The Funk Brothers: The band who played on more number ones than The Beatles
Hit records are the be-all, end-all as far as the mainstream music industry goes; after all, it is chart success and hit singles which make world-famous pop stars out of recording artists.
For all their artistic innovations and songwriting masterpieces, it was chart success which alerted the world to artists like The Beatles, The Supremes, Elvis Presley, and The Rolling Stones, to name only a handful. However, if chart successes invariably lead to fame and fortune, then why has nobody heard of The Funk Brothers?
Founded back in 1959, The Funk Brothers boast something of a mysterious history; it is not known for sure how many musicians played with the group over the course of its 13-year reign. What is known, however, is that The Funk Brothers played on more number-one singles than The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and Elvis Presley combined.
You see, the Funk Brothers were essentially the house band for Motown Records, so they had a hand in virtually every pop smash hit which passed through Hitsville USA during the label’s golden period.
When Motown Records was first founded under the original name Tamla, Berry Gordy immediately set about making the Detroit label into a haven for nationwide hit records. In doing so, the label boss realised the need to create a house band to support the various individual artists being signed up to Motown.
House bands were common practice within the world of funk and soul, and the Stax Records house band, Booker T and the MGs would later find mainstream success in their own right, while The Funk Brothers were most often relegated to the background.
Despite existing in complete obscurity from the attention of the musical mainstream, The Funk Brothers played on the vast majority of Motown’s biggest hits, including their first-ever number-one single, ‘Please Mr Postman’, alongside The Marvelettes. The following few years would see the band participate in countless now-iconic hits, from The Four Tops’ northern soul classic ‘Reach Out (I’ll Be There)’ to the timeless brilliance of Marvin Gaye’s ‘I Heard It Through The Grapevine’.
All in all, the Funk Brothers played on over 50 number-one singles during their time together, taking part in virtually every Motown hit recorded between 1959 and 1972. During that time, a seemingly endless array of artists were classed as Funk Brothers, including the likes of Marvin Gaye, Ray Parker Jr, Greg Reeves, R. Dean Taylor, Billy Preston, and Carol Kaye, to name only a few. In fact, it seems as though the majority of artists who played a major role in the Motown story were, at one point or another, technically a member of the Funk Brothers.
The reason for The Funk Brothers relative obscurity, when taking into account their unparalleled run of hit records, is quite simple: they were ‘only’ a backing band. They might have played on Motown’s biggest hits, but that was rarely reflected on the releases themselves, where artists were simply listed as ‘The Supremes’ rather than ‘The Supremes with the Funk Brothers’, for instance. As such, when Motown canned its house band, there was not much of an uproar from the music-buying public.
It was in 1972 that The Funk Brothers ceased to exist. The decision came almost as an afterthought when Motown abandoned its Detroit roots and relocated to Los Angeles. Although some of the more prominent members of The Funk Brothers followed Gordy’s label to the West Coast, few of them stuck with the label for much longer, preferring the industrial surroundings of Detroit to the sun-soaked beaches of California. Just like that, one of pop’s most prolific groups vanished overnight, without so much as a footnote.
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