Funk's Founding Father (1933-2006)

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.

The trek landed him in dusty, Depression-era Augusta, in the care of his aunt Handsome "Honey" Stevenson, a brothel keeper. There, owing to his precocious dancing and vocalizing, folks called him a godsend child. At six, James could draw a crowd by beating on the busted pump organ his dad scavenged at Eubank's furniture store. Never able to give his son a family, Joe at least gave James his own survivor's work ethic. James shined shoes, racked pool balls, delivered groceries and worked alongside his father in a gas station, washing and greasing cars. At twelve, he was buck dancing for passing World War II troop trains to help make Honey's rent, five dollars a month.

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.

It 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.