Rare Groove: A Field Guide

Some genres are born in a studio. Rare groove was born in a crate. It is less a style than a habit: a way of listening that turned Britain's record diggers into obsessives and made deleted American funk 45s some of the most fought-over vinyl on earth. Here is what it is, where it came from, and why it still fills floors.

What is rare groove?

Rare groove is the name British DJs gave, in the mid-1980s, to a wave of late-1960s and 1970s American funk and soul that had mostly fallen out of print. These were not the hits. They were the album cuts, the B-sides, the regional 45s pressed in small runs and forgotten by everyone except the people who danced to them. "Rare" was literal. If you wanted the record, you had to find the record, and there was rarely a second copy waiting behind it.

What made it a scene rather than a shopping list was the ear behind it. Rare groove prized feel over fame. A tune qualified because it moved a room, not because it charted. The Jackson Sisters' "I Believe in Miracles" is the template: a 1973 US flop that meant almost nothing at home, then reborn as a UK rare groove anthem a decade later and dragged back onto the British charts in the late 1980s on the strength of dancefloors alone. That is the underdog logic that still shapes how people collect today.

Characteristics of the music

Strip a rare groove tune to its parts and you find a live band playing hard. The drums sit up front, dry and heavy, built around a break that a DJ can loop or a dancer can lock into. Underneath runs a bassline you could hum on the bus. On top: wah-wah guitar, horn stabs, a Hammond organ worked until it sweats.

Tempos range from the fast, drilled funk of the James Brown camp to slower, headier jazz-funk that stretches a groove past six minutes without apology. Vocals, when they arrive, tend toward the raw and the exhortative. There is a lot of "get up," "give it up," and "do it." The arrangements are tight but never fussy. Everyone in the room knows their job, and the job is the pocket.

Origins, Norman Jay, and cultural significance

The person most responsible for turning a listening habit into a movement is Norman Jay. In mid-1980s London he ran warehouse parties and, with his brother Joey, the Good Times sound system that still plays Notting Hill Carnival. When pirate station Kiss FM went on air in 1985, Norman Jay's show gave the sound a name and a weekly home, championing exactly this catalogue of overlooked US funk and soul. He was later made an MBE, the first DJ to receive one, which tells you how far an idea built on secondhand 45s eventually travelled.

The cultural weight of rare groove is easy to miss now that its records are reissued and streamable. At the time it was something closer to a code. In a period of few reissues and no internet, knowing the records, and owning them, marked you out. The parties were largely Black British and self-organised, run in empty buildings with a sound system and a door. That DIY spirit fed straight into the club culture that followed, and it built an audience in Britain for American music that America itself had shelved.

Artists and labels

The spine of rare groove runs through the James Brown organisation. Bobby Byrd, Lyn Collins, Marva Whitney and the J.B.'s cut records for People and Polydor that are still the genre's blueprint. Around them sits a wider cast of funk bands: The Meters out of New Orleans, Britain's own Cymande, The Fatback Band, Charles Wright and the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band.

Push toward the jazzier end and you meet the players who gave rare groove its cooler, longer-form side: Roy Ayers, Donald Byrd, The Blackbyrds, Lonnie Liston Smith, Johnny Hammond, Bobbi Humphrey. A lot of that lush, spacey sound traces back to two people, the production team of Larry and Fonce Mizell, whose fingerprints are on Donald Byrd's Places and Spaces and Johnny Hammond's Gears alike. For the sweeter, Chicago-soul corner there is Leroy Hutson, and for the reflective, politically charged one, Gil Scott-Heron, whose grooves carried a message without ever losing the funk.

Labels matter here as much as artists, because collectors learned to read a label like a promise. People, Polydor, Prestige, CTI and its sister imprint Kudu, Fantasy, Stax, Brunswick and Flying Dutchman all turn up again and again. British reissue houses later did the archival work that let the rest of us catch up: BGP, Kent, Soul Brother and Expansion among them.

Impact on music today

Rare groove never really ended. It went underground and came back up through everything else. Its most obvious descendant is hip-hop, which was built on exactly these breaks. When producers went digging for drums, they were digging in the same crates, and the same records surfaced. James Brown's "Funky Drummer" became one of the most sampled recordings ever made. Lyn Collins' "Think (About It)" gave a generation of rap records their engine room, and Eric B. & Rakim borrowed Bobby Byrd's "I Know You Got Soul" wholesale, title and all. Sampling did not discover this music so much as inherit it.

From rare groove also came acid jazz, the late-1980s British scene that took the jazz-funk end of the catalogue and started making new records in its image. That lineage runs forward to the modern funk and soul revival you hear now, the labels pressing brand-new 45s that sound like they fell off a lorry in 1973. When a chart pop record leans on live horns and a fat, dry drum break, it is usually paying rent to this era whether it credits it or not.

Suggested playlist: twelve to start with

A rare groove set should move. This one runs from raw funk through jazz-funk to sweet soul and back, and every record here is one we rate. Click any title to cue it up.

1. Bobby Byrd - I Know You Got Soul (King, 1971)
2. Lyn Collins - Think (About It) (People, 1972)
3. The J.B.'s - Pass the Peas (People, 1972)
4. Jackson Sisters - I Believe in Miracles (Prophesy, 1973)
5. Cymande - Bra (Janus, 1972)
6. The Meters - Cissy Strut (Josie, 1969)
7. Roy Ayers Ubiquity - Running Away (Polydor, 1977)
8. The Fatback Band - Wicki Wacky (Event, 1974)
9. Donald Byrd - (Fallin' Like) Dominoes (Blue Note, 1975, from Places and Spaces)
10. The Manhattans - There's No Me Without You (Columbia, 1973)
11. Gil Scott-Heron - The Bottle (Strata-East, 1974)
12. Dennis Coffey - Scorpio (Sussex, 1971)

Play them loud, play them roughly in order, and you have the whole story in under an hour. Then come dig for the rest.

Diggers' cuts: the jazz-funk seam

Once the floor is warm, this is where it gets interesting. Five deeper records from the jazz-funk end of the catalogue, most of them wearing the fingerprints of the Mizell Brothers, whose lush, spacey production defined the sound. Every one of these is on our shelves right now.

1. Lonnie Liston Smith & The Cosmic Echoes - Expansions (Flying Dutchman, 1975)
2. Johnny Hammond - Los Conquistadores Chocolates (Milestone, 1975, from Gears)
3. Leroy Hutson - So In Love With You (Curtom, 1973)
4. War - Galaxy (MCA, 1977)
5. Change - The Glow of Love (RFC / Warner Bros., 1980)