James Brown

THE LAST SHOW
On the morning of December 28, 2006, dawn in Harlem broke cold and
damp under cloudy skies. But the bleak weather had not kept hundreds of
people from lining up, beginning shortly after midnight, at the entrance to the
historic Apollo Theater on West 125th Street. They were mostly black, mostly between the ages of thirty and sixty.

They waited patiently and good-naturedly to bid a fi nal farewell to the man whose
body would soon rest in an open casket on the Apollo stage. That stage had
been the site of some of his greatest career triumphs—the same stage where he
had ruled, with fi ery music and matchless showmanship, on so many nights
down through the decades.
Hours later, the lines from the Apollo extended both east and west, down
both ends of the long block, and then around the corners of Adam Clayton
Powell and Frederick Douglass Boulevards. All along the route, the dead
man’s recordings poured forth from makeshift sound systems attached to stores
and restaurants: “Try Me,” “I Feel Good,” “I’ll Go Crazy,” “Papa’s Got a
Brand New Bag,” “Sex Machine,” “Living in America.” The police had closed
125th Street to traffi c, and the crowds strained against the temporary metal
barriers erected at the edge of the sidewalk.
At a few minutes past 1 p.m. , a white carriage turned onto the thoroughfare.
It was drawn by a pair of plumed white horses, driven by two men wearing
formal dress and top hats, and bore a gold-painted coffi n built of
sixteen-gauge steel. It held the body of a man known by many appellations:
“Soul Brother Number One,” “The Hardest-Working Man in Show Business,”
“The Godfather of Soul.” But as the carriage moved slowly and solemnly
down the street toward the doors of the Apollo, a chant rose up from the
throng and his real name rang out:
“James Brown! James Brown! James Brown!”
Born into abject poverty in the segregated South, possessed of both immense
talent and indomitable will, James Brown is one of a handful of twentiethcentury
artists of whom it can truthfully be said that they changed music—not
just black music, not just American music, but the sound of popular music
around the world.
In the 1920s another African American genius, Louis Armstrong, defi ned
the role of the instrumental soloist and forever changed the sound of jazz. In
the 1960s, James Brown transformed rhythm and blues into funk and thereby
laid the sonic groundwork for virtually all subsequent rhythm-based pop
music forms. The critic Robert Palmer wrote: “The chattering choke-rhythm
guitars, broken bass patterns, explosive horn bursts, one-chord drones, and
evangelical vocal discourses he introduced in the mid-sixties became the lingua
franca of contemporary Black pop, the heartbeat of the discotheques and
a primary ingredient in such far-fl ung musical syntheses as Jamaican reggae
and Nigerian Afro-beat.” 1
In Brown’s best and most infl uential recordings, the song was virtually
inseparable from his sound . That sound was raw, intense, and indisputably
black in its diction and delivery, and it could not be easily emulated or copied
by white performers.
Much more than a singer, James Brown conceived and commanded a complete
stage show involving crucial elements of timing and sequence. It encompassed
a large instrumental group, backing vocalists, and dancers, all of whose
roles were endlessly rehearsed and revised. The James Brown Show functioned
as a quasi-religious revival meeting, a variety show, and a communal tribute
to both Brown’s innate talent and his relentless striving for success. Along
with his recordings, album covers, publicity photos, and television appearances,
the James Brown Show served as a forum through which he introduced
new dances, slogans, and hair and clothing styles. All of these changes were
closely followed, especially in the 1960s and early 1970s, by an international
fan base that stretched from Manhattan to Mali.
The James Brown story is a classic American saga of upward mobility from
impoverished origins to the pinnacle of pop stardom. At the peak of his infl uence,
Brown was a fi gure of profound social signifi cance in black America
whose actions and statements inspired admiration, controversy, and derision.
He freed himself from record company interference to gain creative control
over his music and established a diversifi ed business enterprise that included
record labels, publishing companies, and radio stations.
The story also reveals the limits of the singer’s real power within the music
industry; it is marred by personal tragedy, professional decline, and numerous
acts of willful egomania. None of these things have diminished the global
impact of James Brown’s greatest music, or the pleasure and inspiration that
generations of listeners have taken from it.

COMING UP HARD
Although varying dates and locales have been reported over the years, today
it is generally accepted that James Joseph Brown Jr. was born on May 3,
1933, in rural Barnwell, South Carolina, the only child of Joe and Susie
Brown. Four years later, James’s mother abandoned the family; he would not
see her again for twenty years. Joe Brown, with only a second-grade education,
toiled for meager wages on farms and plantations, in turpentine camps,
and later as a gas station attendant. Driving a vegetable delivery truck, he
earned $4 per week.
Father and son, along with a succession of Joe’s female companions,
“lived about as poor as you could be,” James later recalled. Their unpainted
wooden shack in the woods outside of town “didn’t have windows except
for shutters that you could pull together; and there was no electricity or
indoor plumbing. . . . We ate black-eyed peas and lima beans, fatback [dried
and salt-cured pork fat] and syrup, polk salad that we picked in the woods,
and cornbread.”
Joe Brown was overwhelmed by the responsibilities of single fatherhood
and at age fi ve, James was sent to live with his aunt Handsome “Honey” Washington
in the black section of Augusta, Georgia, known as “The Terry” (for
“territory”). Her two-story dwelling at 944 Twiggs Street was in fact a working
brothel presided over by Honey and her bootlegger brother, Jack Scott. Often
as not, James was forced to fend for himself in this house full of adult strangers
coming and going at all hours, which was raided regularly by the local police.
Trombonist and arranger Fred Wesley Jr., who served two lengthy stints
with the James Brown Show, later explained to writer Cynthia Rose: “We’re
talking about a three, four-year-old child who actually didn’t live anywhere.
Nobody fed him, nobody bathed him. He didn’t have a place to live. He survived
on sheer guts.” 3 When beds were scarce in the overcrowded house,
James slept on a wooden pallet on the fl oor. He did not own a pair of storebought
underwear until he started school at age seven; at times he was sent
home from class, humiliated, for having “insuffi cient clothes.”
Much later in life, Brown cited music as “one of the things that helped me
to survive . . . It was just there in the community and I fell into it, the way you
will.” 4 He heard the country and pop tunes played on local radio stations and
tried his hand at any instrument within reach, including harmonica, piano,
and guitar. (James also claimed to have taken a few lessons from Hudson
Whittaker, the legendary blues singer and guitarist known as Tampa Red.)
But what most impressed the eager adolescent were the shouting, ecstatic
crowds and blaring brass bands that, every Sunday, fi lled the “sanctifi ed”
churches like Bishop “Daddy” Grace’s House of Prayer in Augusta. Back at
Aunt Honey’s house, James and his cousin Willie “Junior” Glenn, along with
other friends, would try to imitate the singing of such popular male gospel
groups as the Five Trumpets and the Golden Gate Quartet.
In his eponymous 1986 autobiography, James recalled attending revival
services where the preacher “was just screaming and yelling and stomping his
foot, and then he dropped to his knees. The people got into it with him, answering
him and shouting and clapping time. After that . . . I watched the preachers
real close. Then I’d go home and imitate them, because I wanted to preach.”
Brown continued: “Audience participation in church is something the
darker race of people has going [ sic ] because of a lot of trials and tribulations,
because of things that we understand about human nature. It’s something I
can’t explain, but I can bring it out of people. I’m not the only person who has
the ability, but I work at it, and I’m sure a lot of my stage show came out of
the church.” 5
Before he reached the age of twelve, James had dropped out of school and
into the world of low-wage, unskilled labor. He picked cotton, cut sugarcane,
and washed cars. After his day’s work was done, he’d set up a shoeshine stand
outside radio station WRDW; to attract customers, James would dance on the
sidewalk, sometimes singing to accompany himself. That part of his earnings
not contributed to his extended family was often spent at the local colored
movie theater. James was thrilled by the performances of 1940s rhythm and
blues star Louis Jordan, in such all-black-cast screen musicals as Reet Petite &
Gone and Look Out, Sister .
