According to the Guinness World Records, James Brown is the most sampled artist in music history! So why did James Brown appear in thousands of samples from hip hop, pop, electronic, R&B and far beyond? It was a mix of James Brown’s methods, his ability to develop the tightest band around, and perfect timing as the next generation, armed with new technology, used their parents hits to craft new songs and hip hop rhythms.

Because we work with the Estate of James Brown to design and manufacture official James Brown merchandise, we get a lot of questions about the funk pioneer’s sampling roots, so we created this article to explain James Brown’s outsized influence on sampling culture.

It was James Brown’s RHYTHMS!

James Brown really popularized the rhythm of a song. Call it the beat or the Groove, but before James Brown came along, most popular music was chord progressions and standard verse -> chorus -> verse. In the analog days of music sampling before the 2000s, artists who used samples hunted for little repeatable rhythms of a record or tape that they could record, repeat, and create something new with.

Brown Gave His Band Members Highly Sample-able Solos

Brown emphasized solos in his songs from various band members, which was progressive for the time. And the solos were often isolated, without a lot of background instruments or singing, which made them ideal for sampling. 

So when Clyde Stubblefield got an eight bar solo in 1969’s “Funky Drummer” (at about 5:25), without much background noise or instruments, it gave a lot of later artists a perfect drum backing to use — which is how Clyde became the single most sampled drum break in history.

EVERYTHING is on the ONE!

Brown was the first to really popularize emphasizing the first beat of a bar, or “The One”.

It’s that “POP” of the first beat that a lot of people can instantly recognize as James Brown’s trademark. That very first note of the bar having the loudest emphasis makes a lot of Brown’s music explosive.

Later on, when Bootsy Collins was fired from James Brown’s band and moved to George Clinton’s Parliament Funkadelic, he taught Clinton and P-Funk about how to build a groove around “The One”, and before long, Funkadelic was soaring to new heights.

Perfect Timing

It’s important to note that early generations of artists who pioneered sampling in hip hop were drawing inspiration from their parent-era record and tape collections. Because James Brown was among the most popular performers of several decades, his music was usually available to early DJs and producers.

In the late 70s and early 1980s, DJ originators starting on Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx started playing with bits and pieces of older songs. Artists like Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa were regularly using James Brown as the backbeat of their new style that would explode into Hip Hop,  fundamentally changing music and dominating the charts for decades.

Relentless Band Practice

Brown was a legendary perfectionist; driving relentless practices until his bands were the tightest fit for the hardest working man in show business. Whether it was The J.B.s, the Famous Flames or any of the long line of James Brown’s famed backing bands or members, the extreme got the musicians locked into the beat in a way that was perfect for the sampling culture that would later follow.