Funk 45s are the most collected records on earth that almost nobody heard when they came out. A soul ballad could get radio play; a raw funk instrumental cut by six teenagers in a garage in Ohio in 1971 and pressed in a run of three hundred got nothing. Which is precisely why, fifty years later, those are the records people pay for.
This is a listening guide rather than a want list. Twenty-five funk 45s that show what the format could do, chosen because they are good and because you can hear all of them on legitimate reissue without remortgaging anything.
What makes funk 45s different
The seven-inch single is not just a smaller format. It shaped how this music was written.
The break is the point. A funk 45 exists to get to the part where everything drops out except the drums. On a three-minute record you cannot spend ninety seconds building, so the good ones arrive almost immediately.
Part 1 and Part 2. The defining structural quirk of the format. A long track would be split across both sides, with the vocal on the A-side and the instrumental stretch on the flip. Collectors and DJs almost always prefer Part 2, because that is where the band stops singing and starts playing.
Small labels, small pressings. Most of these came out on local imprints with no distribution beyond a few states. Scarcity is not manufactured here; it is just what happened.
Rhythm over melody. Where soul is built around a voice, funk is built around a drum pattern and a bass line. The singer, when there is one, is another percussion instrument.
The essential twenty-five
The foundations
1. James Brown — “Cold Sweat” (King, 1967). The year zero record. Brown strips the arrangement down to a single chord and lets the rhythm section carry everything. Everything below descends from this.
2. James Brown — “Funky Drummer” (King, 1970). Clyde Stubblefield’s break is the most sampled piece of recorded sound in history. Worth hearing in its original context rather than as a component part.
3. The Meters — “Cissy Strut” (Josie, 1969). New Orleans funk, which swings where the rest of it stomps. Zigaboo Modeliste’s drumming is a different tradition entirely.
4. Dyke & the Blazers — “Funky Broadway” (Original Sound, 1967). Arizona, raw as anything on this list, and arguably the first record to put the word funky in a title and mean it.
5. The J.B.’s — “Pass the Peas” (People, 1972). Brown’s band as their own act. Bootsy Collins and Fred Wesley territory.
The deep end
6. The Whole Darn Family — “Seven Minutes of Funk”. A break so useful that hip-hop producers wore it out.
7. Lyn Collins — “Think (About It)” (People, 1972). Produced by James Brown, and the source of one of the most recognisable vocal samples ever lifted.
8. Marva Whitney — “It’s My Thing” (King, 1969). Whitney had the hardest voice in the Brown organisation and this is the proof.
9. The Politicians — “Free Your Mind”. Detroit, and a reminder that funk had a political register long before it was fashionable to notice.
10. Charles Wright & the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band — “Express Yourself” (Warner Bros., 1970). Los Angeles, and one of the great bass lines.
Instrumental funk
11. Booker T. & the M.G.’s — “Melting Pot” (Stax, 1971). The Memphis house band going long and strange.
12. The Mohawks — “The Champ” (Pama, 1968). British, organ-led, and a foundational record for UK hip-hop and rare groove.
13. Kool & the Gang — “Jungle Boogie” (De-Lite, 1973). Before the ballads, they were one of the hardest bands in America.
14. The Blackbyrds — “Rock Creek Park” (Fantasy, 1975). Jazz musicians playing funk, which produces a particular kind of precision.
15. Cymande — “Bra” (Janus, 1972). London, Caribbean, and completely its own thing.
The rarities worth knowing
16. Bobby Byrd — “I Know You Got Soul” (King, 1971). Byrd was Brown’s right hand and this is his moment.
17. The Soul Searchers — “Ashley’s Roachclip” (Sussex, 1974). Washington DC go-go before go-go had a name, and another permanently borrowed break.
18. Rufus Thomas — “Do the Funky Chicken” (Stax, 1970). Novelty on the surface, seriously played underneath.
19. Eddie Bo — “Hook and Sling” (Scram, 1969). New Orleans again, and about as raw as a record can be while still being danceable.
20. Betty Davis — “If I’m in Luck I Might Get Picked Up” (Just Sunshine, 1973). Davis was doing something nobody else was doing and was punished commercially for it at the time.
Later and outward
21. The Fatback Band — “Njia Walk”. New York, and the bridge between funk and what became disco.
22. Manu Dibango — “Soul Makossa” (Fiesta, 1972). Cameroon by way of Paris, and proof that the form travelled immediately.