The odd jobs mixed with small-time crimes and street hustles: “The reality
of black existence at this time, when Georgia vied with Mississippi for the
national lynching championship, was that in any attempt to be something
besides a subservient menial worker, one could hardly avoid breaking the law,
and even that didn’t make life easy.” 6 In 1949, sixteen-year-old James Brown
was convicted on four counts of breaking and entering (into cars), and given
eight to sixteen years in a state penitentiary. When this draconian sentence was
reduced, James was transferred to the Alto Reform School in Toccoa, Georgia.
He became popular among the inmates for his gospel singing in chapel and
trained as a boxer although he was only fi ve feet, six inches tall and weighed
137 pounds. James also played baseball and showed impressive pitching skills
until injuries put an end to his dream of a career in the Negro Leagues.
When a young gospel singer-pianist named Bobby Byrd came to perform at
Alto, the two teenagers struck up an acquaintance. On June 14, 1952, James
was paroled after serving three years and went to live with the Byrd family
temporarily while he looked for a place to stay in Toccoa. (As a condition of his
parole, James could not return to the county where his family resided.) When
not working a variety of low-paying jobs, he sang with Bobby in the Ever
Ready Gospel Singers. This group was affi liated with the Mount Zion Baptist
Church, where James met Velma Warren—the fi rst of his four wives. They
were wed in Toccoa on June 19, 1953, and settled down there; within fi ve years,
Velma had given birth to Teddy, Terry, and Larry, the couple’s three sons.
James’s local performances brought him to the attention of Clint Brantley,
the manager of Little Richard (not yet nationally famous), who urged Brown
to relocate to Richard’s home base in Macon. Soon, Brown had moved into a
room above the Two Spot nightclub in Macon and found a day job with the
Lawson Motor Company. In his off hours, he sang with such locally popular
groups as the Gospel Starlighters and the R&B-oriented Four Steps of Rhythm
(James also played piano and drums).
Bobby Byrd also moved to Macon and formed a new gospel outfi t with
Nafl oyd Scott and Sylvester Keels called the Three Swanees. When fi rst Johnny
Terry and then James Brown joined the group, it became the Swanee Quintet;
after switching to secular music, over the next year their name was changed
to the Flames and then again to the Famous Flames. Whatever the name or
style, Brown seems destined to have become the de facto leader and on-stage
focus of this group, as he eventually did. He may or may not have been the
best pure singer in the Flames, but he was almost certainly the most distinctive.
Even at this early stage, James combined raw talent with a determined
work ethic and an outsized ego fueled, in part, by envy and insecurity.
“He has no real musical skills,” trombonist Fred Wesley Jr. told Cynthia
Rose, “yet he could hold his own on stage with any jazz virtuoso—because of
his guts. Can you understand that? James Brown cannot play drums at all.
But he would sit down on drums and get that look on his face like he’s playin’
’em, and you would just play along with him. . . . He doesn’t understand losing
and he truly understands surviving. It’s not that James wants to win every
time—it’s that he will not lose .”

BREAKING THROUGH
Without a record contract, the Famous Flames worked hard to build up their
reputation on a black club circuit that extended from Chattanooga, Tennessee,
south to lower Florida and west from Savannah, Georgia, into Mississippi.
Their career at this stage was characterized by long hours, low pay, and
exhausting, sometimes dangerous travel conditions across the segregated
South. Macon disc jockey Ray “Satellite Poppa” Brown sometimes traveled
with James in these early days. “Finding a motel room—that was unheard of,
man,” he later recalled. “You’d sleep in your car or stay at the club until
daybreak.” 8
Mostly the group sang other people’s hits, including “Please Don’t Go,” a
Top Ten R&B entry for the Orioles in 1952. The Famous Flames’ extended
live version of this song became an audience favorite and gradually evolved
into “Please, Please, Please,” a hypnotically repetitive ballad credited to James
Brown and Johnny Terry that pitted James’s raspy, emotive lead vocal against
the Flames’ doo-wop background. In late 1955, the group recorded a rough
version of the song at Macon radio station WIBB in a session overseen by disc
jockey Hamp “King Bee” Swain: “I put it on the air and we got a tremendous
reaction. Immediately. The phone lines just lit up.” 9
In January 1956, A&R man Ralph Bass heard the song on an Atlanta station
while traveling through the South on a talent-scouting trip for King
Records of Cincinnati. He tracked down the Famous Flames at a small club
near Milledgeville, Georgia, and promptly signed the group for an advance of
$200, then brought them to the King studios to re-cut the song with professional
studio players. King’s rotund, cigar-smoking founder Syd Nathan
declared “Please, Please, Please” to be one of the worst songs he’d ever heard
and told Ralph Bass he was crazy to have even paid James’s train fare from
Macon to Cincinnati. But Nathan changed his tune when the record began to
sell throughout the South.
“Brown was way ahead of his time,” Ralph Bass later recalled. “He wasn’t
really singing R&B. He was singing gospel to an R&B combo with a real
heavy feeling. . . . He wasn’t singing or playing music—he was transmitting
feeling , pure feeling.” 10
“Please, Please, Please” was released in March 1956 on Federal Records (a
King subsidiary) with label credit inscribed to “James Brown & the Famous
Flames.” The disc hung on the Billboard R&B singles chart for nineteen
weeks, peaking at number fi ve; over time, it sold more than a million copies.
The group’s success attracted the interest of Ben Bart, the white founder and
head of the potent New York booking agency Universal Attractions. Previously,
Bart had managed the careers of swing bandleader Jimmy Lunceford,
singer Dinah Washington, and a pioneering vocal group the Ravens; it was a
big step up for the Famous Flames when he agreed to become their booking
agent. Ben Bart later became the singer’s manager, business partner, and
beloved father fi gure, and the only person ever to refer to James Brown as
“Jimmy” (Brown called him “Pop”). Their close and complex relationship
lasted until Bart’s death in 1968.
Nine more single releases followed, yet not one reached the Billboard R&B
chart—perhaps because most were overly derivative of recent hits by betterestablished
performers, including Little Richard (“Chonnie-On-Chon”) and
Ray Charles (“That Dood It”). Syd Nathan’s personal distaste for Brown’s
music and his tight-fi sted attitude toward promotional expenditures on behalf
of any King artist also may have been signifi cant factors. This string of failures,
combined with Ben Bart’s expressed desire to make James its front-andcenter
star, caused the original group to dissolve in 1957. Later, Bobby Byrd
returned to Brown’s organization for the long haul through the 1960s with
the trio of male singer-dancers always billed as the Famous Flames—but
always in a supporting role to Brown himself.
STAR TIME
By the fall of 1958, Syd Nathan was ready to drop James Brown from the
King/Federal roster when the singer came up with another slow, bluesy ballad,
“Try Me.” To the surprise of all concerned, the song shot to number one R&B
in early 1959—and from that time until 1982, a year would not pass in which
James Brown didn’t place at least one song on the Billboard R&B chart. (“Try
Me” also crossed over to the Hot 100, peaking at number forty-eight.)
Brown became increasingly conscious of the need to maintain his own permanent
road band. It was a bold and expensive move that harkened back to
the big bands of Count Basie and Duke Ellington as well as Louis Jordan’s
Tympani Five. Many leading R&B performers of the period, including Sam
Cooke and Jackie Wilson, traveled with just a guitarist and a drummer while
recruiting other players as needed. But a James Brown band could be trained
to play his music the James Brown way, night after night. It would also be
available around the clock for spontaneous recording sessions in any studio
convenient to the singer’s never-ending tour itinerary. Among his fi rst recruits
(circa 1959) were bassist Bernard Odum, drummer Nat Kendrick, and saxophonists
J.C. Davis and Albert Corley.
