James Brown

• 1. Introduction

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  James Brown was supposed to be named Joseph James Brown. A clerk reversed his first and middle names on his birth certificate, and the mistake stuck. He was born on the 3rd of May 1933, in a small wooden shack in Barnwell, South Carolina, to a 16-year-old mother named Susie and a 21-year-old father named Joseph Gardner Brown. The family lived in poverty in the impoverished town of Elko. When James was four or five, they moved to Augusta, Georgia, and first settled in one of his aunts' brothels.

  From that beginning came a man who collected nicknames the way other people collect awards. Mr. Dynamite. The Hardest-Working Man in Show Business. Godfather of Soul. Soul Brother No. 1. His career ran more than 50 years and ended only with his death from pneumonia on Christmas Day in 2006. How did a child who shined shoes and danced for spare change become the world's most sampled recording artist? What did he build on stage that made grown musicians fear his hand signals? And why would the man who recorded an anthem of Black pride later say he wished he never had? The answers live in the music, the discipline, the politics, and the trouble.

• 2. Building The Funk

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  By 1967, critics began calling Brown's sound something new: funk. That year he released "Cold Sweat", which some cite as the first true funk song. It hit number one on the R&B chart and contained one of his first drum breaks. Its harmony was reduced to a single chord. The change set the foundation for later hits like "I Got the Feelin'" and "Mother Popcorn".

  The method was interlocking syncopated parts. Strutting bass lines, syncopated drum patterns, and percussive guitar riffs locked together. On 1969's "Ain't It Funky" and "Give It Up or Turnit a Loose", the tonal structure was bare bones. The pattern of attack points mattered more than the pattern of pitches, as if the guitar were an African drum. The scholar Alexander Stewart traced this feel from New Orleans through Brown's music into the popular music of the 1970s.

  Brown's vocals shifted too. He moved into a kind of rhythmic declamation, not quite sung and not quite spoken. That technique became a major influence on rapping as hip-hop matured. His grunts and shrieks reached back to ring shouts, work songs, and field cries, according to the Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History.

  In the early 1970s he sealed the sound with a new band. In March 1970, most of his road band walked out over financial disputes. Brown and singer Bobby Byrd recruited members of a Cincinnati ensemble called the Pacemakers, including bassist Bootsy Collins and his brother, guitarist Phelps "Catfish" Collins. The new group became the J.B.'s. Their first session produced "Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine", built around an off-beat play Brown called "The One". The tracks he made in this era were later resurrected by countless hip-hop musicians from the 1970s onward.

• 3. Star Time On Stage

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  "So now ladies and gentlemen it is Star Time. Are you ready for Star Time?" That introduction, delivered by Fats Gonder, opens Brown's 1963 album Live at the Apollo. The MC reeled off the sobriquets and the hit titles, "I'll Go Crazy", "Try Me", "Think", "Night Train", before the star appeared. Drumrolls carried him on.

  Brown's stated goal was to give people more than they came for, to make them tired, because that is what they came for. He danced vigorously while singing, working the Mashed Potato into a routine of leaps, splits, and slides. His horn players and the Famous Flames performed choreographed steps. Male performers in the Revue wore tuxedoes and cummerbunds long after casual wear became the norm.

  The most famous bit came during "Please, Please, Please". Brown dropped to his knees clutching the microphone stand. His longtime MC Danny Ray came out, draped a cape over his shoulders, and escorted him off as if he had collapsed from exhaustion. The Flames kept singing "Please, please don't go-oh". Then Brown shook off the cape and staggered back for an encore. He credited the professional wrestler Gorgeous George as the inspiration for both the cape routine and his concert attire, writing that seeing him on television helped create the James Brown audiences saw on stage.

  The operation was enormous. Brown employed between 40 and 50 people for the James Brown Revue, traveling by bus and performing upwards of 330 shows a year, almost all one-nighters. At the time of his death his band still included three guitarists, two bassists, two drummers, three horns, and a percussionist.

• 4. The Iron Bandleader

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  Saxophonist Maceo Parker once described the rules to Terry Gross on NPR's Fresh Air. You had to be on time. You had to have the bow tie and the cummerbund. The patent leather shoes had to be greased. Brown bought the costumes and the shoes, and if a member left, he told the person to please leave his uniforms behind.

  The discipline came with penalties. Brown directed, corrected, and assessed fines on band members who broke his rules, whether for unshined shoes, dancing out of sync, or showing up late. During concerts he sometimes danced with his back to the audience, sliding across the floor and flashing hand signals. Audiences thought it was choreography. It was actually his way of pointing out the musician who played a wrong note. His splayed fingers told the offender the size of the fine.

  His demands extended to anyone sharing his stage. Fred Wesley, who served as musical director of the J.B.'s, recalled that when Brown felt intimidated by a support act he would undermine their performance. He shortened their sets without notice, banned their showstopping songs, and would even insist on playing drums during their numbers. Wesley called it a sure set killer.

• 5. Black And Proud

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  On the 5th of April 1968, one day after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, Brown gave a free citywide televised concert at the Boston Garden. The police chief wanted it called off, fearing violence. Mayor Kevin White instead arranged to broadcast it repeatedly on the public station WGBH, keeping potential rioters indoors. Angered at not being told, Brown demanded $60,000 in gate fees he believed he would lose. A power-brokering group known as The Vault contributed $100,000, and Brown received $15,000 from the city.

