15 Essential Funk Records Everyone Should Own

James Thomas Ramey, best known by his stage name, Baby Huey, was on his way up in the business when tragedy struck: the 400-pound, larger-than-life performer died at age 26 in 1970. His substance addiction and obesity, brought on by glandular disease, ripped away one of music’s most promising powerhouse singers.

Signed to The Baby Huey Story: The Living Legend—an underground classic of psychedelic soul and heavy funk that’s long endured as both a sampling motherlode in hip-hop and a testament to a charismatic cult figure whose life was cut way too short.

This goldmine has rousing funk romps that showcase not only Baby Huey’s stellar singing talents (a true gritty soul shouter) but the tight musicianship of The Babysitters, bringing to mind the relentless perfection and precision of James Brown’s bands. Thanks to Mayfield’s imprint across this gem, the pounding, room-filling drums, lively horn work, crunchy rhythm guitars, organs, and that rolling fuzz bass make this a dynamite knockout in its own right, played hard and rough. 

Formed at the height of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury scene, Sly & the Family Stone broke ground with their dynamic blast of soul, funk, rock, and psychedelic pop alongside their utopian vision of integration and optimism. Yet the band and its visionary leader, Sly Stone, fell apart as the turbulent ‘60s gave way to the ‘70s.

Their fifth album, There’s a Riot Goin’ On, is as much about soured end-of-’60s disillusionment as it is about Sly Stone’s tragic descent into drugs and despair. Besides the legendary backstories behind its sessions, the album’s musical and sonic impact can’t be understated — early hip-hop owes a debt to its skeletal drum programming, warped vocals, thumped-to-death narcotic grooves, and hazy lo-fi murk.

Album opener “Luv N’ Haight” couples as a meditation on the revolutionary stance of the Black Power era and Sly’s drug-induced isolation with the repeated mantra: ”Feel so good inside myself, Don’t wanna move.” The album’s hit “Family Affair” is one of the most avant-garde singles to ever top the charts with its warped tale of familial discord. A downbeat rerecording of the band’s 1970 classic, “Thank You (Falettin Me Be Mice Elf Agin)” gets stretched out into an eight-minute jam of paranoid funk blues on “Thank You For Talkin’ to Me, Africa.” Although critics and the record-buying public debated what to make of Riot during its initial November 1971 release, it has since become widely regarded as one of the most influential and significant albums of the ‘70s.

With their first two albums, 1970’s Maggot Brain, a sonic trip into the fractured state of the world circa 1971.

Reportedly inspired after Clinton told guitaristHendrix-tinged freakouts (“Super Stupid” and “Hit It and Quit It”) to folky funk jingles (“Back in Our Minds”) to warped Motown-inspired soul (“Can You Get to That.”) Funkadelic would go on to push their shapeshifting funk-rock signature to zanier levels on subsequent albums, but Maggot Brain still sounds sacred and otherworldly.

By the early ‘70s, no one could deny the potency of Chicago soul giant Curtis Mayfield’s post-Impressions solo work. His role as a commentator on timely Black issues of the day was well established by the time he decided to follow the model set by fellow artist Super Fly, a crime drama about a dope dealer making his last score before getting out of the drug game.

Packed with seminal hits, “Pusherman,” “Freddie’s Dead,” “Super Fly,” and “Give Me Your Love,” Mayfield’s sharp observations on harsh inner-city life are augmented with some of the fiercest funk grooves known to man — roaring basslines, chugging wah-wah guitars, sensuous Latin percussion, blaring horns, supple orchestrations, and Mayfield’s fragile falsetto. With a four-week run as the best-selling album in the United States, Super Fly marked Mayfield’s commercial zenith; it has retained its iconic impact as a funk milestone that trailblazed hip-hop and R&B styles to come.