When James had regained his footing on the charts with “Try Me” and
“Think” (number seven R&B), he moved from Federal to the parent King label.
Now commanding a degree of grudging respect from Syd Nathan, he was free
to write and produce his own material with his own musicians. Brown had no
say over King’s release schedule, however, and it was not unusual for six
months or more to pass between the recording and the release of a new song
like “Night Train.” (In 1962, “Night Train” became James’s eighth Top Ten
R&B hit and his second Top Forty Pop entry.) When Brown suggested the
idea of an instrumental based on a dance he called the mashed potatoes,
Nathan told him to forget about it. James cut the track at his own expense
(dubbing disc jockey King Coleman’s voice over his own vocal interjections)
and licensed the song to Henry Stone’s Dade Records in Miami. Credited to
Nat Kendrick and the Swans, “(Do The) Mashed Potatoes (Pt. 1 & 2)” reached
number eight R&B in 1960.
Another, more signifi cant confrontation between the artist and his label
resulted in one of the key albums of James Brown’s entire career. By 1962, his
skin-tight, endlessly rehearsed live show was tearing up audiences across the
country. Even James’s best studio recordings couldn’t capture the intensity of
his on-stage delivery and the fervor of his fans’ collective response. He needed
a live album, and Ray Charles had shown the way with Ray Charles in Person ,
a Top Fifteen bestseller in 1960.
James proposed the idea to Syd Nathan—and was turned down fl at. The
label chief simply didn’t believe that fans would buy an album of songs they’d
already purchased in studio versions, and he was loath to pay the costs of
location recording. In the fall of 1962, James opened the fi fth extended engagement
of his career at the Apollo Theater in Harlem—the premier showplace
in “The Capital of Black America.” On October 24, the performance was
recorded at Brown’s own expense for $5,700. The tapes were pared down to
a thirty-two-minute LP so carelessly edited that the break between the fi rst
and second sides came right in the middle of the climactic track, an intense
11-minute version of “Lost Someone.” When the album was released in January
1963, King initially pressed just 5,000 copies.
Live at the Apollo was an immediate and unprecedented smash. It made no
stylistic concessions to the pop mainstream, simply capturing a typically
heated James Brown performance before an enraptured black audience. Yet
Live at the Apollo rose all the way to number two among Billboard Top Pop
Albums and hung on the chart for sixty-six weeks—in a year when the topselling
album artists included musical humorist Allan Sherman, folk trio Peter
Paul and Mary, and crooner Andy Williams. Reaction among black radio
listeners was so intense that disc jockeys would often play both sides of the
album in full, with commercial spots inserted in the break.
Forty years later, Live at the Apollo was ranked at number twenty-four on
Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. In 2004,
it was one of fi fty recordings added to the National Recording Registry at the
Library of Congress, alongside Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys and the Vladimir
Horowitz/Arturo Toscanini recording of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No.
1, Pp. 23, Bb minor .

MAKE IT FUNKY
James Brown’s music continued to evolve as new personnel came into his
band. Among the key additions of the early 1960s were saxophonists Maceo
Parker and St. Clair Pinckney, guitarist Jimmy Nolen, and drummers Clyde
Stubblefi eld and John “Jabo” Starks. Stubblefi eld is often credited with a crucial
shift in emphasis from the second and fourth beats (as in traditional blues)
to the fi rst and third beats—“The One,” as this rhythm dynamic became
known in the lexicon of funk. Alfred “Pee Wee” Ellis, a saxophonist and arranger
who joined Brown’s revue in 1965, explained the importance of Clyde
Stubblefi eld’s “New Orleans beat” to Cynthia Rose:
If, in a studio, you said “Play it funky,” that could imply almost anything. But
“give me a New Orleans beat”—you got exactly what you wanted. And Clyde
Stubblefi eld was just the epitome of this funky drumming. There was a way his
beat was broken up—a combination of where the bass and the snare drums
hit—which was topsy-turvy from what had been goin’ on. 11
With the success of Live at the Apollo , James felt compelled to relocate to
the center of the American music business; with Velma and their children, he
moved into a twelve-room Victorian house in Queens, New York. Brown and
Ben Bart formed an independent company called Fair Deal Productions. The
singer’s attorney, Marty Machat, took the position that James’s agreement
with King had expired and signed him, through Fair Deal, to a lucrative new
contract with Smash, a subsidiary of Mercury Records. Syd Nathan promptly
fi led suit, alleging breach of contract, but Brown recorded prolifi cally for
Smash while the case wended its way through the legal system.
In the summer of 1964, his Smash recording “Out of Sight” became James’s
tenth Top Ten R&B hit and a number twenty-four Pop entry. On this track,
“you can hear the band and me start to move in a whole other direction
rhythmically,” Brown later wrote. “The horns, the guitar, the vocals, everything
was starting to be used to establish all kinds of rhythms at once. . . . I
was trying to get every aspect of the production to contribute to the rhythmic
patterns.” 12
In October 1964, he appeared at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium in Los
Angeles before a predominantly white audience as a part of a star-studded
cast assembled to fi lm The T.A.M.I. [ Teen Age Music International ] Show , a
concert documentary that was released to theaters the following year. The bill
included the Beach Boys, Marvin Gaye, the Supremes, and the Rolling Stones
but James pulled out all the stops in an explosion of song and dance.

Motown Records
The Sound of Young America
Berry Gordy Jr. was a former prizefi ghter and auto plant worker turned songwriter
who co-wrote Jackie Wilson’s fi rst solo hit “Reet Petite” (1957). Like
Stax, Motown Records began as a small family affair: Berry’s sisters, Esther, Anna,
Gwen, and Loucye, were all early Motown employees, as was his second wife,
Raynoma Liles. But in the crossover appeal of its black artists to white audiences,
the young company quickly surpassed Stax Records, its Memphis counterpart.
The Motown Sound brought rhythm and blues to new heights of
polish and sophistication; in the process, Berry Gordy built one of the most
important black-owned businesses in American history.
This sound was perfected through a style of record production modeled on
a Detroit automobile assembly line. Motown staff writers would compose a
song that was then registered with Motown’s publishing company, Jobete Music.
Motown staff producers worked with the Motown house band in the Motown
studio to create a fi nished instrumental track. Only then would the new song
be presented to the Motown artist or group whose vocals would be added to
the song. Record production was a seven-day-a-week, nearly around-the-clock
operation, conducted in an atmosphere of intense competition—both with
other record labels and within Motown itself, where everyone seemed to be
striving for Berry Gordy’s approval.
Motown Records relocated from Detroit to Los Angeles in 1972, by which
time the label’s fi rst golden era of explosive growth and unsurpassed creativity
was several years in the past. But individual artists like Marvin Gaye and Stevie
Wonder were making the most important music of their careers; a youthful
group called the Jackson 5, fronted by preternaturally gifted Michael Jackson,
had scored seven Top Ten Pop hits (including four consecutive number ones)
in three short years. Berry Gordy Jr.—the tough, canny visionary—was still
in control, and Motown still had musical history to make.
The Hitmakers of “Hitsville”
The Miracles, the Marvelettes, and Mary Wells were among Motown’s leading
hit makers in the company’s fi rst fi ve years. The Miracles’ superb lead singer,
William “Smokey” Robinson, was also a gifted songwriter who wrote or cowrote
all of the group’s biggest hits from their fi rst R&B number one (“Shop
Around,” 1960) through their last (“The Tears of a Clown,” 1970). In 1961,
the Marvelettes’ “Please Mr. Postman” became the fi rst single on any Motown-
affi liated label (in this case, Tamla) to reach number one on both the
R&B and Pop charts. Sweet-voiced Mary Wells had the fi rst number one R&B/
Pop single on Motown proper in 1964 with Smokey’s lilting song “My Guy.”
