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Funk's Founding Father
Born in utter poverty, James Brown became the ultimate self-made man, whose work ethic was topped only by his rhythmic innovations and musical genius
By GERRI HIRSHEY
"A colored is a very frightened-to-death Afro-American. A Negro is one that makes it in the system, and he wants to be white. A nigger, he's loud and boisterous, wants to be seen. Nobody likes a nigger. A black man has pride. He wants to build, he wants to make his race mean something. Wants to have a culture and art forms. And he's not prejudiced. I am a black American man. Now you go ahead and print it." - James Brown, 1982
On Christmas morning, James Brown breathed his last in an Atlanta hospital. For a man whose trademark soul scream -- black, American and proud -- upended a half century of popular music, the end was uncharacteristically quiet. Congestive heart failure and pneumonia conspired to still the self-proclaimed (and undisputed) Hardest Working Man in Show Business. A week earlier, he had been especially reflective when speaking to those close to him, almost as if he were taking stock. And when on December 24th, his worried dentist, suspecting pneumonia, sent him to Emory Crawford Long Hospital in Atlanta, JB -- a man with incredible tolerance for pain and little patience for doctors -- did not argue. In recent years, he had battled prostate cancer to remission. He tussled daily with diabetes. His legs, scarred by decades of dropping to his knees onstage, pained him greatly. At seventy-three, though he had gigs lined up through August 2007 on his Seven Decades of Funk Tour, it seems James Brown was ready.
"I do think he knew he was going, yes." This from his unofficial son, protege, spiritual adviser and longtime aide-de-camp, the Rev. Al Sharpton, who was calling the day after Christmas from Atlanta, where he had just accompanied three of James Brown's children to view the body. He said that Charles Bobbit, Brown's personal manager of forty years, had been with him in the hospital when, at 1:30 a.m., he complained of a raging fire in his chest. The boss told Bobbit quite calmly that he would be leaving that night. "Three long sighs," reports Sharpton, "he lay back on the pillow and was gone."
Resuscitation was attempted, to no avail. The deeply Christian Mr. Brown would argue anytime, with anyone -- except the Almighty. His stage exits of legend -- the famous triple-collapse, sequined-cape resurrections -- belied a country boy's deeper conviction: "Mortality ain't no big deal," he had assured me more than once. Mr. Bobbit covered the body with a hospital blanket.
James Brown leaves a cultural wake as wide as his dear friend Elvis did. It took three services and as many wardrobe changes to send him to Jesus. The Augusta, Georgia, public funeral, broadcast live on CNN from the recently renamed James Brown Arena, took the form of a soul revue: tremulous thanks from Michael Jackson and dance moves by MC Hammer, along with a cape for the open casket. His singular life, begun in unspeakable Jim Crow-era poverty, careened through phases of great fame, wealth, disgrace and redemption. He saw it this way: "My story is a Horatio Alger story. It's an American story, it's the kind that America can be proud of, but yet if you tell it in detail, if you tell all the things I fought to make it, it's like the Satchel Paige story."
Spike Lee will direct the biopic, slated to begin shooting next year. But can any of us hope to get it right? "He was a very secretive man," acknowledges Sharpton. "The closer you were to him, the less he told you."
knew the Godfather of Soul for over two decades, long enough for him to insist I call him James and well enough to understand that he preferred the hard-won honorific Mr. Brown. The first time I met him on his home turf in Augusta, he drew a line with his shoe in the red dirt outside his office and challenged, "Unless you do puzzles, you cannot hope to understand James Brown."
You would need a bloodhound -- or a hand-held GPS -- to find the precise spot where James Joseph Brown Jr. entered the world on May 3rd, 1933. His father, Joe Brown, told me that it was a while before he could leave work in the turpentine camps and walk out of the piney woods where his wife Susan Brown gave birth to their only child in a shack where "the windas never seen a glass," in Barnwell, South Carolina, to register the blessed event. Joe was twenty, with fewer prospects than a box turtle on a four-lane highway. Having begun his working life at age eleven, struggling to control a four-mule team grading South Carolina roads, he went where the work was: farming, tapping sticky rivers of pine resin. It barely kept them eating, and offered no nourishment for a family life.
Pain was a JB staple from his earliest memory. In conversation and in song, he waxed from his earliest memory about its effects. Peer into his childhood and you hear its conflicted echoes in "I'll Go Crazy": "If you leave me, I'll go crazy," begs the forsaken singer. Then the superbad independent punches back: "You gotta live -- for yourself, for yourself and nobody else!"
