The 1960s File Feature
Cissy Strut
The Meters: "Cissy Strut" (1969) Few instrumental recordings from the late 1960s have proven as enduringly influential as "Cissy Strut" by the Meters. Releas…
01 The Story
The Meters: "Cissy Strut" (1969)
Few instrumental recordings from the late 1960s have proven as enduringly influential as "Cissy Strut" by the Meters. Released in 1969 on Josie Records, the track distilled the essential characteristics of New Orleans funk into under three minutes and became one of the most sampled recordings in the history of recorded popular music. The Meters were formed in New Orleans around 1965, emerging from the city's extraordinarily rich musical ecosystem as the house band for producer Allen Toussaint and his Sansu Enterprises operation. The original lineup comprised Art Neville on keyboards and vocals, Leo Nocentelli on guitar, George Porter Jr. on bass, and Joseph "Zigaboo" Modeliste on drums.
This quartet developed what became known as the New Orleans funk sound through years of playing together in clubs and studios before their debut recording appeared. Their music was characterized by interlocking rhythmic patterns, syncopated bass lines, spare arrangements, and a relentless groove emphasis that prioritized feel over melodic elaboration. The influence of the city's second-line parade tradition, its brass band heritage, and its unique synthesis of African American, Creole, and Caribbean musical elements all fed into what the Meters created over this period of intense musical development. Their approach to rhythm was genuinely distinctive even within the broader landscape of funk that was developing simultaneously across American cities in the late 1960s.
"Cissy Strut" was recorded and released as the group's debut single on Josie Records in 1969. The track debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 on April 12, 1969, entering at number 93, and climbed steadily over the following weeks. By June 7, 1969, the single had reached its peak position of number 23 on the Hot 100, representing a run of eleven weeks on the chart from its debut in mid-April to its exit in late June. It also performed strongly on the Billboard R&B chart, where it reached number 4, confirming the track's power within the soul and funk radio formats that were its natural home and demonstrating its crossover appeal to the broader pop audience simultaneously.
The recording itself is a masterclass in rhythmic economy and ensemble coordination. Zigaboo Modeliste's drumming on "Cissy Strut" is among the most celebrated in funk history, combining a loose-limbed feel with absolute precision in a way that made the groove feel both inevitable and subtly surprising on each listening. His use of ghost notes, syncopated accents, and unexpected rhythmic displacement created a drum performance that subsequent generations of players and producers would study and emulate extensively. George Porter Jr.'s bass line locked in with the drums to create a rhythmic foundation that was simultaneously deep and propulsive, a combination that subsequent producers would return to repeatedly as a model of what funk rhythm could achieve at its most refined.
Leo Nocentelli's guitar contributed spare, percussive chording and brief melodic fragments that added texture without cluttering the arrangement, demonstrating an admirable restraint that prioritized the collective groove over individual display. Art Neville's organ playing provided the harmonic context that held everything together, filling the midrange frequencies with a warmth that balanced the rhythmic sharpness of the guitars and drums. Allen Toussaint's production approach emphasized capturing the band's natural groove rather than imposing external structural elements, which resulted in a recording that sounds both organic and perfectly constructed.
The song's title referred to the cissy strut, a specific dance associated with New Orleans street culture and parade traditions, connecting the recording to the city's living tradition of music-making as a communal and physical practice embedded in specific community life. This rootedness in local culture gave the track an authenticity and specificity that more generic funk recordings of the period could not match. The Meters were not approximating a style from outside; they were expressing a culture from within it, and that distinction is audible in every measure of the recording.
The track's legacy in hip-hop and contemporary music has been substantial and wide-ranging. "Cissy Strut" has been sampled by artists including A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, and countless others across decades of subsequent music production, making it one of the foundational texts of sampling culture. Its presence across such a broad range of subsequent music speaks to the timeless quality of the groove the Meters created and confirms the recording's status as one of the essential documents of American funk. The Meters themselves went on to a celebrated career as both a recording group and as supporting musicians for artists including Dr. John, Paul McCartney, and Robert Palmer, but "Cissy Strut" remains their most universally recognized recording and the single most emblematic statement of what they achieved at their creative peak.
02 Song Meaning
Groove as Language: The Meaning of "Cissy Strut"
"Cissy Strut" is an instrumental, which means that its meaning is communicated entirely through musical arrangement, rhythmic feeling, and the cultural associations embedded in its sound. This places it in a different interpretive category from song-with-lyrics, but the communication it accomplishes is no less rich or complex for the absence of words. The Meters were operating within a tradition that understood music as a form of embodied knowledge, something felt in the body before it is processed conceptually, and "Cissy Strut" represents the fullest expression of that philosophy they had achieved to that point in their career.
The title itself provides an initial entry point. The cissy strut was a specific dance style associated with New Orleans street culture, particularly with the city's second-line parade tradition and the communities that surrounded it. A strut is, by definition, a mode of walking that expresses confidence, pride, and a certain theatrical self-presentation. To name an instrumental track after a specific communal dance is to declare its function: this is music designed for movement, and the movement it invites carries with it the social meanings of the dance from which it takes its name. The music and the physical practice it accompanies are inseparable.
The groove that Zigaboo Modeliste and the Meters create on the recording is simultaneously relaxed and intensely focused. This combination, sometimes called playing in the "pocket" by musicians, is the central aesthetic achievement of funk drumming, and Modeliste's performance on "Cissy Strut" is one of its defining examples. The paradox of something that feels effortless but is technically demanding speaks to a broader aesthetic in African American music that values the appearance of ease as a form of mastery. Making difficulty look natural is itself a kind of expression, a demonstration of complete command over the musical material.
The New Orleans context gives the track additional layers of meaning for those familiar with the city's musical culture. New Orleans has always been a place where music, community, and ritual intersect in unusually direct ways. Second-line parades, jazz funerals, and Mardi Gras celebrations all involve music as a collective, participatory experience rather than a passive entertainment, and "Cissy Strut" carries that communal character within its DNA, even when heard in contexts far removed from the streets of New Orleans where it originated.
The track's subsequent life as one of the most sampled recordings in hip-hop history has added another dimension to its meaning that was impossible to anticipate in 1969. Each sample transforms the original context while preserving the essential groove, creating a chain of musical conversation that stretches across decades of popular music production. The Meters' original recording has thus become a kind of ur-text for subsequent generations of producers exploring what rhythm can do independent of melody and lyric, confirming that "Cissy Strut" communicates something fundamental about music's capacity to organize time, energy, and collective feeling into a single coherent and deeply physical statement.
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