But Mary Wells and the Marvelettes were pushed aside when the Supremes
(Diana Ross, Mary Wilson, and Florence Ballard) broke through with “Where Did Our Love Go” in the summer of 1964. The trio’s unprecedented run of
twelve number one Pop hits included “Come See About Me,” “Stop! In the
Name of Love,” and “You Can’t Hurry Love”—all written and produced by the
team of Eddie Holland, Lamont Dozier, and Eddie’s brother Brian Holland. The
Supremes became the most successful African American group of the 1960s.
Florence Ballard, who left in 1967, later died in poverty at age thirty-two;
Diana Ross became a top-selling Motown solo artist and an Oscar-nominated
fi lm star ( Lady Sings the Blues ).
Holland-Dozier-Holland’s most successful Motown act after the Supremes
was the Four Tops. When the producers prodded the Tops’ lead vocalist Levi
Stubbs into singing at the top of his range, a bland supper-club act was transformed
into a powerhouse soul group on the R&B/Pop number one hits “I
Can’t Help Myself” (1965) and “Reach Out I’ll Be There” (1966).
Founded in 1960, the Temptations struggled with personnel changes and
mediocre material until their fi rst number one R&B/Pop hit in 1965. “My Girl”
is the classic “Tempts” song, a Smokey Robinson composition sung by Melvin
Franklin, Otis Williams, David Ruffi n, Eddie Kendricks, and Paul Williams. The
Temptations were legendary for their immaculate stagecraft and luxuriant
vocal blend, the leads alternating between Ruffi n’s grainy tenor and Kendricks’s
ethereal falsetto. After Dennis Edwards replaced David Ruffi n in 1968,
the group rebounded with two more number one songs, “I Can’t Get Next to
You” (1969) and “I Wish It Would Rain” (1971). Among Rock and Roll Hall of
Fame inductees, Motown is well represented by the Four Tops, the Temptations,
Smokey Robinson, the Supremes, Holland-Dozier-Holland, and Berry Gordy Jr.

hit the stage on fi re, just because I was told by so many people not to
push my heat button too hard. I mean, I torched those songs. . . . The minute
we kicked in with our opening number, ‘Out of Sight,’ all those white kids in
the audience went crazy!” It was, he recounted proudly, “the fi rst time anybody
in that neck of the woods had got a dose of real soul, James Brown
style.” 13
The T.A.M.I. Show captured on fi lm the so-called cape routine, a key ritual
of James’s live performance. “In a drama that would play itself out many
times during the course of a single concert, Brown, supposedly overcome by
torturous emotional and physical cravings, would drop prayerfully to his
knees, unable to continue. Only when his seconds, the Famous Flames, draped
a velvet cape across his shoulders and led the shambling singer from the stage
would he again fi nd the strength to continue.” 14
James’s career took a curious turn when King obtained a court injunction
which dictated that he release instrumentals on Smash and vocals on King.
Mercury was forced to withdraw the Out of Sight album and instead put out
instrumental sets like Grits and Soul and James Brown Plays New Breed , all featuring Brown on organ. Meanwhile, Syd Nathan delved into the King
vaults and cobbled together “new” James Brown vocal releases from tapes
recorded years earlier.

No one can say for certain just when “rhythm and blues” became “soul.” By
about 1960, the word “soul” was frequently used in the lexicon of African
American music: in 1958, for example, Ray Charles and jazz vibraphonist Milt
Jackson released an album titled Soul Brothers . Nor is it easy to describe
the musical elements that differentiate soul music from earlier styles of R&B.
James Brown’s hard-hitting, syncopated rhythms marked one evolutionary
change; so did Jerry Butler’s deep, gospel-infused lead vocal with the Impressions
on their 1958 ballad hit, “For Your Precious Love.”
Once soul music took hold, small and large record companies in urban centers
across the nation began pumping out countless records in the new style.
In 1959, Jim Stewart and his older sister Estelle Axton created Stax Records
(initially as Satellite Records) in Memphis, Tennessee.
Unusually for its time and place, Stax Records was an integrated operation.
Its white partners built their offi ces and recording studio in a converted movie
theater in the heart of Memphis’s black community. The artist roster was virtually
all black, but Booker T. and the MGs—the house rhythm section that
played on most of the label’s greatest hits—comprised two black musicians
(drummer Al Jackson Jr., keyboards player Booker T. Jones) and two white ones
(guitarist Steve Cropper, bassist Donald “Duck” Dunn). Black producer/songwriters
like Isaac Hayes and David Porter worked alongside the white recording
engineer Ron Capone.
In 1959, Rufus and Carla Thomas provided the fl edgling company with its
fi rst national hit, “ ’Cause I Love You.” Rufus’s daughter Carla became the label’s
most popular female artist with such songs as “B-A-B-Y” and “I Like What
You’re Doing to Me.” In 1967, she recorded a humorous, funky duet called
“Tramp” with Otis Redding, whose music epitomized the Stax sound.
Otis Redding was a classic “down home” soul singer whose gritty voice
sounded older than his years, especially on pleading ballads like “I’ve Been
Loving You Too Long.” He sang with a pronounced Southern accent, punctuating
the lyrics with trademark phrases like “GOT-ta, GOT-ta” and “mymy-
my.” Otis wrote or co-wrote many of his best-known songs, including
“Respect” (later a career-making hit for Aretha Franklin) and “Pain in My
Heart” (which was covered by the Rolling Stones). Redding died at age twenty-
six in a plane crash in Madison, Wisconsin, on December 10, 1967, soon
after recording an unusual new song. With its prominent acoustic guitar and surf sound effects, “(Sittin’ on) the Dock of the Bay” was a striking but wholly
natural departure from Redding’s usual down-home style. Released posthumously,
it became his fi rst and only number one hit (on both the Pop and R&B
charts) and won two Grammy Awards.
After Otis Redding’s death, soul-blues man Johnnie Taylor brought Stax
back to the top of the charts in 1968 with “Who’s Making Love” (number one
R&B/number fi ve Pop). The Staples Singers’ blend of social consciousness and
funky gospel fervor on “I’ll Take You There” and “Respect Yourself” made
them one of the most popular R&B groups of the early Seventies.

Sam and Dave and Isaac Hayes
Sam Moore and David Prater Jr., known as Sam and Dave, recorded some of the
most enduring songs in the Stax catalog: “Hold On, I’m Coming,” “Soul Man,”
“I Thank You.” These discs were written and produced by Isaac Hayes and David
Porter—a top Stax production team until 1969, when Isaac’s Hot Buttered Soul
album propelled him into a hugely successful solo career as soul music’s fi rst
“underground” artist. With some tracks running as long as eighteen minutes,
Hot Buttered Soul became the fi rst Stax album to sell over one million copies.
“Up to this point,” wrote Stax historian Rob Bowman, “virtually everyone in
the record industry simply assumed that the black audience was neither economically
equipped nor aesthetically interested in purchasing LPs in large
numbers . . . Hot Buttered Soul unquestionably proved that black artists could
sell LPs, and singlehandedly revolutionized the notion of the length and musical
palette appropriate for black artists” (p. 184). In 1971, Hayes’s Stax
soundtrack for the Gopalon parks fi lm Shaft shot to number one, and its proto-
disco title song won an Academy Award—the fi rst ever earned by an African
American composer.
Today, the Stax Museum of American Soul Music commemorates the label’s
historic achievements. Isaac Hayes, Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, Booker T.
and the MGs, and Jim Stewart all have been inducted into the Rock and Roll
Hall of Fame.

A BRAND NEW BAG
The year of the Beatles’ American breakthrough, 1964, visited setbacks and
tragedy upon a number of James’s fellow soul stars. His friend and former
King Records label mate, Little Willie John, was charged with assault in Miami;
he died in a Washington State prison in 1968. In October, Ray Charles was
arrested for possession of marijuana and heroin in Boston. In December,
Sam Cooke was shot and killed by a motel owner in Los Angeles. Jackie Wilson
did not have one Top Ten R&B hit in 1964; Solomon Burke had several, mostly sung in a smooth ballad style. Wilson Pickett was between record contracts
and Otis Redding had not yet emerged as a national star from his Southern
base.
