In the first of intermittent Friday Funks in 2025, after last year's weekly series, we dig a little deeper into a little-known James Brown song containing hidden treasures of funk.
James Brown and the Famous Flames’ ‘Get It Together’ was a two-part single released amid one of the most revolutionary periods of music by any artists, later compiled by Polydor for an album called Foundations of Funk – A Brand New Bag: 1964–1969. Brown wrote the song with his longtime saxophonist and arranger, Pee Wee Ellis, and Bud Hobgood.
The trumpets’ phrases are bright and brief, the kind of abbreviated lines that started at Brown’s the dawn of funk. The trombone acts as a second bassline, on top of the bass from Bernard Odum, who played on classics including ‘Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag’, ‘I Got You (I Feel Good)’, and ‘Cold Sweat’, a song Brown references in this song (5:55). (‘Cold Sweat - Part 1’ and ‘Get It Together (Part 1)’ were successive singles in 1967.)
Maceo Parker solos after a couple of minutes, with Brown improvising and finding rhymes for “Underdog”. When Brown sings, “Now, look-ee here,” it sounds like the next verse is just a few beats away, but it’s another few bars. It’s difficult to tell if Brown knew it was a few bars away, or if anyone did. The song has such a live energy that you could easily believe it was one of the first few takes – often Brown and his band only needed a few.
‘Get It Together’ is one of the many songs where Brown addresses his horn sections as “Horns”. And it’s one of many he sings a call-and-response with them. “Now when I say, ‘Uh’, one time, you say, ‘Uh’. Ready?”
Brown’s instructions (7:20) will be familiar to regular listeners of 'Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine'. “Now I’ll tell you what I want you to do. Now when I say ‘Hit it’, I want you to hit it. You get me, Jabo? You hear me, Bernard? But when I say ‘Quit it’, I want you to quit it.’
Even without Brown’s urgent singing and instructions, the track would be captivating. Listen from 4:28, when the Jabo Starks’s syncopated snare, Odum’s low, hollow sounding bass, and Jimmy Nolen’s trademark chicken scratch guitar dance in and out of each other.
Shortly after, at 5:10, Brown says, “If you hear any noise, it’s just me and the boys,“ a phrase Parliament used for possibly their greatest ever chorus.
At 6:00, he asks trombone player Levi Rasbury, “Rasbury, what kind of horn you play – a trombone?” Brown was a musician himself, even if you discount vocals, having played the harmonica from about five-years-old, but it seems a genuine question. (Similarly, on ‘Make It Funky’, four years later, he asked Fred Wesley about his instrument.)
Brown’s sign-off (“fade me on outta here ’cause I got to leave anyway”) was literal – according to a piece on his legacy, “Brown rushed out the door to set up advance promotion for the next night’s gig in Richmond, Virginia.“
Brown only mentions the song once in his autobiography, but that’s once more than many other classics. He was so prolific that when The Guardian critic Alexis Petridis wrote a piece on Brown for his regular Ranked series, it featured 20 albums rather than the customary 20 songs.