Funk's Founding Father (1933-2006)

This did not mean he abandoned Niggertown. A quarter century before Magic Johnson dared build multiplexes in Crenshaw and Harlem, the Godfather believed in black enterprise. He owned radio stations, a fast-food chain and his own company, Top Notch. He lost nearly all of it in an IRS donnybrook. But what he lacked in business acumen, he made up for in tenacity. As he explained to hapless boxer Leon Spinks one night, "You got to keep what you get punched in the head for."

As an activist, James Brown never meant to overthrow the republic -- just find room in it. He sang his bootstrap manifesto: "I Don't Want Nobody to Give Me Nothing (Open Up the Door I'll Get It Myself.)" He was a patriot who could chopper to 'Nam to succor the brothers marooned there, then embrace Richard Nixon. His musical calls to social justice were not as eloquent as Martin Luther King Jr.'s speeches. But they were equally heartfelt.

Consider the genesis of his most famous 1968 anthem, the companion piece to Aretha Franklin's 1967 proclamation, "Respect." It was composed in a Los Angeles hotel a few hours before dawn. A disgusted Mr. Brown switched off the TV news after another report on black crime. He fretted and paced a bit, sent his grateful manager off to his rest, then summoned him twenty minutes later. The boss had scrawled some indelible lyrics on two napkins, commanded the incredulous Mr. Bobbit to find a studio in the middle of the night -- along with musicians and thirty black children. And lo, it was done: The kids were corralled onto a bus in Watts. At the studio, they learned their chorus quickly: "Say it loud! I'm black and I'm proud!" Eight words sent out on megawatt black stations nationwide helped the movement reach critical mass.

Everywhere he went, he represented the constituency as a sharp-dressed man. No one understood his concept of male beauty better than JB's childhood friend Leon Austin, who explained that Mr. Brown knew he wasn't pretty in the accepted sense. In Augusta, there existed a stratification of "high complexion" versus "low." "A darker person would be named as ugly," Leon explained. His friend was dark. "So," concluded Leon, "he made the ugly man somebody."

For Soul Brother Number One, the toughest sacrifice was deflating his chemically cooked hair. The interim Afro was pure torture: "It was like givin' up somethin' for Lent," he said. "I wanted people to know that one of the most prized things I let go of was my hair. It was a real attraction to my business. But I would cut it off for the movement."

As his interviewer and hopeless fan, I knew James Brown for about a quarter of a century -- much of it sleep-deprived. Hanging with JB was a life-altering, if challenging, adventure. He would call when he hit Manhattan, stop his limo across from my apartment and pop out to hold up traffic until I was aboard. You never knew who was going to be inside: Muhammad Ali. JB's father, Joe Brown. Leon Spinks. A comely Bride of Funkenstein. A new wife. And nearly always, "Rev," as he called Sharpton.

The star had taken Sharpton under his wing when the preacher was a fatherless teenager. Few failed to notice the timing: It was shortly after the 1973 auto-crash death of his own nineteen-year-old son, Teddy. Born in Toccoa, Georgia, where his father struggled to feed him by singing gospel in churches, Teddy was JB's oldest child and greatest hope. He was going to college.

In all the times I saw them together, Brown and Sharpton were gleeful, affectionate co-conspirators, shoring up each other's agenda on endless antic road trips. Running with Mr. Brown could induce the same orgy of emotion as his shows: laughter, tears, disbelief -- and moments of genuine terror. Nights on the town were funky. And fraught. It was excruciating squirming with members of the Brown entourage in a pricey and very white hotel dining room as a disdainful waiter tried to humiliate JB with blather about the petits champignons in the veal Marengo. But it was divine when our leader sent the waistcoated roach scuttling, defeated, with a polite but firm response: "I don't eat toadstools."

If you were in his mental Rolodex you were perpetually on call: At 3 a.m., the phone would ring, and the singular rasp would ask: "Aw, you sleepin'? It's James. Lissen. I been thinking . . . . " The incessant verbal sparring, on everything from racism to "blackro-economics," could be maddening and exhilarating. Often I hollered myself hoarse over the roar of Mr. Brown's heavy-duty hair dryers; the man spent more time in rollers than Edna Turnblad in Hairspray. Sometimes we couldn't talk at all. In the latter years, the Godfather's repeated falls from grace were heartbreaking; PCP-fueled rampages, domestic violence, car chases, the televised mug shots, more jail time and the awkward post-prison explanations and denials.

If I ever came within a light-year of understanding James Brown, it was in deepest "Georgia-lina," as he called his sanctuary: Augusta, and Beech Island, South Carolina, across the Savannah River, where he made his home. Despite the mantle of urban cool, despite a brief New York residency in the Sixties, with the white-carpeted castle in Queens and the black lawn Santas, he insisted, "I am country. I stayed country. Couldn't do nothing about it, if you want to know the truth. And entertainers like me, from the South, you meet up on the road and you could tell if a guy was missing something. I used to talk about being homesick with Otis Redding."

Of all the material goods he won and lost -- the private jet, the fleet of cars, the suitcases bulging with cash, the 500 suits, the 300 pairs of shoes -- the thing James Brown clung to most tenaciously was his home and the ability to walk the streets around it with uncompromised ease.

"Now Elvis, he got so far away from it, he couldn't do that. He told me he'd ride around Memphis, around the streets he come up in, all alone at night. Ride around on his motorcycle when he was sure the rest of the world was asleep, just kind of haunting them places he hung around as a kid. He was a country boy. But the way they had him livin', they never turned off the air condition'. Took away all that good air. You get sick from that."

He was inconsolable when Elvis died, stared down at the bloated face in the coffin and through tears asked the King, "How you let it go?" In the darker days, after disco had Latin Hustled him off the charts and the personal demons got top billing, JB would admit that he let a lot go himself: wives, a viable family life, fortunes and, for some spells, his freedom and good name. But he was resolute about the real estate: "I have the one thing which means somethin' in this world, which God gives to no man. Yet man sells it. I have land. For my kids. They need a place where they can pick up dirt and let it go through their fingers and say, 'It's mine.' As far as man's law, that dirt belongs to them, and I feel good about it."