All of these circumstances reinforced James Brown’s position as the preeminent
soul singer of the day. He criss-crossed the continent at the head of a
troupe that now numbered nearly two dozen musicians and vocalists. When
James’s musical career began, the conditions of his parole prohibited him
from remaining within the Augusta city limits for more than twenty-four
hours. Now he could, by his insistence on playing to mixed audiences, effectively
integrate fi rst the Macon City Auditorium and then Bell Auditorium in
Augusta—months before President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights
Act into law on July 2, 1964.
Under a renegotiated contract with King, James was releasing a new single
every few weeks. Two of these—“Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” and “It’s a
Man’s Man’s Man’s World”—were among the best-selling and most infl uential
songs of his entire career.
“Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” is a blues in form but with a sound far
removed from the deliberate, Mississippi-bred style of Muddy Waters or
Jimmy Reed. Brown’s brusque vocal rides a taut, hard-hitting beat as he namechecks
various dance crazes like the twist, the jerk, and the boomerang. At the
end of each verse, everything drops away for a few seconds of jazzy chickenscratch
chording by guitarist Jimmy Nolen and a blast of horns, signaling a
repeat of the chord sequence. Like another world changing hit from the summer
of 1965, Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” “Papa” feels like it could
go on for a very long time. In fact, the complete original recording is over
seven minutes in length: King’s two-minute single edit was only part one of a
three-part track.
“Papa” became the fi rst James Brown single to reach the Top Ten of the
Billboard Hot 100 and held the R&B number one position for eight weeks; it
spawned a best-selling album of the same title that reached number two R&B
and number twenty-six Pop. In 1999, “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” was
given a Grammy Hall of Fame Award as a recording “of lasting qualitative or
historical signifi cance.”
“It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” was the stylistic opposite, a slow minorkey
ballad co-written by Brown and songwriter Betty Jean Newsome. James
had produced an earlier version of the song for Tammi Terrell, a singer with
his touring revue; it passed unnoticed when released under the title “I Cried.”
But Brown’s own rendition is a moody masterpiece, with dark clouds of
orchestration shadowing his lead vocal and the almost inaudible rhythm section.
His tormented delivery, with its dramatic sobs and shouts, infused the
lyrics with deeper, more universal emotions. Perhaps the depiction of “a man’s
world” that “would be nothing without a woman or a girl” refl ected the pain
of James’s breakup with Velma, from whom he separated in 1964 (they
divorced in 1969).

Released in April 1966, “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” topped the R&B
chart and cracked the Pop Top Ten, peaking at number eight. The chord sequence
and melody of “Fallin’,” Alicia Keys’s massive Grammy Award–winning hit
of 2001, are startlingly similar to James’s song—even though “Fallin’ ” is
credited only to Keys.
BLACK AND PROUD
Brown enjoyed his greatest crossover success in the period 1967–68, when
three of his number one R&B hits all reached the Pop Top Ten. “Cold Sweat”
and “I Got the Feelin’ ” were funk masterpieces, but “Say It Loud – I’m Black
and I’m Proud” was that and something more. The song was released in September
1968, a year in which the United States was rocked by political assassinations,
the Tet offensive in South Vietnam, widespread protests against the
Vietnam War, and the violence that erupted during the Democratic National
Convention in Chicago.
On April 4, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee.
The next night, Brown was scheduled to headline Boston Garden in
Boston, Massachusetts. At fi rst, Mayor Kevin White wanted to cancel the
show. Instead, a plan was formulated to broadcast the show live over Boston’s
public television station WGBH. A few thousand ticket-holders showed up
that night; on stage, James paused several times in the course of his show to
speak to the audience, cooling tempers and heading off confrontations between
young blacks and the police stationed inside the arena. His words were heard
by a much larger audience that had stayed home to watch the show for free—
and although civil disturbances broke out that night in nearly 100 cities across
the nation, Boston remained calm.
In June, James fl ew overseas to entertain U.S. troops in Korea and Vietnam—
an opportunity he’d been denied, despite his repeated requests to the
USO, until Vice President Hubert Humphrey interceded on the singer’s behalf.
Brown and his band (stripped down to just fi ve musicians for the trip) often
played several shows in a day; they traveled in military helicopters that came
under enemy fi re on several frightening occasions.
James returned to the United States and in August recorded “Say It Loud”
in Los Angeles. For the session, he recruited an amateur chorus of schoolchildren
and adults to chant the title phrase. His lead vocal is quite literally a
“rap,” a string of spoken couplets, while the horn section and an unforgettable
bass line provide the melodic content.
“Say It Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud” became a rallying cry and a powerful
expression of self-affi rmation. Almost overnight, it seemed, terms like
“colored” and “Negro” fell out of the African American lexicon. Through the
expressive power of this song and its constant airing on black radio, James
Brown “named an entire people: Black Americans,” 15 wrote journalist Glen Ford, whose fi rst full-time radio news job was on WRDW Augusta, one
of three radio stations owned by Brown in the late 1960s.
“The phenomenon built upon, but was more far-reaching than, Stokely
Carmichael’s popularization of ‘Black Power’ two years earlier. Carmichael’s
slogan called for—demanded—power for Black people. But James Brown’s
anthem actually empowered ordinary Black folks to signal to their leaders and
oppressors—the whole world, in fact—the fundamental terms of any dialogue:
how they were to be addressed.” 16
Brown’s politics were complicated, contradictory, and rooted in personal
experience. He was a member of the National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People. In the summer of 1966, he performed in Tupelo,
Mississippi, in support of James Meredith, who’d been shot in the back while
making his March Against Fear from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi.
But racial pride didn’t prevent James from hiring white musicians or
working with white managers and agents. Later in life, he even spoke of
George Wallace and Lester Maddox with admiration and forgiveness despite
the fact that both men had bitterly opposed the civil rights movement when
they served as the governors of, respectively, Alabama and Georgia.
The title of a 2006 book by business author Tyrone L. Cypress— Say It
Loud . . . I Sell and I’m Proud —may have been a crude manipulation of the
song’s true historical meaning. But it was also consistent with the recurring
theme of black capitalist uplift that ran through Brown’s worldview and public
rhetoric. For proof that America was indeed a land of opportunity in which
hard work and determination could pay off beyond anyone’s wildest dreams,
James Brown needed to look no further than the nearest mirror. His economic
philosophy might have been summed up by the title of his number three R&B/
number twenty Pop hit of 1969: “I Don’t Want Nobody to Give Me Nothing
(Open up the Door, I’ll Get It Myself).”
In a real-life demonstration of the song’s credo, Brown faced down a local
campaign to prevent his realtor from closing on a large house that the singer
intended to purchase in Walton Way, an upscale white section of Augusta. In
October 1969, following his divorce from Velma, James married Deidre
“Deedee” Jenkins and moved into the new home with his new wife who later
gave birth to their daughters Deanna and Yamma.
LARGE AND IN CHARGE
Republican President Richard Nixon “made Brown feel he was a key example
of black capitalism at work, which appealed to the singer’s gigantic ego,”
wrote Nelson George. “Brown didn’t understand the nuances of Nixon’s plan—
reach out to showcase some black business efforts while dismantling [Lyndon]
Johnson’s Great Society programs, which for all their reputed mismanagement
had helped a generation of blacks begin the process of upward mobility.” 17
James endorsed Nixon in his 1972 re-election campaign—one of the few black
entertainers to do so, besides Lionel Hampton and Sammy Davis Jr. In May
1973, during a return engagement at the Apollo Theater, black demonstrators
picketed the theater with signs that read “James Brown, Nixon Clown” and
“Get That Clown Out of Town.”
