We’re celebrating 60 years of funk across six weeks. Check out ‘Doing It To Death’ and ‘Funky Drummer’ from previous weeks.

Like many James Brown songs, 1972’s ‘Get On The Good Foot’ was released as a two-side single. The album of the same name combined the two sides and included more music, with a fuller instrumental break, despite being 29 seconds shorter (the sides faded and repeated, around when Brown sings “Take care of business, sister”).

Often, music critics’ main criticism of Brown is that he wasn’t really an album artist and that his albums had too much filler. It’s true that he revisited tunes and didn’t always prioritise themes or track ordering to make a cohesive record. But it did give us some good songs; the version of ‘Cold Sweat’ on this album is pretty faithful to the 1967 original but thoroughly enjoyable.

Soon, Brown would make one of his most cohesive and consistent albums: 1974’s Hell. Arranger David Matthews worked on both albums (including the revisiting of ‘Cold Sweat’) and shared arranging duties with Brown.

It may also have been Matthews’ influence that led to one of Brown’s most striking similarities with Fela Kuti. Although in his Red Bull Music Academy interview Matthews talked more about Fela’s influence on the bass and drums in Brown’s music, it’s the dual guitars that sound most Fela here. ‘Get On The Good Foot’ is one of the earliest examples of the polyrhythmic guitars that both Fela and Brown used extensively. The rhythm guitar plays on the One and the second ‘and’ of “One-and-two-and”, and the lead guitar plays a high-pitched staccato line – it’s a part to test the precision of any player (likely Bobby Roach in this case, with Hearlon “Cheese” Martin on rhythm).

Hearing the bassline in isolation, you could think of any number of guitar parts before you arrived on the ones Brown used. The rhythms aren’t obviously connected, but interweave to form an irresistible groove. A big part of their connection unsurprisingly comes on the One.

On We Want the Funk (2025), music historian Scot Brown said,

“James Brown had this approach to music where – I call it ‘simplexity’. Simplexity: it’s simple, but when you put it all together it’s complex.”

By this time, Brown had been shouting out his musicians for years. In ‘Good Foot’, he shouts, “Hit it, Jab!” in the drum-and-bass-led break. Brown wrote in his memoir, “Afrika Bambaata says it’s the song that people first started break dancing to.” Jabo Starks’s rhythms are enough to get your foot moving on their own, but the bass’s emphasis of the One adds some extra stomp and the horns’ bizarre cries a very different tone to the verses’ joviality. The horn section comprised trumpeters Russell Crimes and Isiah “Ike” Oakley, trombonist Fred Wesley, and saxophonists Jimmy Parker, and St. Clair Pinckney. ‘Good Foot’ was a rare co-write with Wesley, along with Joseph Mims, a DJ who supposedly inspired Brown to write the tune and received a credit.

Brown sprinkles some Spanish in the lyrics. ‘Pt. 1’ opens with “¿Qué pasa, people? ¿Qué pasa?” (“What’s up, people? What’s up?”). In ‘Pt. 2’, Brown speak-sings, or raps, “Hasta mañana, mi cielo” (“See you tomorrow, my heaven”). He didn’t often sing in Spanish, but one of the most fascinating parts of that Matthews interview was about Brown’s relationship with Latin music:

“Now in the typical James Brown arrangement of the band, the horn section would be one element, each of the guitars, the lead guitar specifically, would be another one. The bass would be another one. And those three elements would fit together as one pattern. Then the drums would tie everything together. So that’s the form that James came up with. And as I’ve thought about it over the years, if you listen to Latin music of that time, there’s a lot of similarities. I once heard James say that the Latin guys somewhat blew it, because they didn’t understand about the ‘one.’ They were always off the ‘one.’ And so he took those elements of Latin, Cuban music and put the big, strong ‘one’ in front of it, and came up with his own thing which we now call funk.”

The big, strong One. Brown understood the importance of the first beat before, and better, than anyone else.