The following are excepts taken from the book James Brown (Godfather of Soul) (James Brown, with Bruce Tucker)
James Brown, in his autobiography, candidly shares his life’s story, from birth through stardom. He had many obstacles to overcome and became known as the ‘hardest working man in the entertainment industry.” His influence became the foundation upon which various genres of dance music stands, from Disco to Michael Jackson, and beyond. He was contemporary, in his stardom, with Elvis, and even sang with him at one point. He knew the Jackson Five when they were children. He was on a friendship basis with Richard Nixon and Martin Luther King, Jr., helping to establish a national day of recognition after King had been assassinated. He was an icon of black heritage, but was never against the white man. He considered himself an American who was fortunate enough to fulfil the American Dream.
James Brown was involved in creating two musical revolutions. He helped create ‘Soul,’ and single-handedly made ‘Funk.’ “Like Elvis…James Brown stands at that crossroads where the fascinating and fascinated interchange between black and white cultures takes place.”
“James is not hostage to a single, mannered style, unlike, for example, the seventies dinosaurs still lumbering through their endless reunion tours. Rather, he is the embodiment of vast musical traditions (blues, R&B, gospel, soul, funk, rap, and numerous hybrids) and the bearer of an expressive tradition (black performance) that has set the terms for much democratic art in the twentieth century.”
James was born May 3, 1933 around Barnwell, South Carolina. He was stillborn. “Aunt Minnie picked me up and started blowing breath in me. She just wouldn’t give up. She patted me and breathed into my mouth and rubbed my back. Just about the time my father busted out crying, I did, too…When I was four years old, my parents split up.” He didn’t see his mother again for twenty years. She insisted that he stay with his father, since she knew she couldn’t provide for him.
“Life out in the woods with my father was rough. We lived in a series of shacks…We ate black-eyed peas and lima beans, fatback and syrup, polk salad that we picked in the woods, and corn bread…Daddy was gone a lot, working in the turpentine camps…Being alone in the woods like that, spending nights in a cabin with nobody else there, not having anybody to talk to, worked a change in me that stayed with me from then on: It gave me my own mind. No matter what came my way after that- prison, personal problems, government harassment- I had the ability to fall back on myself.”
“The social system back then was like it is right today: economic slavery. One thing you have to understand about slavery: A man never enslaved a man because he didn’t like him; he enslaved him because he wanted him to work for him. It’s about free labor. That’s all it’s ever been about. It works that way everywhere in the world.”
Eventually, he went to live with his Aunt Minnie in Augusta, Georgia. “In Augusta, Aunt Minnie and I lived with another aunt of mine in a house…Outside, Highway 1 ran right by the door. You could go all the way to New York on that highway. Inside, there was gambling, moonshine liquor, and prostitution. I wasn’t quite six years old.”
Growing up in that environment, he also started going to church, which is where he started to learn how to play various instruments. But he had to participate in the culture’s way of ‘making ends meet.’ “That’s what everything that went on in that house- gambling, bootlegging, prostitution- was about: survival. Some people call it crime, I call it survival…One of the things that helped me to survive in those days was music…Really, gospel is what got me over, especially after I went to prison.”
“At the churches there was a lot of singing and handclapping and usually an organ and tambourines, and then the preacher would really get down. I liked that even more than the music…Audience participation in church is something the darker race of people has going because of a lot of trials and tribulations, because of things that we understand about human nature. It’s something I can’t explain, but I can bring it out of people. I’m not the only person who has the ability, but I work at it, and I’m sure a lot of my stage show came out of the church.”
James’ father was drafted into the military. “My father came and went like he always had, but it seemed like I saw less of him after the move. Pretty soon they took him right out of the service station he was working in and put him in the Navy. He was thirty-two-years-old with a second-grade education, and he eventually wound up a second-class seaman…More and more I was getting to be a street kid.”
