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>> Watch an
exclusive video of Rolling Stone contributing editor
and rock critic Robert Christgau talking about the Godfather of
Soul. PLUS: Check out a James Brown
photo gallery and a showcase of his
best live-performance clips.
"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."
I 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.
"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."
I 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.
- Portions of Album Content Provided by All Music Guide © 2009 All Media Guide, LLC.
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