There Was A Time (I Got To Move)

Being a fan of James Brown can be a challenge, because his classic songs have all been recorded multiple times in different versions with different names on different labels. “I Got To Move” is a case in point.

It was first released on In The Jungle Groove in 1986, but was recorded back in 1970. The strangely tacked-on intro is an excerpt from a different song, “Give It Up Or Turnit a-Loose.” Except that the specific version of “Give It Up Or Turnit a-Loose” they took the excerpt from was titled “In The Jungle Groove,” which is where they got the name of this compilation. Except that the full song “In The Jungle Groove” was not on this compilation, and has actually never been released. Like I said: confusing! Anyway, the point is, once “I Got To Move” proper starts at 0:29, it’s unbelievably funky.

Here’s my transcription of the main groove:

As in any good funk groove, the harmony is minimal. The main groove is an unbroken stretch of Dm7, in D Dorian mode, which I have heard called “the key of James Brown.” There’s also a bridge that moves to G7, in keeping with the Dorian vibe. Most of the interest in this tune is in the rhythm.

Here’s the drum pattern on the Groove Pizza:

Here’s a circular MIDI visualization of the entire groove. You can see how complex the rhythmic arrangement is, how much the different elements of the groove are all accenting different sixteenth note subdivisions.

This groove is two bars of 4/4 time. The strongest beats, the ones that conventionally get the most emphasis, are the downbeats of each bar (twelve o’clock and nine o’clock on the circle). As you would expect, every instrument in the groove hits on the first downbeat: horns, guitar, bass, kick, hi-hat. The horns, kick and hi-hat also play on the second downbeat, as you expect, but the guitar and bass don’t. Instead, they anticipate it by a sixteenth note. And actually, because the musicians are swinging their sixteenths pretty widely, they are quite late for their anticipation. That is a lot of rhythmic friction!

The next strongest beats are beat three of each bar, three o’clock and nine o’clock on the circle. The horns, kicks and hi-hats play on beat three in each bar, as you expect. On the first beat three (three o’clock), the guitar and bass are anticipated by a sixteenth note, and once again, they are late for their anticipation because the musicians are swinging. But then, having created that expectation in the first bar, the onsets fake you out in the second bar, hitting squarely on that bar’s beat three (nine o’clock.) When you expect a syncopation and it isn’t there, that creates a hip kind of meta-syncopation.

It is a bedrock convention of Black American music for the past hundred years that you accent beats two and four with snare drum hits. This groove violates that convention; while the guitar and hi-hat play on the backbeats, the snare drums don’t. Instead, there are snare hits on the and of one and the and of three, and on the sixteenth note offbeats before the and of two and the and of four. So maybe what’s happening is that the drums are doing implied doubletime, and every alternating subdivision “backbeat” is anticipated? That is complicated! This instability affects the relationship of every other component in the groove, which is why it has such a bubbling tension.

Much as I love “I Got To Move”, there’s a different version of it that I love even more: “There Was A Time (I Got To Move)”, specifically, the version released on Funk Power 1970: A Brand New Thang.

This is a version of the song “There Was A Time“, which James Brown first released in a different form on Live At The Apollo Vol 2. That version is great too, but is less rhythmically complex. Once it got combined with the more syncopated New Orleans feel of “I Got To Move”, that’s when it became possibly the funkiest thing that has ever been recorded. Here’s my chart of the main groove (really, the only groove, since the song only has the one section):

Here’s the drum pattern on the Groove Pizza:

And here’s a circular MIDI visualization of everything:

Every instrument hits on the first downbeat: horns, guitar, bass, kick, hi-hat. However, there’s not nearly so much emphasis on the second downbeat; just the horns and the hi-hat play it. The guitar, bass and snare do all hit on the sixteenth note subdivision right before it, though, which creates a lot of rhythmic friction. The snare drum hits the backbeats, but also plays lots of offbeat subdivisions around them. The kicks and bass are scattered around the offbeat subdivisions as well. Once again, that is a whole lot of rhythmic conflict.

I’m working on a new approach to teaching these kind of grooves. The idea is to start with a heavily simplified version of the rhythm, then play a less simplified version, then a less simplified version, until you are doing the groove in all its complexity and nuance. Here’s a series of variations on the bassline, moving from more to less simplified.

