I'm a musical pluralist who thinks there is a lot of categorical hair-splitting going on. To me it's all R&B.
In the early 70s several future members of P-Funk were in James Brown's backup band after he fired veteran JB band leader Maceo Parker and the rest of the charter members of the JB band.
Practically overnight Brown hired Bootsy Collins, Bobby Byrd, Catfish Collins, Clayton Gunnels, Frank Waddy, Robert McCollough and Jabo Strarks to replace the JB band. Prior to James Brown, Bootsy and Catfish were playing gigs at an Atlanta eatery and bar called the Wine Cellar under the name of the Dap Kings and several other names. They were all still in their teens and Brown hired these young upstarts without an audition the and basically trained them to play his music.
Brown had only heard Bootsy and Catfish's band once by happenstance before he made his impulsive decision to hire these young turks, but Brown's musical acumen proved to be brilliant. This younger, rawer sound of the James Brown band was the template for most funk music for the next two decades.
And nearly all those James Brown players did a tour of duty on George Clinton's Mothership, following their hitch with the James Brown Band. George Clinton pyschedelicized funk but there were R&B bands that predated Clinton's fusion of psychedelica and funk, most notably the Chambers Brothers and Sly Stone. But it was James Brown who was truly the Godfather all funk musicians.
Early in the 1960s James Brown invented the deeply grooved drum and bass sound and the repetative but complex one chord vamp that was the basis for all funk and much of hip-hop. His contributions to both modern funk and hip hop were enormous. The earliest hip hop samples by Chuck D, Public Enemy, and Afrika Bambaataa were borrowed from James Brown grooves.
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