In a nutshell, here’s the backstory about the birth of the Funk genre:

According to Dave Thompson in his book Funk, “In 1964, believing his King contract to be at an end, Brown formed his own production company, Fair Deal, and linked his entire operation to a new record label, the Mercury subsidiary Smash. King, however, disputed the arrangement and was granted an injunction against Brown releasing and further vocal recordings for Smash.

The injunction was upheld when the case came to court, and Brown was forced to record instrumentals alone for Smash. It was only after some months of stalemate that Brown realized that there was more to the dispute than the rights to his own work — Mercury seemed to be actively trying to close King down.

Immediately Brown swung back into vocal action, recording a new song and handing it over to the embattled Syd Nathan. Working with Nat Jones, Brown redeveloped a rhythm first worked up for summer 1964’s “Out Of Sight” and created “Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag”, a yelping, insistent tour de force, which King gratefully released in July of 1965.

It became Brown’s first R&B chart-topper since “Try Me”; it saved King from extinction and, while Brown himself considered the record to be simply the next stage in his own creative development, for other listeners it was the birth of a new musical genre altogether.”

“‘Papa’s Bag’ was years ahead of its time”, Brown wrote. “I was still called a soul singer, but….I had gone off in a different direction. I had discovered that my strength was not in the horns, it was in the rhythm. I was hearing everything, even the guitars, like they were drums. Later on, they said it was the beginning of funk. I just thought of it as where my music was going. The title told it all: I had a new bag.”

Thus the Funk genre was born, and it’s a genre that is still evolving!