Songfacts®:

• "Funky Nassau" celebrates funk's arrival in the Bahamas. It's the defining song of The Beginning Of The End, a band whose name unfortunately turned out to be rather prescient - they folded after two albums.
  
  Nassau is the capital city of The Bahamas. Northern Florida has Nassau County, but "Funky Nassau" is about the city. Funk is a musical genre that rose out of inner city African American communities in the 1960s. Combining R&B, soul, and jazz, it focuses on driving basslines and drum rhythms to create a highly danceable sound.
  
  Funk represented more than music. It was revolutionary as a statement by African Americans and as a rejection of traditional norms in both dance and lifestyle.
  
  Miniskirts, maxi skirts
  And Afro hairdo
  People doing their own thing
  They don't care about you and me
  
  It was bold and defiant for African Americans to openly celebrate their racial identity with "afro" hairdos in 1971. Miniskirts challenged prevailing sexual norms. So, while "Funky Nassau" celebrates the musical genre of funk, it's also a celebration of cultural revolution.
  
  Funk spawned an adjective: to be "funky" is to be unconventional in an entertaining or interesting way.
• The Beginning of the End were made up of three brothers and a friend. They were: guitarist Roy Munnings, drummer Bud Munnings, organist Ray Munnings, and bassist Fred Henfield. All four were born and raised in Nassau. Ray wrote the song with Tyrone Fitzgerald, who also wrote and recorded his own songs throughout the 1970s. Chuck Kirkpatrick engineered the song, and Marlin Productions produced it.
  
  The band borrowed around $2,000 dollars to travel to Miami and record the song at Criteria Studios in November 1971. They brought it back to Nassau and released it on their own label.
  
  The song was an instant smash. By Christmas it sold 20,000 copies, which was astonishing on an island with a population of around 200,000. Many tourists who bought the album brought it back to the States, which got the attention of the Alston record company, who became the US distributor. From there, the song became a hit in the US and the UK.
  
  The band maintained that they were unsurprised by the success, despite their album being the first serious pop hit to come out of Nassau. "We had faith in what we did and it's proved to be right," Roy said.
• The song celebrates funk, but the song itself isn't really funk, per se. As Roy explained in Blues & Soul: "You see, we get the soul radio stations from the States; then we get calypsos from the Caribbean and Latin American music from nearby Cuba. So, really 'Funky Nassau' is a mixture of them all."
• "Funky Nassau" was the second single released off the debut album by The Beginning Of The End. The other was "Monkey Tamarind," which didn't chart.
• In 1994, Prodigy sampled the song for "No Good (Start the Dance)." In '99 they mixed another version for "Section 8."
• The Blues Brothers performed a version for the 1998 film Blues Brothers 2000.
• "Funky Nassau" is on the soundtrack for the 2005 Cameron Crowe film Elizabethtown. The romantic tragicomedy stars Orlando Bloom and Kirsten Dunst.