“I met another kid around this time who would mean a lot to me- Leon Austin. He was a few years older and played piano. He showed me how to play with both hands and taught me how to get rhythmic feel into it…I was also hearing all kinds of new sounds around me- on the radio, on records, around town. I listened to Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Cleanhead Vinson, Louis Jordan. Jazz, rhythm and blues, it didn’t make any difference to me. I tried to play whatever I could, and I imitated all the singers no matter what their style.”
Brown entered and won several talent contests in the region and began to have a small local following. But the odds were stacked against him getting ahead in life. “I don’t remember when I first started stealing, but I remember why I started- to have some decent clothes to wear to school…I kind of fell in with a bad crowd, too. There were a lot of gangs around the city.”
He was eventually arrested. “This time they took me to jail for real- fingerprinted me, took a mug shot, and threw me in the lockup with adult offenders even though I was only fifteen years old…I turned sixteen then all of a sudden they wanted to try me- as an adult.”
The judge gave him eight to sixteen years in prison. “When he asked me if I had anything to say, I begged him to give me a chance. “‘This is your chance,’ he said. ‘If you work hard in prison, you can get out when you’re twenty-four years old. If you don’t, you’ll be thirty-two. It’s up to you.’”
“There was a boy’s home, a reformatory, right there in Augusta, but he was going to send me to a detention center in Rome. Mine was a kangaroo court, I knew that. What I have always felt was unjust in this country is that they didn’t allow us to get an education, and yet when we went to court they treated us like we were impresarios who knew what was going on. We can’t be wrong on both ends. If you don’t’ allow a man to get an education, don’t put him in jail for being dumb. That’s what they did in Augusta- they sent me to prison for being dumb.”
“I hadn’t been there but a couple of months before I formed a gospel quartet…I sang a lot of gospel in prison. Gospel is contentment because it’s spirit, and you feel that spirit when you sing it. It’s the same spirit I feel when I’m on stage today. I feel it when I sing. Period. I make people happy, and they feel it.”
“Singing gospel’s a good way to learn about music in general. There’s a format for gospel; you learn the different parts, and then you start putting them together: first tenor, second tenor, baritone, bass. Instrumental music’s put together the same way. That’s how I knew the chords before I ever got to the piano. I had sung so much gospel.”
James worked hard to have a good reputation with the authorities in prison and was let out on parole. He soon formed a singing group, known as the Flames. “We were pitiful. Our voices didn’t seem to fit together…We practiced and practiced…worked up a repertoire of about ten rhythm and blues songs…I stayed on top of all the latest dances- the slop, the funky chicken (even before it was called the funky chicken), the alligator, the camel walk.”
“I had always absorbed ideas from whatever I was around- minstrel shows, circuses, preachers, gospel music, records- but now I started to pay attention to the way professional musicians performed on stage…The best group we ever saw in Greenville was Hank Ballard and the Midnighters.”
Little by little the group started becoming known. “They had liked us so much that almost all of them booked us again as soon as they could. Word spread to other campuses, and we began to get gigs at places that were so far away we had to sneak away from work in the middle of the day. Sometimes we were so tired after driving all night that we’d lay low the next day and miss work entirely. Before long, I got fired, but before my parole officer could get upset, I found another job, this time as a janitor at Toccoa High School.”
“From our first pitiful rehearsal we had progressed to that- being on the radio in the big city. We had worked out our problems in the group; we’d managed to keep ourselves from being thrown out of church; we were riding in a new car, even if it didn’t belong to us; and we worked five or six nights a week all around our area. We had achieved the local popularity we’d been working for.”
James made a song demo to pitch to a talent scout from Atlanta, and before long he was asked to record for King Records, based in Cincinnati. When they started recording in the studio, the producer was aghast, “‘What’s that?…Stop the tape,’ he yelled. ‘That doesn’t sound right to my ears.’ He was in a rage…
“I showed him the chord changes on the piano and explained to him what we were doing. Once he understood, and it made sense to him, he said he would go and tell Mr. Nathan that they should try it, even if it sounded funny. He was gone a long time. While we were waiting, hanging out in the hall, we could hear them yelling upstairs behind closed doors. When Gene came back, all he said was, ‘Okay, we’re going to cut it.’”
