In her early ’70s heyday, Betty Davis set the standard for future funk broads with strong come-ons that would scare most modern wanna-humps back to the Stone Age. On these excellent reissues of her ...

The foundations of funk were laid down in the mid-1960s, when James Brown began to emphasize the first beat of each measure in his stage-tested and frenzy-inducing R&B songs. Before the decade’s end, ...