James was a temperamental and often vindictive employer of musicians and
other personnel. Underlying nearly all his actions was, as Arthur Kempton
noted, “his conviction that every inch of his way up had been bought and paid
for by his own unreasonably hard effort” 18 as well as “the classic Napoleonic
little man’s disposition to take any subordinate’s challenge as a towering
affront.” 19
When trombonist Fred Wesley Jr. joined James’s organization in early 1968,
he was grateful to receive a salary of $350 per week regardless of whether
“Mr. Brown” (as he demanded to be addressed by everyone, at all times) was
working or not. Wesley soon found out that this system was stacked in favor
of the boss, who regularly worked 300 days of the year. The same weekly salary
could cover multiple shows in the same venue or gigs in two cities in the
same day; the musicians received nothing extra for recording sessions or television
appearances. The payroll remained at about $6,000 a week, a paltry
sum given Brown’s earning power, “and he acted like he didn’t want to give
you that.” 20
In addition, band members were forced to endure “horror rehearsals” during
which James would harangue and insult them for hours on end. He also
imposed fi nes for on-stage offenses ranging from wrong notes to unshined
shoes. Fred felt deeply that such manipulation was “unnecessary to the creation
of an act as exciting as the James Brown Show. But, on the real side, there
has never been a show that exciting, that tight, that completely entertaining.
There also has never been a man so dedicated, so determined, so focused.” 21
In 1970, just hours before a show in Columbus, Georgia, the musicians
threatened to quit unless Brown promised to change his ways. Instead, he
summarily fi red most of the band including Maceo Parker, Clyde Stubblefi eld,
and Jabo Starks. James then dispatched his Lear jet to Cincinnati to pick up a
local group called the Pacesetters, led by eighteen-year-old William “Bootsy”
Collins on bass and his brother Phelps “Catfi sh” Collins on guitar. They arrived
in Columbus, were driven directly to the venue, and carried their equipment
on stage as the other musicians were removing their own. Despite a few hours’
delay, the James Brown Show went on as scheduled.
James changed the Pacesetters’ name to the JBs. It was this group—later
rejoined by Parker, Starks, and Fred Wesley Jr.—that provided the backing for
many of his best and biggest funk hits of the Seventies. This series of inspired
singles included “Get Up—I Feel Like Being Like a Sex Machine,” “Super
Bad,” “I’m a Greedy Man,” “Soul Power,” and “Get On the Good Foot—
Part 1.” In 1974 alone, James scored three R&B number one hits with “The
Payback—Part 1,” “My Thang,” and “Papa Don’t Take No Mess—Part 1.”

The relentless repetition of beats, riffs, and vocal phrases, over tracks that (in
their album versions) sometimes ran for ten minutes or more, was not a drawback
but an essential element of the James Brown sound. The individual songs
seemed to form a non-stop and continuously evolving jam, with the leader
verbally cuing one of the tightest and most versatile bands in all of popular
music through the chord changes, horn solos, and drum breaks.
After nearly twenty years on the road, James remained a galvanizing live
performer whose volcanic intensity and spontaneous eruptions could provoke
near-hysterical reaction from audiences throughout Europe, Africa, and North
America. In 1970, at a huge outdoor sports arena in Dakar, Senegal, “James
demonstrated his endurance . . . by jumping off the ten-foot-high stage and running
a lap around the stadium, wearing his ‘Please, Please, Please’ robe, after
singing and dancing for two hours.” 22 In Lagos, Nigeria, James communed with
Nigerian superstar Fela Kuti. In the fall of 1974, the singer performed in Kinshasa,
Zaire, as part of an African American music festival attached to the
heavyweight title fi ght between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman.
Syd Nathan, the founder of King Records, died March 5, 1968, and in
October his company was sold to Starday Records of Nashville. Starday itself
was then sold to Lin Broadcasting, which sold James Brown’s contract and
catalog to Polydor Records of Germany in July 1971. James was a vital addition
to the Polydor roster as the company sought to establish itself in the allimportant
U.S. market. In addition to Brown’s own unending fl ow of singles
and albums (including the two-LP sets Revolution of the Mind , The Payback ,
and Get On the Good Foot ), he founded a new label, People Records, to distribute
his productions of other artists: Hank Ballard, Bobby Byrd, Lyn Collins,
and assorted instrumental confi gurations of the JBs.
TRIALS AND TRIBULATIONS
In his off-stage life, however, the singer was under increasing personal strain.
Beginning in 1968, he became embroiled in protracted disputes with the IRS,
which claimed that he owed millions in back taxes. Eventually, Brown lost
ownership of his three radio stations, his two private planes, and even his Augusta
home to the agency. At times, he felt certain he was under government
surveillance.
In August 1973, James’s eldest son Teddy, age nineteen, was killed in a car
accident in upstate New York, leaving his father “on my knees with grief.” In
his darkest moments, Teddy’s death felt like “a kind of punishment for me
that I could never be pardoned or paroled from, or a sin I could never properly
atone for.” 23 His marriage to Deedee began to disintegrate, although they
were not legally divorced until 1981.
But the greatest threat to Brown’s career was the advent of a kind of music—
disco—that could never have existed without him. His complex polyrhythms were smoothed out into one metronomic dance beat; his jazzy horn riffs were
replaced by sweeping string arrangements. In general, the new style was more
adaptable to the melodic voices of female singers like Donna Summer and
vocal groups such as the O’Jays. James derided disco as “a very small part of
funk, like a vamp. The difference is that in funk you dig into a groove, you
don’t stay on the surface. Disco stayed on the surface.” 24
Competition arose on another front from Parliament-Funkadelic, the
extravagant “funk mob” led by George Clinton and featuring such former JBs
as Bootsy Collins and Fred Wesley Jr. P-Funk’s sprawling, wildly costumed
live shows were fi lling the sports arenas and municipal auditoriums that had
been Brown’s live domain a few years earlier. Meanwhile, Stevie Wonder and
Marvin Gaye were selling millions of copies of their progressive soul masterpieces
like Talking Book and What’s Going On . In contrast, James’s albums
seemed to be assembled from a stockpile of recordings while he was on tour
or otherwise engaged; the paintings that adorned some of his LP covers had
the weirdly sincere look of what later became known as “outsider art.” In the
course of his career, Brown placed forty-nine releases on the Billboard Top
200 Albums chart but only one— The Payback , from 1974—has been certifi ed
gold by the Recording Industry Association of America.
REJUVENATION
Toward the end of the 1970s, the singer began to encounter a new and enthusiastic
audience in new wave rock clubs, where hip young whites hailed him
as infl uence and innovator. In 1980, diehard James Brown fans John Belushi
and Dan Aykroyd cast him in the role of a singing sanctifi ed preacher in their
hit movie The Blues Brothers (which also featured appearances by Aretha
Franklin and Ray Charles). That same year Brown recorded “Rapp Payback
(Where Iz Moses),” one of his best late-career tracks. With his Polydor deal
now expired, James licensed the song to T.K. Records, a label run by Henry
Stone—the same Miami music entrepreneur who’d picked up “(Do The)
Mashed Potatoes (Pt. 1 & 2)” two decades earlier. “Rapp Payback” only
reached number forty-fi ve among Billboard R&B Singles but it would be a
long time before James Brown again attained even this modest level of chart
success.
Two years later, the singer met makeup artist Adrienne Rodriguez on the set
of the TV show Solid Gold . She moved into James’s new South Carolina
home a few months later and they were married in 1984. In the same year,
Brown released “Unity,” a new single and video performed with Afrika Bambaataa—
a Bronx DJ and rapper whose position in New York’s hip-hop nation
was comparable to Brown’s role in traditional R&B.
