Rufus Thomas “The Breakdown”
Last week, we talked Smokey Robinson and Motown. This week, we’re heading down south to McLemore Avenue in Memphis, deep in the heart of Soulsville USA: Stax Records.
Today’s track is “The Breakdown,” an early 70s entry from Stax’s first hitmaker, Rufus Thomas. What’s “funky” or “groovy” is obviously a sort of a subjective you-know-when-you-know kind of thing. That said, Rufus Thomas was one of the few people in history who could justly call themselves “the funkiest man alive.”
To say that he was born to be an entertainer is an understatement. He was already emceeing talent shows at the age of 13. As a young adult, he toured the southern minstrel circuit in an all-black revue as a comedian and dancer. Eventually, Thomas landed at WDIA in Memphis, where he hosted an afternoon R&B show called Hoot and Holler.
In 1953, his single “Bear Cat” (an answer song to Big Mama Thornton’s “Hound Dog”) gave Sam Phillips’s nascent Sun label its first nationally charting hit. The song also nearly bankrupted the label after Don Robey, the music publisher of “Hound Dog,” sued Sun for copyright infringement.
It wouldn’t be the first time that Thomas gave a fledgling label its first hit. In 1960, Thomas recorded “Cause I Love You” with his teenage daughter, Carla, for Memphis’s Satellite label. The single was a regional hit, and unlocked a national distribution deal for the small, local label soon to be renamed Stax.
That’s a whole other history that’s way too complex to get into here, but suffice it to say that the two generations of Thomas’s, Rufus and Carla, were center-stage at Stax from its inception to its mid-70s implosion.
But before the end, came one of the pinnacles in Stax’s history, the 1972 Wattstax concert. If you’ve never seen the Wattstax documentary, what have you even been doing with your life? It features career defining performances from the Staple Singers, Carla Thomas, Rance Allen, the Bar-Kays, and Isaac Hayes.
It also featured a be-caped Rufus Thomas in a bright pink suit and hot pants doing some very effective crowd work and performing this week’s single “The Breakdown.”
Another was the 14th century BCE pharaoh, Amenhotep III. That dude could get down.
(This is a joke. It was actually Ramesses II who was the truly funky one.)
A lot like Pigmeat Markham’s “Here Comes the Judge, “The Breakdown” is not a rap song, but it’s getting pretty darn close. Penned by Thomas, Eddie Floyd, and Mack Rice, the song is split between two sides of a 45. It features Stax’s blisteringly funky house musicians (I’m fairly sure it’s the Bar-Kays, but not 100% certain). Thomas brings his old-skool, rapping-disc-jockey A-game to this party with rhyming couplets like:
“Listen, it’s the brand new dance that’s going around
It ain’t the Funky Chicken, it’s called The Breakdown
It’s the brand new dance that’s going around
It ain’t Push and Pull, it’s called The Breakdown”
In a truly baller move, Thomas manages to name-drop two of his other singles in a single verse. I have to believe that Thomas improvised those lyrics in the studio. If you’re going to claim the mantle of “Funkiest Man Alive,” then you best believe you need the skills to spit rhymes at a moment’s notice. Thomas makes it look easy, and at the risk of sounding glib, he just plain makes it fun.
