Headphone Echoes: Funk — Pre-Funk Foundations (1950s to Early 1960s)
Plug in, tune out, and let the music haunt you.Boiling Frogs
Before funk declared itself, it gathered pressure.
The previous entry in this series began with James Brown and the imposition of the one. That was no accident. Funk arrives as a decision, not a suggestion. Once it takes hold, it reorganizes everything around it.
But after that opening volume, it became clear that something important had been skipped. Not a correction, but a widening of the lens.
This prequel steps backward to trace the forces that made funk inevitable. The blues and its devotion to repetition, teaching that persistence can carry emotional weight. Gospel and its bodily authority, proving that music can act directly on the nervous system. Ray Charles breaking genre boundaries and placing feel above form, reshaping country and rhythm and blues through phrasing and groove. New Orleans rhythms that rolled, staggered, and breathed, showing that momentum can emerge from interlocking parts rather than forward motion. Lesser-known pioneers, from Bo Diddley’s insistence on cyclical rhythm to Jimmy Reed’s hypnotic minimalism, were part of this quietly insistent revolution. These were not footnotes. They were the groundwork.
so sit back and listen backward so the forward motion makes sense, revealing why funk did not arrive suddenly—it was inevitable.
Read on at Boiling Frogs
Plug in, tune out, and let the music haunt you.