In 1985, James’s career was revitalized temporarily by his recording of
“Living in America,” the theme song from the movie Rocky IV . He had no hand in writing or arranging the song, which others had completed by the
time James cut his lead vocal. Nonetheless, “Living in America” went all the
way to number four to become the highest-charting Pop hit of his career as
well as a number ten R&B entry, and won the Grammy Award for Best
Rhythm & Blues Recording.
As the song climbed the Hot 100, James Brown was among the inaugural
group of musicians to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He
attended the black-tie ceremony at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York on January
23, 1986, and later “spoke of it as the culmination of his career.” 25 On the
morning of January 28, the space shuttle Challenger exploded, killing the
seven astronauts on board. Twelve hours later, James’s fi rst headlining appearance
at New York’s prestigious Radio City Music Hall began with a solemn
invocation offered by Reverend Al Sharpton, the New York political activist
who’d become the singer’s close friend and confi dant after Teddy Brown’s
death. James Brown then went through the motions of his performance in a
manner that suggested either deep despair over the Challenger disaster or the
fogged-in condition of drug use. Rather than a celebration of a triumphant
comeback, the Radio City show was a harbinger of worse things to come.
Nonetheless, the Rocky IV soundtrack sold over a million copies and led to
a new recording contract with Scotti Brothers Records. Gravity (1986), produced
by pop hit-maker Dan Hartman, was described by critic Robert Christgau
as “not a James Brown album—a James Brown–infl uenced Dan Hartman
record, with James Brown on vocals.” 26 I’m Real (1988) was a more artistically
successful collaboration with the producer/performers of New York hiphop
group Full Force. The album yielded Brown’s fi nal number one R&B hit
(“I’m Real”) and a number fi ve follow up (“Static”) but only reached number
ninety-six on the Billboard Pop Albums chart. If contemporary listeners were
no longer receptive to new James Brown songs, perhaps it was because old
James Brown songs were saturating the radio and MTV airwaves in the form
of JB samples on innumerable rap hits.
James Brown: The Godfather of Soul , the fi rst and best of the singer’s two
memoirs, appeared in 1986. Even if some of the reconstructed conversations
didn’t ring true, Brown’s capacious memory created a richly detailed narrative
that blended personal history with philosophical musings on poverty, politics,
racism, marriage, and stardom.
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
Financial pressures, career decline, marital strife, and drug use all came to a
head for James Brown in 1988. He was arrested repeatedly on charges ranging
from leaving the scene of an accident to domestic violence involving Adrienne.
In September, attendees at an insurance seminar in Augusta were
confronted by a shotgun-wielding James Brown who demanded to know if anyone had used his offi ce’s private restroom on the same fl oor. He then fl ed
the building and a high-speed police chase ensued, back and forth across the
Georgia–South Carolina state line. James’s arrest resulted in multiple charges
including assault on a police offi cer, possession of the animal tranquilizer PCP,
and carrying an unlicensed pistol.
The singer later insisted that “I never did anything the police said I did. It
was simply a vengeance sentence, made worse by my celebrity. Because I was
a famous black performer, busted roadside in the South, I had to pay the
price.” 27 Refusing to plead guilty, Brown was sentenced to a total of six years
but served only fi fteen months in a South Carolina prison. Even as he protested
his innocence, James admitted that his incarceration was “a muchneeded
break from the crazy merry-go-round of booze and drugs. . . . I was
tired, my resistance was low, and I needed a place to get myself together.” 28
After ten more months in a work-release program, Brown was paroled in
February 1991. (Later the singer was arrested a few more times—for drug
possession and domestic violence—but never re-incarcerated.) In June, he
returned to public performance with a show at the Wiltern Theater in Los
Angeles. Still on board were such longtime allies as manager Charles Bobbitt
and emcee Danny Ray, whose immortal line “Are you ready for star time?”
had kicked off the fi rst Live at the Apollo in 1963. The James Brown Show
was now a slicker, more Las Vegas–style affair that incorporated, among other
bits of razzle-dazzle, a troupe of female singer-dancers. One of them, Tomi
Rae Hynie, became the fourth Mrs. James Brown—and the mother of his son,
James Brown II—after Adrienne Rodriguez died in 1996 while undergoing
cosmetic surgery.
Novelist Jonathan Lethem witnessed the spectacle in the course of writing
a lengthy, revealing, and often hilarious profi le of the artist for Rolling Stone
magazine. A James Brown performance, he wrote, is
the ritual celebration of an enshrined historical victory, a battle won long ago,
against forces diffi cult to name—funklessness?—yet whose vanquishing seems
to have been so utterly crucial that it requires incessant restaging in a triumphalist
ceremony. The show exists on a continuum, the link between ebullient bigband
“clown” jazz showmen like Cab Calloway and Louis Jordan and the
pornographic parade of a full-bore Prince concert. 29
In 1991, James’s recording career was surveyed on Star Time , a carefully
compiled and critically acclaimed four-CD box set; new albums such as Universal
James (1992) and a fourth Live at the Apollo set (1995) came and went
without much media attention or commercial impact. But at this point—forty-
fi ve years after “Please, Please, Please” fi rst hit the charts—it really didn’t
matter. A Kennedy Center honoree, the winner of a Grammy Lifetime Achievement
Award, with his own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the ragged
boy from Twiggs Street was now an icon of global pop culture—and the show
would go on. “We could work for a hundred years,” one member of his Soul Generals band told Jonathan Lethem. “Because he’s James Brown. It’s like we’re
up there with Bugs Bunny, Mickey Mouse. There’s no other comparison.” 30
When not on the road, the singer—diabetic and in remission after a bout
with prostate cancer—retreated to his home in Beech Island, South Carolina.
It was just across the Savannah River from Augusta, where Ninth Street was
now James Brown Boulevard and where the civic center was renamed the
James Brown Arena in August 2006.
FINAL DAYS
Brown’s fi nal tour was a two-week trek across Eastern Europe that included
a private fi ftieth birthday party in Moscow (the other “entertainment” was
Jennifer Lopez). The concluding show, in Croatia, was the last he ever played
with his own band. The musicians fl ew home to the United States but James
traveled to London. On November 14, 2006, he was honored by the U.K.
Music Hall of Fame in a televised ceremony; backed by a stage band, he sang
“I Got You (I Feel Good).” Four decades earlier, in 1965, the song had topped
the Billboard R&B Singles chart for straight six weeks. No one could have
predicted that it would be James Brown’s last live performance.
On the Friday before Christmas, James Brown participated in his fi fteenth
annual holiday toy giveaway, at the Imperial Theater in Atlanta, Georgia. On
Sunday, he was admitted to Emory Crawford Long Hospital in Atlanta with
a diagnosis of pneumonia. A show in Connecticut was canceled but the singer
told associates that he looked forward to performing at B.B. King’s Club in New
York on New Year’s Eve, as he’d done annually for several years. At 1:45 a.m.
on December 25, 2006, James Brown died of congestive heart failure.
LEGACY
The news of James Brown’s death prompted a fl ood of tributes from his contemporaries
and admirers. Soul queen Aretha Franklin said, “He was an original,
[like] a Rembrandt or a Picasso.” 31 “For oppressed people,” rap star
Common declared, Brown’s music “was the light at the end of the tunnel.” 32
In the Village Voice , writer/musician Greg Tate hailed James Brown as “the
embodiment of all the working-class African blood that got us through . . . all
our collective love, joy, ingenuity, and indefatigability, all our spirited and
spiritual survivalist complexity, all our freedom jazz dance. . . . In a nutshell,
JB was our grand black unifi er.” 33
At a time when even such soul music pioneers as Ray Charles were moving
toward a smoother, more pop-oriented sound, James Brown brought American
black music back to its African-derived polyrhythmic roots even as he
pushed it forward into the future. Although he never scored a number one
Pop hit, Brown is one of an elite group of artists to have placed a song in the Top Ten of the Billboard Hot 100 and/or Top R&B Singles chart in each of
four decades from the 1950s through the 1980s. He holds the Billboard R&B
Singles record for Most Chart Hits (118), Most Top 40 Hits (100), Most Top
Ten Hits (60), and Most Crossover Hits (88), that is, songs that “crossed
over” from the R&B chart to the Hot 100.
