GHOST NOTES: The players whose names were nearly lost in the music.

Clyde Stubblefield was the drummer you heard without knowing his name.

His work with James Brown helped define the sound of funk. But one performance would carry his playing far beyond the records on which his name appeared.

On “Funky Drummer,” Stubblefield laid down a brief drum break that became one of the most influential pieces of rhythm in modern music. It was sampled again and again, becoming part of the foundation of hip-hop and reaching thousands of recordings.

The remarkable thing is not simply how often his playing was heard. It is how rarely the person behind it was seen.

Stubblefield was not listed as a songwriter on “Funky Drummer,” and he received little of the financial benefit generated by the use of his work. Yet the sound he created became part of the musical vocabulary of generations that followed.

This photograph captures the man behind the break.

Not the celebrity. Not the name on the marquee. The musician whose quiet eight bars changed music.

Some things become so familiar that we forget someone had to create them.