 Like many of his contemporaries, James Brown infused his indomitable funk grooves with cinematic underpinnings that suggested the blaxploitation movie craze of the early 1970s. The Godfather of Soul composed the soundtracks for two American International films in 1973: The Hell Up in Harlem, but it was rejected after director Larry Cohen allegedly found the music to be “the same ‘ol James Brown stuff.”

That score evolved into this 1973 release, Fela Kuti-like African chants (the 13-minute jam session, “Time Is Running Out Fast”) and brooding late-night blues (“Forever Suffering”) to gritty street anthems (the legendary title track and “Mind Power”) and cosmic jazz-funk (“Shoot Your Shot”) over which Brown rambles, shouts, and croons into the microphone with his signature raspy delivery. An exemplary prog-funk masterpiece this is.

As funk rose to prominence from the late 1960s into the early ‘70s, many jazz vets and upstarts began dabbling with soul and funk in their music. Head Hunters. Intensely groovy and complex, Head Hunters found Hancock combining his past harmonic piano style with the funk’s irresistible earthiness. This is very evident on the album’s classic opener, “Chameleon,” an all-time rump-shaker built on Hancock’s futuristic synth burps and a head-bopping groove, the Afrocentric rework of jazz staple, “Watermelon Man,” and even the sprawling salute to funk pioneer, Sly Stone on “Sly.”

These rhythms are steeped in the African music and funk tradition, taken in a rolling virtuoso direction, courtesy of Bernie Maupin brings the electrified funk full circle with his dazzling saxophone work.

While Earth, Wind & Fire already explored a heady mélange of free jazz, soul, and funk on their first three albums, their fourth album, Brazilian music. The clavinet-laden, Sly Stone-influenced “Build Your Nest” shows off their funk mastery, while somewhere in between lies brooding message songs like the inspirational title track, “Keep Your Head to the Sky,” and the low-key, introspective gospel funk of “The World’s a Masquerade.”

Many often cite Go for Your Guns dropped in the spring of 1977, the Isleys had undergone several reinventions and proved their staying power as funk-rock hitmakers.

An all-time underrated great whose guitar wizardry summoned a brew of Jimi Hendrix’s Black psychedelic magic, Eddie Hazel’s freewheeling funk ferocity, and the wails of Marvin Isley‘s speaker-rumbling  bass and a pair of all-time classics.

Although he was crowned Motown’s hit-making prince who kept the label’s commercial power afloat in the disco era, Street Songs.

A striking classic of hard-edged funk that melded new wave, disco, soul, and pop sensibilities, Street Songs found James at his most autobiographic, waxing tales based on the people and experiences he knew in the Buffalo projects he grew up in. He morphs from street philosopher on “Ghetto Life” to tender romancer on “Make Love to Me” and the epic 7-minute scorcher, “Fire and Desire” with kindred spirit, Teena Marie. Through it all, he presents himself as the daring badass he always was, going so far as to deliver a no-holes-barred, reggae-tinged critique on police brutality with “Mr. Policeman” that predates hip-hop and Black Lives Matter, and then flaunting his wild side on the enduring bass-driven hits, “Super Freak” and “Give it to Me Baby.” 

 In the funk heritage, 1999, fusing elements of the Parliament-Funkadelic aesthetic with his idiosyncratic world of risqué sex obsessions, taut Linn LM-1 machine beats, artsy Oberheim OB-SX synth-scapes, and godly guitar solos that were sonically ahead of the curve.

What put 1999 over the top was Prince’s ability to put all of his genre dabblings together without a single track sounding out of place. Sprawling synth-funk grooves gave way to smooth pop (the immortal “Little Red Corvette” or the anthemic “Free”), only to take a left turn with the rockabilly-tinged “Delirious” or claustrophobic, lust-filled jams, “Let’s Pretend We’re Married” and “Automatic.” Aside from its crossover smashes, genre-defying wonders like “Something in the Water (Does Not Compute)” and “All the Critics Love U in New York” alone inarguably predated what’s touted in contemporary Black music as avant-garde or “alternative.”