Traces of James Brown’s sound can be heard in the music of Sly and the
Family Stone, Talking Heads, Parliament-Funkadelic, Fela Ransome-Kuti,
Miles Davis, and Public Enemy, to name but a few. Hip-hop producers and
MCs have sampled his recordings countless times, creating new contemporary
hits from his classic beats, horn lines, and vocal refrains.
“Funky Drummer,” one of Brown’s lesser hit singles from 1970, contains a
drum break played by Clyde Stubblefi eld that is probably the most sampled
beat in hip-hop history. It has been used in songs by A Tribe Called Quest, the
Beastie Boys, George Michael, Public Enemy, and Sinead O’Connor, among
others. Additional James Brown samples were employed by Biz Markie on
“Vapors” (“Papa Don’t Take No Mess”), by Gang Starr on “Words I Manifest”
(“Bring It Up”), and by Rob Base and D.J. E-Z Rock on “It Takes Two,”
which sampled James’s production of “Think (About It)” by Lyn Collins.
“He was dramatic to the end—dying on Christmas Day,” the Reverend Jesse
Jackson told the Associated Press. “Almost a dramatic, poetic moment. He’ll be
all over the news, all over the world today. He would have it no other way.”


TIMELINE
May 3, 1933
James Brown is born in Barnwell, South Carolina. He is raised in poverty in Augusta,
Georgia, forty miles away.
1949
At age sixteen, Brown is convicted on four counts of breaking and entering (into cars)
and sentenced to a term of eight to sixteen years in a Georgia state penitentiary.
The sentence is later reduced and James is transferred to the Alto Reform School in
Toccoa, Georgia.
June 14, 1952
Brown is paroled and remains in Toccoa, where he sings with the Gospel Starlighters,
a vocal quartet led by his friend Bobby Byrd.
June 19, 1953
James Brown and Velma Warren are married in Toccoa. The couple will have three
sons: Teddy, Terry, and Larry.
November 1, 1955
As lead singer of the Famous Flames, a secular vocal group, Brown records the original
version of his song “Please, Please, Please” at radio station WIBB in Macon, Georgia.
The song receives considerable regional airplay.
January 23, 1956
Producer and A&R man Ralph Bass travels to Macon to sign James Brown to King
Records.
February 4, 1956
James Brown and the Famous Flames re-record “Please, Please, Please” at King/Federal
studios in Cincinnati.
March 3, 1956
“Please, Please, Please” is released as the group’s debut single on Federal Records, a
King subsidiary.
April 11, 1956
“Please, Please, Please” by James Brown and the Famous Flames reaches number six
on the Billboard R&B Singles chart. The single sells over one million copies.
April 1957
The original Famous Flames disband when nine follow-up singles fail to make the
charts.
November 10, 1958
“Try Me” by James Brown enters the Billboard R&B Singles chart and eventually
becomes the best-selling R&B single of 1958. It is the fi rst of the singer’s seventeen
R&B number one hits, his fi rst song to make the Hot 100 (at number forty-eight), and
his second million-seller.
October 24, 1962
Using $5,700 of his own funds, Brown records his live performance at New York’s
Apollo Theater.
June 15, 1963
James Brown hits number eighteen with “Prisoner of Love,” the peak Hot 100 listing
of his career thus far.
June 30, 1963
James Brown’s Live at the Apollo is released and reaches number two on the Billboard
Pop Albums chart. It becomes the most successful LP ever released on the King
label.
September 1963
With manager Ben Bart, Brown forms his fi rst record label, Fair Deal, and a song
publishing company, Jim Jam Music.
October 28–29, 1964
The T.A.M.I. Show , a concert documentary, is fi lmed in Santa Monica, California. It
features live performances by James Brown, the Beach Boys, Chuck Berry, the Rolling
Stones, and the Supremes.
February 1, 1965
James Brown records “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag.” Released in July, the song tops
the R&B chart for eight weeks and reaches number eight on the Hot 100—the singer’s
fi rst Top Ten Pop hit.
March 15, 1966
“Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” wins the award for Best New R&B Recording in the
eighth annual Grammy Awards.
May 1966
The singer makes his prime-time network TV debut, appearing on The Ed Sullivan
Show .
June 4, 1966
James Brown’s number one R&B hit, the orchestrated ballad “It’s a Man’s Man’s
Man’s World,” peaks at number eight on the Hot 100.
August 1967
Alfred (Pee Wee) Ellis joins the James Brown Show as musical director. As one
of Brown’s chief collaborators, Ellis is crucial to the singer’s transition from gospelinfl
uenced R&B to a harder-edged and more dynamic funk sound.
April 5, 1968
After Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated in Memphis, James Brown appears on
WGBH-TV in Boston to appeal for calm in the streets and headlines that night at
Boston Garden.
September 14, 1968
“Say It Loud – I’m Black and I’m Proud (Pt. 1)” enters the Billboard R&B Singles
chart. It becomes Brown’s seventh number one R&B hit and reaches number ten on
the Hot 100.
July 23, 1969
The City of Los Angeles declares James Brown Day in honor of his sold-out show at
the Great Western Forum in Inglewood. When Mayor Sam Yorty arrives late to the
ceremony, Brown walks out.
July 1, 1971
James Brown’s King Records contract and back catalog of master recordings are sold
to Polydor Records. He continues to record for Polydor for the next decade.
August 12, 1972
“Get On the Good Foot” enters the R&B chart and soon reaches number one (for
four weeks) and number eighteen Pop. It is Brown’s fi rst single to be certifi ed gold for
sales of more than one million copies by the Recording Industry Association of America
(RIAA).
January 5, 1974
The Payback debuts on the Billboard album chart. The most successful of James
Brown’s 1970s LPs, it becomes the only album of his career to be RIAA-certifi ed gold
for sales of more than 500,000 copies.
September 1, 1974
Brown performs at a music festival in Kinshasa, Zaire, staged in tandem with the
Muhammad Ali/George Foreman heavyweight championship fi ght.
June 1, 1980
James Brown appears with stars John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd in the John Landis
fi lm The Blues Brothers .
January 11, 1986
“Living in America,” the theme song from the movie Rocky IV reaches number four on
the Billboard Hot 100 and number ten R&B. The song becomes James Brown’s highestcharting
Pop hit and wins the Grammy Award for Best Rhythm & Blues Recording.
January 23, 1986
James Brown is inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame during the organization’s
first induction ceremony, held at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City.
July 23, 1988
“Static” enters the Billboard R&B Singles chart. Peaking at number fi ve, it becomes
James Brown’s fi nal Top Ten R&B hit.
December 15, 1988
In South Carolina, James Brown is sentenced to a six-year prison term on charges of
assaulting a police offi cer, drug possession, and carrying an unlicensed handgun.
February 27, 1991
Brown leaves prison on parole after serving fi fteen months and spends the next ten
months in a work-release program.
May 7, 1991
Star Time , a four-CD box set surveying the singer’s career, is released on Polydor/
Universal.
February 25, 1992
The National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS) presents James
Brown with a Lifetime Achievement Award during the thirty-fourth annual Grammy
Awards.
February 25, 1993
MC Hammer presents James Brown with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the fourth
annual Rhythm & Blues Foundation Pioneer Awards.
December 1, 2003
Brown is honored at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC.
November 14, 2006
In London, James Brown performs “I Got You (I Feel Good)” on the telecast of the
U.K. Music Hall of Fame Awards—his final live performance.
December 25, 2006
After being admitted with a diagnosis of pneumonia, James Brown dies of congestive
heart failure at Emory Crawford Long Hospital in Atlanta.