23. Fela Kuti — “Zombie” (1976). Afrobeat rather than American funk, built on the same rhythmic logic and considerably braver.
24. The Isley Brothers — “Get Into Something” (T-Neck, 1970). A group most people know for ballads, playing hard.
25. Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings — “How Long Do I Have to Wait for You?” (Daptone, 2005). Included deliberately. Recorded forty years after most of this list, to tape, with period methods, and it stands up next to any of it.
The regional scenes
Funk is usually discussed as one thing. It is at least five, and once you can hear the regions the whole field opens up.
Cincinnati and Augusta. The James Brown axis, built around King Records. Hard, disciplined, one-chord, drilled to within an inch of its life. Brown ran his band like a military unit and fined musicians for mistakes, and you can hear the fear in the precision.
New Orleans. The Meters, Eddie Bo, Allen Toussaint’s productions. The rhythms come out of second-line parade drumming rather than gospel, which gives everything a swing the rest of funk does not have. Looser, trickier, more syncopated.
Memphis. Stax turning funkier after 1968. More horn-led, and closer to soul than most funk because the same house band was playing it.
Los Angeles and the West Coast. Charles Wright, Dyke & the Blazers, later Sly Stone. More psychedelic, more studio-experimental, often with a political edge the Southern records kept implicit.
Everywhere else in America. The vast middle: Ohio, Indiana, Texas, the Carolinas, hundreds of bands who pressed one 45 on a local label and split up. This is where the expensive records live, and where the reissue labels do their most valuable work, because these groups left no other trace.
Spotting good funk 45s in a crate
If you ever find yourself in front of an unsorted box, some practical heuristics.
Look for Part 1 / Part 2. It signals a band that had more music than would fit, which usually means a band worth hearing.
Local label, no distributor credit. A small imprint with an address in a city rather than a corporate logo. That is the profile of the records nobody has reissued.
Band names with a place in them. Countless groups named themselves after their street, their neighbourhood or their high school. It is a reliable marker of a self-financed local pressing.
Check the run-out groove. Hand-etched matrix numbers, rather than stamped, usually mean a small plant and a short run.
Do not trust the sleeve. Most of these came in plain company sleeves or no sleeve at all. Condition of the vinyl matters; packaging tells you nothing.
How to listen
Play the B-sides. With funk 45s this is not completism, it is the main event. Part 2 is where the band is let off the leash.
Listen to the drums, then the bass, then everything else. Funk is built from the bottom. If you listen for melody you will conclude, wrongly, that not much is happening.
Volume matters more than with soul. These records were made for rooms and systems. At low volume the bass disappears and the whole thing turns into scratchy guitar.
Follow the break. If a record sounds familiar and you cannot place it, you have almost certainly heard it sampled. Tracing that backwards is one of the genuine pleasures of this music.
Where to hear it
Almost all of the above is on licensed compilation. Several of the labels in our guide to soul and funk reissue labels specialise in exactly this material — Tramp and Jazzman in particular have built catalogues out of raw funk 45s, and Daptone sits at the other end, making new records the old way.
If you want to see how the funk 45 connects to the slower Southern tradition it grew out of, our deep soul listening guide covers the other half of the story.
Frequently asked questions
Why are funk 45s so expensive?
Tiny pressing runs on local labels with no distribution, combined with fifty years of demand from DJs, collectors and hip-hop producers. Scarcity plus sustained demand. The music itself is available cheaply on reissue.
What does Part 1 / Part 2 mean on a funk single?
A long recording split across both sides of the seven-inch, usually with the vocal on Part 1 and the instrumental stretch on Part 2. Part 2 is generally the side collectors and DJs want.
What is the most sampled of all funk 45s?
James Brown’s “Funky Drummer” is the usual answer, for Clyde Stubblefield’s break. “Ashley’s Roachclip” and “Seven Minutes of Funk” are close behind.
Do I need original pressings?
No. Licensed reissues and compilations carry the same music, usually mastered from better sources than a worn original. Buy those first and treat originals as a separate hobby.
Where should I start?
“Cold Sweat”, then “Cissy Strut”, then “Pass the Peas”. Those three cover the Southern, New Orleans and band-led strands of the form in about eight minutes.