The golden age of American independent funk began in 1967 — when James Brown’s "Get It Together’" announced that a great R&B single didn’t need a trad song structure if it had a groove — and sputtered out around 1974. For those seven years, though, every teenage funk band in the country seemed to have a good reason to record. They cranked out eccentric, bouncy singles by the hundreds and thousands, their instrumentals and offhanded rants driven by unstoppable rhythm sections. Most of those recordings stayed within the small cities and towns of their origins for 20 years, until the breakbeats of that era became the hugely collectible backbone of hip-hop and drum ’n’ bass. Now some of them are finally being heard by the outside world, and a few contemporary bands are even imitating that style.

Peanut Butter Wolf and Egon, the proprietors of the San Francisco label Stones Throw, are connoisseurs of weird little indie-funk tracks, veteran crate-diggers to whom names like Soul Seven and Ebony Rhythm Band are as familiar as Wilson Pickett or Kool and the Gang. Late last year, Stones Throw released The Funky 16 Corners, a spectacular compilation of utter obscurities from funk’s golden age — all of them legitimately licensed from their creators, in pointed contrast to the "what the hell, they’ll never know" attitude of most funk-rarity comps. They rediscovered the unknown soldiers of the groove: Conrad O. Johnson, who led Kashmere High School’s stage band and taught them to play jazz-funk; Carleen Butler, the frenetic drummer behind Carleen and the Groovers, whose brother Clary sang just like James Brown; the Highlighters, local heroes in Indianapolis who never made it big but were responsible for 16 Corners’ title track. The disc’s highlight is Co Real Artists’ "What About You (In The World Today)" — a funky drummer, a conga player, three vocalists, and a sound that anticipates hip-hop by a good six years.

That conga player’s son, it turns out, is Mix Master Wolf, who sings with Breakestra, a loose San Francisco ensemble led by Miles Tackett. Tackett produces hip-hop under the name This Kid Named Miles (the T-Love record he made a few years ago, Return of the B-Girl, is worth hunting down); Breakestra, though, are a full-on band in the vein of the golden-age funk he loves. On the group’s new Deuces Up, Double Down EP (Stones Throw), Mix Master Wolf cheerfully barks out a creditable live take on "The Funky 16 Corners," and the chattering guitars and flashy horn arrangement of the title track would’ve set off any discotheque 30 years ago. The cover of "Humpty Dump," originally recorded by the Vibrettes in the same era, is creditable, too, though its clear-as-glass mix and cello solo are pure 2002.

You can’t say that about the New York label Soul Fire, which has devoted itself to wholly reproducing the vintage indie-funk aesthetic. Its singles are meant to look exactly like the real thing, right down to the seven-inch vinyl, haphazardly typeset text, and retro-looking logos. Indeed, many of the latest Soul Fire productions are on one-shot "labels": "QuiŽnes Que Resolverio" by Bronx River Parkway on Latin Express, "Answer Me Softly" by Fabulous Three on Psycho, "Nothin’ Doin’ but Waitin’ on Leon" by a band they don’t even bother to name on WQLJ. Just the sort of thing that quickens collectors’ pulses. They’re not just cheaply recorded funk instrumentals (and occasional showcases for rubble-voiced shouters): they sound like they were cheaply recorded in 1970, from their pitapat snare sounds to their never-quite-in-tune horns to an overall ambience that suggests rec-room wooden paneling and scuffed salt-and-pepper carpets. The turntable-deprived and commodity-fetish-resistant can hear the same material on Soul Fire’s Grazing in the Trash compilations; a second volume has just been released.

The newest release on Soul Fire is the Whitefield Brothers’ In the Raw, whose cover art, hints of jazz and Afrobeat, and song titles like "Weiya (Serengeti Beat)" suggest that it might actually be a reissue of an early-’70s African LP. In fact, it’s a new recording by a couple of German brothers named Weissenfeldt, who also play with the Poets of Rhythm — one of the first rare-groove-revival bands. If it’s impossible to tell the difference between these new recordings and the originals that influenced them, perhaps the golden age of funk hasn’t really ended.