“So on March 3, 1956, ‘Please, Please, Please’ was released. Eventually, it sold a million copies.”
By now, James had gotten married and had two children, but his travelling was causing this relationship to drift apart.
Eventually, he had to replace all the people in his band, as he continued to grow. He released another song on record, ‘Try Me’ and it went to number 1 on the R&B charts immediately and to number 48 on the pop charts, and Universal signed him.
With his new group, they did more and more shows, eventually at the Apollo. “We kept rehearsing between shows, getting sharper and sharper.”
“I worked all the time now, as many as 350 nights a year, most of them one-night stands. I played every place- arena, auditoriums, clubs, ball parks, armories, ballrooms, any place that had a stage or a place you could put one.”
“When you’re on stage, the people who paid money to get in are the boss, even if it cost them only a quarter. You’re working for them.”
“It doesn’t matter how you travel it, it’s still the same road. It doesn’t get easier when you get bigger; it gets harder. And it will kill you if you let it. There are lots of ways it can kill you: accidents, shootings, drugs. If you don’t have the stamina, you can even work yourself to death, like Jackie Wilson did. The road has killed a lot of good people: Jackie, Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, all those great entertainers.”
“But even if you live, you have to see to it that you last. I wanted to last. I’d been a shoeshine boy, a jailbird, and a janitor, and I had less than a seventh-grade education: I knew there weren’t a lot of opportunities for somebody like that. That’s reality. Reality is what drives me. When I go around the streets of Augusta today, the same streets I grew up on, it makes me return to the stage and work that much harder.”
“To last you have to think about more than the performance. I started carrying an entire show, working every night, learning everything I could about the business. When you travel with a whole show it costs a lot more to run. You’ve got to draw and you’ve got to make it pay for itself. One way you draw is to have a good show in the first place; we had a good one, and it was getting better all the time. You have to be smart, too.”
“I was smart enough to know that a big group had to have discipline to succeed…With the original Flames I didn’t worry about…stuff too much because we had all come up together and everything went smooth naturally. But when my show got bigger and I was hiring people, I saw that we had to have discipline. I put in a system of fines- so much for a dirty uniform, for unshined shoes, for being late. If somebody showed up drunk, he sat out and might get fired. Some of the cats resented the fines, but I think it gave me the tightest band in show business. I abided by the rules, too. I fined myself. When I fined somebody else, I didn’t keep the money but put it in a pot to pay for parties later. I wouldn’t take anybody’s money.”
“No matter what happened on the road, I was always developing the show, picking up new ideas, new sounds. There was one sound, though, I couldn’t hear anywhere but in my head. I didn’t have a name for it, but I knew it was different. See, musicians don’t think about categories and things like that. They don’t say, I think I’ll invent bebop today or think up rock ‘n roll tomorrow. They just hear different sounds and follow them wherever they lead. Let somebody else give it a name. Like they’d named the stuff we’d been doing rhythm and blues. It would take the world a long time to catch up to what we were fixing to do, but when they did, they gave it a name, too: soul.”
“Really, 1960 was the year my hard work started paying off.” James Brown had wanted to do a live album, which was an unusual idea back in those days. His producers didn’t want to do it, “So, I wound up paying for recording Live at the Apollo out of my own pocket. It cost me $5,700, a lot of money to me then because I really didn’t make that much. It was expensive to carry around the big show I did, and there was still something funny about my records and publishing money.” The album was a hit.
About the time he was breaking up with his second wife, James was pioneering a new musical style.
“‘Out of Sight’ was another beginning, musically and professionally…You can hear the band and me start to move in a whole other direction rhythmically. The horns, the guitar, the vocals, everything was starting to be used to establish all kinds of rhythms at once. On that record you can hear my voice alternate with the horns to create various rhythmic accents. I was trying to get every aspect of the production to contribute to the rhythmic patterns. What most people don’t realize is that I had been doing the multiple rhythm patterns for years on stage, but Mr. Neely and I had agreed to make the rhythms on the records a lot simpler. ‘Out of Sight’ went out of sight on the charts when it came out…was the biggest hit I’d ever had up to that point.”
