Clyde Stubblefield
*Clyde Stubblefield was born on April 18, 1943. He was a Black funk and blues drummer.
Born to Frank D. and Vena Stubblefield, Clyde Austin Stubblefield grew up in Chattanooga, Tennessee. After seeing musicians in a parade, he wanted to drum, and the industrial sounds of factories influenced his sense of rhythm and the trains around him. He played professionally as a teenager and performed in local bands such as Blue Shufflers, Inclines, and Cascades.
In the early 1960s, he moved to Macon, Georgia, worked with guitarist Eddie Kirkland, and toured with Otis Redding. In 1965, James Brown asked him to audition. Over the next six years, the band had two drummers, Stubblefield and John' Jabo' Starks, who had joined the band two weeks earlier. Starks' style came from the church music he grew up with in Alabama.
The two created the grooves on many of Brown's biggest hits and laid the foundation for modern funk drumming. Stubblefield's recordings with Brown are some of the standard-bearers for funk drumming. His first solo album, The Revenge of the Funky Drummer, was released in 1997. In 1998, he released a 26-track album, The Original Funky Drummer Breakbeat Album. Stubblefield's third solo album, The Original, was released in 2003. All compositions were from Stubblefield's drum grooves, and Leo Sidran produced the album. Stubblefield collaborated frequently with Starks.
As the Funkmasters, the duo also released a drumming instruction video 1999 titled Soul of the Funky Drummers. In December 2007, the duo joined Bootsy Collins in Covington, Kentucky, for the first tribute concert in memory of James Brown. Stubblefield and Starks played on Funk for Your Ass, a tribute album by fellow James Brown Orchestra alum Fred Wesley. The album was released in 2008. Later that year, an expansion to the EZdrummer software was released, and Stubblefield and Starks recorded samples.
It is among the world's most sampled musical segments, used for decades by hip-hop groups, rappers, and other genres. He was in the 2009 PBS documentary Copyright Criminals, which addressed the creative and legal aspects of sampling in the music industry. He survived cancer in 2000 and coped with kidney disease in 2002, and in 2009, Stubblefield underwent dialysis treatments. Musicians in the Madison area organized fundraiser events, donating the proceeds to supplement his dialysis treatment and subsequent medical bills.
It was reported that Prince, who deeply admired Stubblefield, paid about $80,000 of the drummer's medical costs. In 2011, Stubblefield performed on the Jimmy Fallon show; in 2012, he gave an autobiographical talk and performed his favorite beats at the Madison Ruby Conference in Madison, Wisconsin. In 2015, a scholarship fund for music education was started and named after Stubblefield. In 2017, he accepted an honorary degree from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Clyde Stubblefield died on February 18, 2017, from kidney failure. Stubblefield was survived by his wife, Jody Hannon.
