OBITUARY
George Brown
Self-taught drummer and founding member of Kool & the Gang who helped to create some of the band’s most memorable hits
Brown playing live in 1974. Despite growing up in poverty he always had music
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George Brown described Kool & the Gang’s records as “the sound of happiness”. As the band’s long-serving drummer, he joyously drove the beat on such party anthems as Jungle Boogie, Ladies Night and Celebration. “That’s what we do,” said Brown, whose nickname was “Funky”. “We say our prayers and then we go ‘let’s make some people happy’.”
Kool & the Gang’s most memorably uplifting hits came during the disco era in the 1970s and early 1980s when their groove proved irresistible on dancefloors the world over, but more than 40 years later Brown was still playing with the group, one of two founding members in the line-up alongside Robert “Kool” Bell.
The group’s approach was summed up in the lyrics of their 1980