1967 · Behind the Songs
One definite chord change, and a record that redrew the map of funk.
“Cold Sweat” was written with Brown’s bandleader Alfred “Pee Wee” Ellis and recorded in May 1967 at King Studios in Cincinnati. King Records issued it as a two-part single (King 6110) in June 1967; it reached number 1 on the R&B chart and number 7 on the pop chart. The song grew out of an earlier Brown tune, “I Don’t Care” (1962). Ellis later recalled that after a show Brown called him into the dressing room and grunted a bass line; Ellis, who had been listening to Miles Davis’s “So What” six or seven years earlier, built the horn line on it, wrote the arrangement on the bus between New York and Cincinnati, and cut it with the band the next day.
Musically it was a watershed. Building on “Out of Sight” and “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag”, it pares the harmony down to a single definite chord change, uses every instrument percussively and hammers the first beat of the measure. It is the first Brown recording in which he calls for a drum solo, shouting “give the drummer some” to Clyde Stubblefield, and it features a saxophone solo by Maceo Parker. Sometimes cited as the first true funk song, it has been sampled by generations of hip-hop producers; producer Jerry Wexler said it “freaked out” the musicians he knew, and in 2016 “Cold Sweat – Part 1” entered the Grammy Hall of Fame.