With all his success, James Brown had the privilege to know a number of people in politics, and was friends with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and was deeply saddened by his death.
As Brown was an important voice in the Black culture, his decisions were on national display. “Black Power meant different things to different people, see. To some people it meant black pride and black people owning businesses and having a voice in politics. That’s what it meant to me. To other people it meant self-defense against attacks like the one on Meredith. But to others it meant a revolutionary bag. I wanted to see people free, but I didn’t see any reason for us to kill each other.”
Brown travelled to Vietnam to entertain the troops and came out with the song, ‘America is My Home.’
“By the time I got back from Vietnam people were on my case about ‘America Is My Home,’ calling me an Uncle Tom, saying the song ws a sellout, things like that.”
He subsequently wrote ‘Black and Proud’ “Many white people didn’t understand it any better than many Afro-Americans understood ‘America Is My Home.’”
“The song cost me a lot of my crossover audience. The racial makeup at my concerts was mostly black after that.”
“Later on it came out that the FBI under Mr. Hoover had a program during this time to destroy black nationalists. They were infiltrating several groups, spying on people, taping them, like they did to Martin. Mr. Hoover wrote instructions to his agents to ‘prevent the rise of a ‘messiah’ who could unify and electrify the militant black nationalist movement.’ I think ‘Black and Proud’ probably got their attention.”
Brown began touring internationally, and visited Africa. “It’s a funny thing about me and African music. I didn’t even know it existed. When I got the consciousness of Africa and decided to see what my roots were, I thought I’d find out where my thing came from. My roots may be imbedded in me and I don’t know it, but when I went to Africa I didn’t recognize anything that I had gotten from there.”
Continuing his political involvement, he decided to endorse Richard Nixon, even encouraging him to establish a national day to honor the memory of Martin Luther King, Jr. Nixon agreed that this was a good idea.
With all of his success, Brown started having difficulties he didn’t know how to solve or rise above.
In 1973, his son Teddy was killed in a car accident. “What was on my mind was preserving my sanity. I thought if I continued on with my life right away, then maybe I wouldn’t have a total breakdown. And I was afraid that if I didn’t go ahead with the shows, I might never be able to get on a stage again.’
He also had another problem, an industry music-style shift.
“By the middle of 1975 disco had broken big. Disco is a simplification of a lot of what I was doing, of what they thought I was doing. Disco is a very small part of funk. It’s the end of the song, the repetition part, like a vamp. The difference is that in funk you dig into a groove, you don’t stay on the surface. Disco stayed on the surface. See, I taught ‘em everything they know but not everything I know.”
“Disco was easy for artists to get into because they really didn’t have to do anything. It was all electronic sequencers and beats-per-minute – it was done with machines. They just cheated on the music world. They thought they could dress up in a Superfly outfit, play one note, and that would make them a star. But that was not the answer. It destroyed the musical basis that so many people worked so hard to build up in the sixties. The record companies loved disco because it was a producer’s music. You don’t really need artists to make disco. They didn’t have to worry about an artist not cooperating; machines can’t talk back and, unlike artists, they don’t have to be paid. What disco became was a lawyer’s recording; the attorneys were making records.”
“Part of the reason I pulled back from show business was my wife. Deedee wanted me to be at home more and be a good father to our children. We had two sweet daughters, and they meant everything to me.”
Brown, also began having major tax issues, as his management team hadn’t handled things appropriately.
James had known Elvis, and when Elvis died, it had an effect on him. Around this time, Deedee filed for divorce. She didn’t want to be married to an entertainer, but someone who would stay home and help raise children.
The tax issues finally caught up to him, and after doing a concert, “There was a U.S. marshal waiting for me with a bench warrant issued by the U.S. District Court…I went to city jail in handcuffs and spent three days there. I couldn’t understand it; the whole thing was about money in the first place, a civil suit…What kept running through my mind was the connection between being in jail when I was a kid and being in jail as an adult. Here I was successful, well known and, most of all, respected– and still in jail.”
“For the first time in my life I said something I never thought I’d hear myself say: ‘I just don’t care anymore.’”
