The lyrics were a powerful plea for justice and Black solidarity: “We’re people, we like the birds and the bees/ We’d rather die on our feet/ Than be living on our knees/ Say it loud: I’m Black and I’m proud!” The song had an unforgettable opening line that could only have been uttered by Brown: “Uh! With your bad self!” By the time we played it through a couple of times, we knew it was working.” “He had the words he’d written on a napkin he’d kept in a brown paper bag. “I rehearsed the band through that song – getting the horn parts right and guiding the bass player through his lines – and the next day Brown showed up,” Ellis told The Independent last year. With its propulsive, syncopated pulse, torrid horn solos and scratching rhythm guitars, “Cold Sweat” became recognised as one of the first songs in a new genre that came to known as funk.ĭuring their four years together, Ellis and Brown collaborated on 26 songs, but none had a greater impact than “Say It Loud – I’m Black and I’m Proud”, which was recorded in 1968, months after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr and during a summer of civil unrest and growing Black pride. The song was recorded in 1967, quickly became a No 1 R&B hit and rose to No 7 on the Billboard pop chart. I had been listening to Miles Davis, and ‘So What’ was in my mind too, and that gave me an idea for the horn line of ‘Cold Sweat’.” I wrote what I considered were the ‘grunts’, and kept it in my mind – that turned out to be the bass line of ‘Cold Sweat’. We got on the bus, and in the back I had this set-up where I could write music. “Brown called me into his dressing room and said ‘I got an idea’, and he started grunting, like ‘Uh. “We were in the Apollo Theatre in Harlem,” Ellis said in a 2020 interview with the American, a magazine for US expatriates in Britain. It’s about the groove and the feeling’.”īrown, who was always on the look-out for material, invited Ellis to help him write music for the group. If it sounds good, don’t analyse it, just do it. “A lot of stuff rubbed off on me about how to lead a band,” Ellis said of Brown.

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