Clyde Stubblefield was the person who performed drums with James Brown throughout a few of his most celebrated years and created the endlessly-sampled break on 1970’s “Funky Drummer.”
When he died on February 18, 2017 of kidney failure, at 73, his fellow member of Brown’s band and later funk figurehead Bootsy Collins wrote on Fb: “We lost another Pillar Stone that held up the Foundation of Funk. Mr. Clyde Stubblefield has left our frequency. I am lost for words & Rythme [sic] right now. Dang Clyde! U taught me so much as I stood their watchin’ over u & Jabo while keepin’ one eye on the Godfather. We all loved U so much.”
Satirically, among the many many Brown classics on which Stubblefield performed, “Funky Drummer” was not one of many Godfather of Soul’s greatest hits, reaching No.20 on the R&B chart and solely No.51 pop. Nevertheless it went on, successfully, to create the hip-hop breakbeat, sampled greater than a thousand occasions on such staples as Public Enemy’s “Fight The Power,” LL Cool J’s “Mama Said Knock You Out,” and, typically, within the pop world, on such hits as George Michael’s “Freedom ‘90.” Public Enemy wrote on Twitter: “R.I.P. to the ‘funky drummer’ – Clyde Stubblefield – from the entire PE family.”
Stubblefield was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on April 18, 1943, and was knowledgeable drummer even in his teenagers. He joined Brown’s band in 1965 and have become one of many soul legend’s two drummers of selection into the early Nineteen Seventies, together with John “Jabo” Starks. Clyde performed on such enduring tracks by Brown as “Cold Sweat,” “There Was A Time,” “Say It Loud – I’m Black And I’m Proud,” and “Get Up (I Feel Like Being A Sex Machine).”
He subsequently labored with numerous different musicians, releasing his first solo album The Revenge of the Funky Drummer in 1997 and recording within the early 2000s with Starks because the Funkmasters. In 2008, with one other Brown bandmate, trombonist Fred Wesley, he launched Funk For Your Ass.
“People use my drum patterns on a lot of these songs,” Stubblefield mentioned in an interview with the New York Occasions in 2011. “They never gave me credit, never paid me. It didn’t bug me or disturb me, but I think it’s disrespectful not to pay people for what they use.”
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