even more starkly modern in comparison.
“It just freaked [other musicians] out,” legendary producer Jerry Wexler, who coined the term “rhythm & blues,” once recalled of the song’s impact. “No one could get a handle on what to do next.”
They would quickly figure it out. George Clinton already had his first hit with “(I Wanna) Testify” (not that one, this one) and the word “funk” was making its chart debut with “Funky Broadway.” By the end of 1967, Sly and the Family Stone would release their debut album, A Whole New Thing. Brown had tapped into something that was already developing organically in music studios across the U.S., a wave of black music from artists who were tired of being told what to do and how to do it — that the only way to success was through assimilating into a world that was comfortable for white people and hard as hell for everyone else. In place of Motown’s charm school, Brown set the stage for pop music that didn’t need to code its political leanings. And he was only just beginning: he’d make his politics explicit by releasing “Say It Loud — I’m Black and I’m Proud” the following summer.
Even when they didn’t totally understand what they were hearing, the industry felt the R&B/funk fissure, and it terrified them. Brown billed himself as “a one man riot act,” a promise that occasionally took a literal turn. “Sexy Dance Triggers Wild Riot,” screamed the Philadelphia Tribune after a 1966 James Brown concert in Kansas City ended with 20 people arrested and one woman stabbed — allegedly all stemming from Brown’s insistence on integrated concert audiences. Paranoia about just what his music might inspire led to concert cancellations throughout 1967. “Jukebox operators and radio stations that play derogatory and inflammatory music are in some ways just as guilty as the lawbreakers,” one jukebox executive told Billboard magazine just after the summer’s Detroit riots. “They’re accessories to the crime.” When Detroit burned, “Cold Sweat” was no. 10 on Hot R&B Songs.
No music could have started or stopped the riots of 1967, not even music by titans like James Brown or Aretha Franklin. But funk was another symbol of the black community’s growing refusal to compromise their power — a small way, by comparison, but a way nonetheless. As Amiri Baraka put it in his 1966 essay “The Changing Same (R&B and New Black Music),” James Brown brings his listeners to “a place where Black People live…where Black People move in almost absolute openness and strength.”
Funk is music unapologetic about what it is and who it’s for. And as James Brown interpreted it, it was music where lyrics and melody were secondary to to the beat which had to keep chugging forward, propulsive yet steady, no matter what. When the cities were burning and it seemed like there was nothing left to be done, he kept the beat going not to make white people feel like everything was going to be alright, but to make it clear that no curfew or tank or executive order was going to stifle the culture.