“Leon Austin, the childhood friend who first showed me some chords on the piano and who I had cut on a lot of singles from the late sixties on, came by and talked to me… ‘you can’t quit,’ he said. ‘you can’t lay down.’”
“‘I’m tired, Leon,’ I answered. ‘I’m tired of fighting the government and the record company and the radio establishment.’”
“He kept coming by, kept talking to me, arguing with me, encouraging me. I wouldn’t budge. He could see how far down I was, so he got off the retirement thing and started talking to me about spiritual things. He told me how he’d recently let God back into his life and what a difference it made. He didn’t preach to me or anything like that. He just talked real quiet about what it meant to him personally, how it gave him peace of mind.”
“I was always religious, even before I used to help Charlie Brown, the crippled fella, to the different churches on Sunday when I was a kid. I’d sung gospel all my life. Gospel saved me in prison and got me out. Over the years I presented a lot of gospel acts on my shows, too, but somehow, I guess, I’d just been going through the motions lately.”
“Really, a lot of the ways I communicate with people and what I communicate I owe to the church. When I’m on a stage, I’m trying to do one thing: bring people joy. Just like church does. People don’t go to church to find trouble, they go there to lose it. Same thing with a James Brown show. I’d always felt that as an entertainer you shouldn’t bring your personal problems to the stage. Your job is to send people home feeling better than they did when they came in. I wasn’t sure I could do that anymore.”
“Leon got me thinking about all that and gave me the moral support I needed. We all need moral support; we don’t get any bigger than that. When we don’t need it, we’re in trouble. And we need to trust in somebody, something bigger than ourselves. That’s what I did. I rededicated myself to God. In a little country church near where I was born, I was rebaptized. I’d been baptized when I was a little boy, but I wasn’t as serious then as when I went on my own as an adult. Eventually I just let go and put things in His hands.”
“The final turning point came one day when I walked outside the house and found my father down on his knees working around the walkway. It must have been 100 degrees in the shade.”
His father was pulling weeds, and James got down and started helping him.
“Something happened while I was down there beside my father. He knew what I was going through, and he straightened me out. ‘You’re lucky, Junior,’ he said. ‘The yard you pulling weeds in belong to you.’”
“In his whole life he’d never stopped working. It didn’t make any difference to him: turpentine, heavy machinery, filling station work, picking vegetables. That’s what he was about. And his son was about working on the stage. God showed me the direction. I knew it was time for me to get up and go back to work.”
“When I made the decision to come back, I decided to fight back, too…we charged the federal government with harassing me through the FBI and IRS…Meantime, I went back to work in America as a live performer. It wasn’t easy. There were people who wanted to put me on oldies shows. I refused. I said, ‘I’m a contemporary artist.’ I wouldn’t let ‘em call my greatest hits albums golden oldies, either. Called ‘em Soul Classics.”
After writing the song, ‘Living In America’ for the Rocky IV movie, “The soundtrack went platinum, the single went into the top five on the charts, and I signed a new record deal with Scotti Brothers and CBS. They understood that I’m a contemporary artist.”
“But honors and gold records and all that aren’t what I’m proudest of. I’m proudest of what I have become, as opposed to what I could have become, and I’d like to be remembered as someone who brought people together.”
“I don’t’ consider myself better than anyone. I consider myself luckier than most. People say I have a big ego, but I had to have an ego to make anything of myself in the first place. I had to have an ego to stay out there and continue to work no matter what, and I have to have one now to say, ‘Yes, I’m James Brown, and it’s still happening for me.’ Because it doesn’t just happen. You have to make it happen.”
“Where I grew up there was no way out, no avenue of escape, so you had to make a way. Mine was to create JAMES BROWN. God made me but with the guidance of a Ben Bart, I created the myth. I’ve tried to fulfill it. But I’ve always tried to remember that there’s JAMES BROWN the myth and James Brown the man. The people own JAMES BROWN. That belongs to them. The minute I say ‘I’m JAMES BROWN’ and believe it, then it will be the end of James Brown.”