Dyke & the Blazers, from Phoenix, Arizona, with their raw-voiced, street-hip frontman, were about as natural and unpolished an act as could be found in the mid-1960s R&B charts. While Dyke didn’t invent funk, he surely brought it to fruition, and along with James Brown - who considered Dyke a serious rival at one time – provided the most tangible building blocks for the emergence of street rhythm in black music during the late 1960s.