"I come up hard," is the way he put it. More than fifty years after he found himself hungry and all but abandoned in the woods at age four, he remembered the worst of times. Susan Brown left. Though he would never discuss her early exit, he recalled, "When my mother and my father broke up, my father had met people who were going to take care of James." They didn't; when Joe found him playing in the dirt hungry and alone one night and James admitted it happened often, he walked the child into town for good. "Eleven miles!" the Godfather recalled, leaping to his feet to mime the woozy feeling of walking in his sleep, waking only when the grassy edge of the road made him correct his course. He couldn't walk the next day, and Joe soaked his swollen legs in milk.
In the seventh grade, his teacher, Miss Garvin, nicknamed him Robin Hood. It was an open secret that he stole pants and shoes to clothe his more desperate classmates. One day, nearly forty years after he had rooted for spoiled canned goods on a warehouse loading dock, James parked his shag-carpeted Dodge van at the abandoned site to show it to me. His son Larry was along, and he looked stricken at the rusted oil drums. "Daddy, you ate garbage?"
As the young James was made to understand it, there was no such thing as petty crime if committed by a black teen in postwar Georgia. So in 1949, an evening's misadventure breaking into cars conferred a prison sentence for almost as many years as he had been alive. He was shipped to a hot, murderously noisy rural facility, where his fellow inmates called him Music Box. Redemption came with the gospel quartet he formed there. "We sang like angels," he said. "We sang at other prisons. We were just kids and these big tough cats -- even the guards sometimes -- they would cry. We cried when we sang, it was so pretty."
It was sweet enough for early release after three and a half years. He joined the Avons, a group led by local singer Bobby Byrd, and they soon became the Flames. Drummer-harmonizer Brown shot to frontman on the strength of his pleading vocals.
The Famous Flames' 1956 debut single, the raw-as-chicken-guts "Please Please Please," stunned Syd Nathan, owner of the group's first label, Cincinnati-based King Records, by selling a million copies. Nathan hated the thing, two minutes and forty-three seconds of one word, tortured, panted and wailed.
Nathan and Brown often disagreed, but the artist insisted he had no regrets. "Mr. Nathan was the first one willing to take a chance on me," JB recalled. "We had differences. Mr. Nathan never did believe I could play keyboards. Had it in my contract I couldn't play and sing on the same record. And he was dead wrong on that." But early on, the country boy understood he needed Nathan's shrewd business tactics: "I knew how to pick up change when people threw it at my feet. I knew what to charge for a shoeshine. But what do you ask for a song? What's a one-nighter worth?"
Though for a while an appellate court sided with Nathan in forbidding Brown to sing and play on the same record, the ambitious Mr. Brown kept stubbornly, successfully pushing his rhythmic agenda by adopting Nathan's business credo: "You charge! If you run backwards, you get shot in the ass." JB tore up the R&B charts with a still-unmatched 114 single-artist hits. Six of his seven singles to hit Billboard's Top Ten were released between 1965 and 1968. It was never a cakewalk. Though "Please" hit the same year that Elvis howled "Hound Dog," it would be nine years before Brown breached the crossover barrier with "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag." And -- perhaps a measure of his uncompromising and exacting craft -- James Brown died without ever having had a Number One record on the pop charts.
t was 1963's Live at the Apollo -- recorded in Harlem's shrine of soul against his record company's wishes and at his own expense -- that proved career-making. Busting out of the chitlin circuit to a national stage, the Hardest Working Man in Show Business was saleable enough to free himself from any outdated R&B orthodoxies that Nathan might insist on. Believing that "nobody can tell James Brown how to be James Brown," he bulled past Nathan, who told him that no one would want to buy an album full of already released songs. He bet $5,700 of his own money on his hunch that most of black and white teen America might prefer an eleven-minute, tease-and-please version of "Lost Someone" slathered with lubricious audience shrieks and swoon, to tepid Top Forty. Released in January 1963, it spent sixty-six weeks on the charts. Black radio stations played the sides like singles; white fraternity houses wore out multiple copies in quad bacchanals. And from then on, the lines around the Apollo wound for blocks when the self-ordained Minister of Super Heavy Funk was in town....
...Thus, it is impossible to overstate James Brown's musical legacy. For nearly fifty-five years, he made the global soundtrack pop, crackle and ooze, from Astoria to Zaire, live from the bandstand, howling from tinny dashboard radios, still calling stubbornly, slyly from the sampled rhythm tracks of latter-day rappers. But what should never be lost in the translation to postmodern funk is the galvanizing live aspect of James Brown's theatrical, testifying soul: The man could dance. In the Sixties, a decade full of careers that caught fire in live moments -- from Dylan turning electric at Newport to Hendrix at Woodstock -- JB proved it all night, every night. You had to see him to believe him !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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