such as Dizzy Gillespie's "Night In Tunisia." The trebly, insistent chicken-scratch guitars were a legacy of Fifties R&B as played by Mickey "Guitar" Baker and by Brown's own Jimmy Nolan, who had served his apprenticeship with Johnny Otis. The tight staccato horn bursts were prominent on soul records coming out of Stax studios in Memphis, where Al Jackson was already a past master of hustling, dynamically understated, excruciatingly even drumming.
But James Brown put those elements together in a way that sounded perfectly natural, for all its newness, and further emphasized them by stripping away any elements in his music that might interfere with their impact. Before "Out Of Sight" and "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag," the rhythmic elements Brown synthesized had been used to drive home songs, harmonic structures with choruses and bridges and dramatic modulations and all the other devices which black pop had borrowed from white pop and from its blues and gospel roots. With "Sight" and especially "Bag," the rhythmic elements became the song. There were few chord changes, or none at all, but there were plenty of tricky rhythmic interludes and suspensions, and Brown used his voice more and more as a rhythm instrument, putting affirmative slogans in stream-of-consciousness fashion over an increasingly elaborate counterpoint of pulses. The approach probably wasn't inspired by African drumming (in which rhythms are orchestrated as if they were melodies in a fugue) but it was certainly analogous and soon Brown was the most popular recording artist in Africa. In the U.S. he was Soul Brother Number One.
Sly Stone arrived in 1967 and soon dispelled any lingering traces of the walking bass line and the shuffle beat. He is often credited with having singlehandedly booted pop rhythms into the Seventies, but his new kind of momentum would have been impossible without the scores of James Brown singles which preceded and shaped it. As Sly temporarily took over the partying crowd's fancies, Brown began singing more and more about the need for black ownership, self-determination and pride. He was singing directly from his own experience.
As long ago as 1958 Brown knew what he wanted to do on record. He wanted to use his crack road band, but Syd Nathan of King records said no. Brown's reaction was to record the band himself under the nominal leadership of drummer Nat Kendrick and in 1960 Kendrick
