Before there was funk there was the New Orleans second-line — the brass-band parade that follows the "first line" of the band and the family at a jazz funeral, a wedding, or a Sunday afternoon street procession. The drummer in that parade is split in two: a bass drummer walking with the low pulse, and a snare drummer ornamenting it with rolls and accents. When that two-player vocabulary moves onto a single drum kit, you get the New Orleans groove that runs through Earl Palmer's 1950s rock-and-roll sessions, Joseph "Zigaboo" Modeliste's work with The Meters, and the modern continuation through drummers like Stanton Moore, Russell Batiste, and Herlin Riley.
The signature of the style is a conversation between bass drum and snare. The kick is not glued to 1 and 3 — it walks, it anticipates, it lands on the upbeats. The snare is not glued to 2 and 4 — it ghosts, it press-rolls, it accents in unexpected places. The whole point is that the two voices keep talking to each other, like two parade drummers passing a phrase back and forth.
The Bass Drum's Job
In a marching band the bass drummer carries the dotted-quarter walking pulse — sometimes called "tipitina" pulse after Professor Longhair's piano figure. On the kit you hear a kick on 1, on the & of 2, on 3, and often on the & of 4 — leaning forward into the next bar. That syncopation is the parade bass drum, transcribed for the foot.
The Snare's Job
The snare drummer in a parade plays press rolls — short buzz strokes pressed into the head — and rim accents on the strong beats. On the kit, that becomes ghost-note 16ths between accented backbeats, often coloured with a buzz or a flam. The snare doesn't simply mark 2 and 4; it weaves between them.
Why It Matters
Almost every funk groove that came after — Memphis, Detroit, Bay Area — descended from this parade vocabulary. The Meters' "Cissy Strut" is a New Orleans groove on a rock kit. James Brown's "Funky Drummer" inherits the kick-on-the-and. Even the modern displaced backbeat (the next lesson) starts with the seed Zigaboo planted: the kick is allowed to walk, the snare is allowed to talk back.