Note that I am not arguing that whoever came up with this bassline went through anything like this process. I’m proposing a method for learning this pattern, not a theory of how the pattern developed in the first place.

Alexander Stewart gives some valuable context for these grooves in his article, “Funky Drummer”: New Orleans, James Brown and the Rhythmic Transformation of American Popular Music. He traces several different influences on James Brown’s funk: blues, gospel, jazz, early rock, Afro-Caribbean music, and most specifically, the second-line rhythms of New Orleans street drummers. While blues and jazz typically use swung eighth notes, Latin music uses straight eighths, as do a lot of rock songs. As you move from the 1950s into the 1960s, sixteenth note grooves come to predominate. New Orleans grooves are somewhere in between: using a hybrid of straight and swung eighths, with complex sixteenth note subdivisions and polyrhythm.

The straight eighth note feel of funk does not begin with James Brown. Stewart cites “Book of the Seven Seals” by The Dixie Hummingbirds as a precursor from gospel. Not only is this rhythm straight and funky, but the harmony is static for long stretches too.

You typically think of blues as using 12/8 shuffle, but Stewart points out that it sometimes uses straight eighth note proto-funk as well, as in this Charlie Patton song:

Latin music is very groovy, but it hardly ever swings. American pop culture got a massive influx of Afro-Caribbean influence in the 1950s: mambo, rumba, calypso and so on. Rock and R&B rhythms are a hybrid of blues-style swing and Latin-style straight rhythm with heavy syncopation. Most musicians play one feel or the other in any given song, but in New Orleans, they play both feels at the same time. Stewart points out that sometimes the bassist plays straight eighths while the pianist swings; or the drummer swings while the pianist plays straight. The most sophisticated musicians do both at the same time: drummers might play straight eighths on the hi-hat and swing eights on the snare, while pianists might play swing in one hand and straight in the other. The New Orleans term for this is “open shuffle.” Here’s an example, “Nervous Boogie” by Paul Gayten.

Here’s another iconic example, “Tipitina” by Professor Longhair, featuring drummer Earl Palmer.

Here’s an open shuffle tutorial from New Orleans drummer Johnny Vidacovich.

Vidacovich is playing straight eighth notes on his ride cymbal and behind the beat or swung eighths on the snare and tom. Clyde Stubblefield brought this approach to his drumming too. Check out Stubblefield’s playing on “Mother Popcorn”.

Stewart observes that Stubblefield is playing a very similar pattern here in the first bar of each two-bar cell to the one that Earl Palmer uses in “Tipitina”, with accents on two and on the ‘and’ of four.

And by the way, Stewart identifies straight eighth note/swung sixeenth note funk in James Brown’s music earlier than I realized, going back to “I’ve Got Money” from 1962, featuring drummer Clayton Fillyau.

Stewart’s article is an invaluable reference, but I take some issue with the language that he uses to describe swing. He refers to swung eighth notes as “triplets” or “12/8 shuffle”, which is not wrong, exactly, but it is heavily oversimplified. The reality is that 12/8 shuffle is only one variety of swing; usually there is not a simple two-to-one ratio between the length of onbeat and offbeat subdivisions. Also, Stewart describes funk as using straight eighth notes, which is true, but he glosses over the fact that funk is usually swinging at the sixteenth note level. This is what makes funk sound different from Latin music: both use straight eighths, but funk swings its sixteenth notes, while Latin music doesn’t.

Anyway, funk history is always interesting, but my main motivation for studying all of this is the massive influence that James Brown’s grooves of 1970 had on later forms of groove-oriented music, especially hip-hop. The various versions of “I Got To Move” and “There Was A Time” have been sampled many times in rap songs, and have been imitated by uncountably many drum programmers and producers. You hear the effects of Clyde Stubblefield’s embrace of New Orleans open shuffle across the entire breadth of global popular culture. The music academy has not devoted much attention to James Brown’s grooves so far, but this has started to change. I recommend Anne Danielsen’s book Presence and Pleasure: The Funk Grooves of James Brown and Parliament. Not only does she transcribe and analyze lots of James Brown and P-Funk classics, but she uses them to explore the larger concept of the groove as a structural unit. It feels like we’re in the early days of a major musicological expansion, and I am here for it.