  That summer he wrote the lyrics to "Say It Loud - I'm Black and I'm Proud", which his bandleader Alfred "Pee Wee" Ellis set to music. The song became an anthem for the civil rights movement. Brown performed it only sporadically afterward. In 1984 he said that if he had his choice he would not have recorded it, because he did not like defining anyone by race. In his autobiography he added that the song cost him much of his crossover audience, and that his concerts were mostly Black after that.

  His activism began earlier and in a gentler key. Forced to drop out of the seventh grade for wearing insufficient clothes, Brown released "Don't Be a Drop-Out" and donated royalties to dropout-prevention programs. The effort led to a White House meeting with President Lyndon Johnson, who cited Brown as a positive role model. In 1971 Brown toured Africa, including Zambia and Nigeria, where Oba Adeyinka Oyekan made him a freeman of the city of Lagos for his influence on Black people all over the world.

• 6. Nixon's Clown

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  A November 1972 show in Cincinnati was picketed with signs reading "James Brown: Nixon's Clown". Brown had openly proclaimed his support for Richard Nixon's reelection over George McGovern, and several national Black organizations boycotted his records and protested his concerts. By his own account, the decision cost him a big portion of his Black audience. His record sales and concerts slumped in 1973, and he failed to land a number-one R&B single that year.

  His politics resisted easy labels. He endorsed Democrat Hubert Humphrey in 1968 and was branded an Uncle Tom for it. He began backing Nixon after being invited to perform at the inaugural ball in January 1969. He later reversed course and composed "You Can Have Watergate (Just Gimme Some Bucks And I'll Be Straight)". After Nixon resigned and Gerald Ford took office, Brown wrote the 1974 hit "Funky President (People It's Bad)". He went on to support Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, and stated he was neither Democrat nor Republican.

  One relationship cut across all of it. Brown mentored the activist Rev. Al Sharpton beginning in 1971 and served as his tour manager from 1973. He convinced Sharpton to be known as "Al" rather than "Alfred". In a 2022 interview Sharpton said he learned from Brown that you have to be dramatic to get people to see things they are not inclined to see. In November 1981, the two met with President Reagan to endorse a national Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

• 7. Marriages And Disputes

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  Bobby Bennett, a former member of the Famous Flames, told Rolling Stone what he witnessed of Brown's treatment of singer Tammi Terrell. "He beat Tammi Terrell terrible. She was bleeding, shedding blood." Brown became sexually involved with Terrell when she was 17 and in his revue. She left him to escape the abuse, then became famous as Marvin Gaye's singing partner before her death in 1970. Bennett also claimed he saw Brown kick one pregnant girlfriend down a flight of stairs.

  Brown married three times before that. His first wife was Velma Warren in 1953, and they kept a close friendship until his death despite divorcing in 1969. His second marriage, to Deidre "Deedee" Jenkins on the 22nd of October 1970, produced two daughters and ended in divorce in 1981 after what his daughter describes as years of domestic abuse. His third wife, Adrienne Lois Rodriguez, married him in 1984. Between 1987 and 1995 he was arrested on four occasions for assaulting her, once reportedly beating her with an iron pipe. She was hospitalized after the last assault in October 1995, and charges were dropped after she died in January 1996.

  His final marriage became a legal puzzle that outlived him. On the 23rd of December 2002, Brown, then 69, held a wedding ceremony with backing singer Tomi Rae Hynie, then 33. Hynie was still married to a man from Bangladesh, and the annulment of that marriage did not occur until April 2004. A judge ruled Hynie his legal widow in January 2015. Then on the 17th of June 2020, the South Carolina Supreme Court ruled she was not legally married to Brown and had no right to any part of his estate.

• 8. Angel Dust And Honors

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  On the 23rd of January 1986, Brown became one of the first ten inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He recorded 17 singles that reached number one on the Billboard R&B charts, and in Joel Whitburn's analysis of those charts from 1942 to 2010 he ranks number one in the Top 500 Artists. Posthumous honors kept arriving, including induction into the Rhythm & Blues Music Hall of Fame in 2013 as an artist and again in 2017 as a songwriter.

  The same man enforced a strict drug- and alcohol-free policy on his entourage while breaking it himself. He fired members of the J.B.'s, including Catfish and Bootsy Collins, after they took LSD during a 1971 performance. Yet Vicki Anderson told journalist Barney Hoskyns that Brown's regular use of PCP, known as angel dust, began before 1982. After he married Adrienne Rodriguez in 1984, the two used PCP together, and the drug often produced violent outbursts that led to arrests.

  The brushes with the law stretched across decades. In 1963 he reportedly wielded two shotguns and tried to shoot his rival Joe Tex during a Macon concert, an incident in which multiple people were shot and stabbed. He was never charged. After a high-speed chase near the Georgia-South Carolina border in September 1988, he was sentenced to six years in prison and paroled on the 27th of February 1991 after serving two years.

  Work outlasted all of it. Brown kept a grueling schedule into his final year, living up to the name the Hardest Working Man in Show Business. His last shows in 2006 included a record crowd of 80,000 at the Irish Oxegen festival. A week before his death, looking gravely ill, he gave out toys and turkeys to children at an Atlanta orphanage, something he had done many times before. His will directed most of his estate into the I Feel Good, Inc. Trust to benefit disadvantaged children and fund scholarships for his grandchildren.