Funk 1
People usually think of funk as energetic dance music propelled by a hard-driving, syncopated basslineThe bass player performing very rhythmically. and drumbeat, and in this style, the goal is to create a "groove." This description, however, does not fully reflect the transformations of the style over time. For instance, after its emergence during the mid-1960s, funk established itself during the 1970s as an independent music genre and continues to have currency among contemporary musicians. The next paragraph provides a fuller meaning of funk and its development out of Black culture.
"Funk" is one of many words from the African American oral tradition that defies exact definition and varies depending on time and place. As a slang term, "funky" is commonly used to describe an offbeat style or attitude. Historically, the words "funk" and "funky" were associated with harsh realities-foul odors, tales of pain and brutality, destroyed relationships, crushed aspirations, racial strife, and so on-and from there, with flights of imagination that expressed unsettling truths about the African American experience. As a musical term, "funky" denotes a certain "feel" derived from the rhythmic interplay of the musicians working towards a groove. Its reference to music goes back at least as far as the late nineteenth-century "funky butt" or "funkybuttin'" dance.
Peter Tamony writes about Buddy Bolden's use of "funky butt" in an article titled "Funky." He also mentions how Louis Armstrong said "funkybuttin'" was a type of dance practiced at the Funky Butt Hall in New Orleans, where Armstrong first heard Buddy Bolden (Tamony 1980, 210). He further writes, "The adjective of Buddy Bolden's legendary coinage connoted the bodily aroma of women who frequented a dance floor back of town in humid New Orleans, where they slow-dragged to low-down blues or up-tempo to the strains of ragtime, which reflected the speed-up of American life around the first decade of this century" (Tamony 1980, 210).