The story of James Brown

A shack in Barnwell, a brothel in Augusta

James Brown was born on the third of May 1933 in a small wooden shack in Barnwell, South Carolina. His mother Susie was sixteen and his father Joe was twenty one. He was meant to be named Joseph James Brown, but the first and middle names were swapped on his birth certificate, and James Joseph stuck. His father worked in the turpentine camps, tapping pine trees for resin, and the family had almost nothing. His parents' marriage was violent and unhappy, and when James was about four his mother left. Brown rarely spoke about her leaving. Years later he told a journalist that his father once found him alone and hungry in the woods, and simply walked him eleven miles into town.[1] [2] [3]

That walk ended in Augusta, Georgia, in the care of his Aunt Honey, who ran a brothel. James grew up in Depression era poverty. He shined shoes, racked pool balls and delivered groceries, and he danced for coins. When army convoys from nearby Camp Gordon crossed a canal bridge near his aunt's house, he buck danced for the troops and they threw him change. He was sent home from school once for wearing insufficient clothes, a humiliation he never forgot. A teacher nicknamed him Robin Hood, because it was an open secret that he stole clothes to give to classmates who were even poorer than he was.[1] [2] [3]

Music got into him early. In 1944, at about eleven, he won a talent show at Augusta's Lenox Theater singing a ballad called So Long. He taught himself piano, guitar and harmonica, and the record that made him want to be an entertainer was Louis Jordan's Caldonia. He also tried boxing as a teenager. But the streets caught up with him. In 1949, at sixteen, he was convicted of robbery after breaking into cars, and was given a sentence of eight to sixteen years. It was an enormous punishment for a Black teenager in the Jim Crow South, and he was sent to a juvenile detention center in Toccoa, Georgia.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Inside, he formed a gospel quartet with other boys, including Johnny Terry. They built instruments out of whatever they could find, a comb and paper, a washtub bass and drums made from lard tubs, and James played a sort of mandolin made from a wooden box. That earned him his first nickname, Music Box. Then came a baseball game. The detention center team played a local side that included a young gospel singer named Bobby Byrd. Byrd heard about the kid called Music Box, and he and his family agreed to sponsor James for early release. He was paroled on the fourteenth of June 1952, on condition that he stay away from Augusta.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Famous Flames and Please, Please, Please

Brown moved in with the Byrd family in Toccoa and took work arranged by a local businessman, S. C. Lawson, who had promised to keep him employed. He washed dishes, sang in a gospel group with Bobby Byrd's sister Sarah, and dabbled in boxing again. Byrd's own group had been singing rhythm and blues under the name the Avons, quietly, because church elders disapproved of the Devil's music. In 1954 one of its members, Troy Collins, was killed in a car crash, and Byrd asked Brown to join. At first Brown sat behind the drums while lead vocals were shared around, but his raw voice and hunger soon pushed him to the front.[1] [2] [3]

The group became the Toccoa Band, then the Flames, playing parties near college campuses across Georgia and South Carolina. In 1955 they crossed paths with Little Richard in Macon, and he pointed them to his manager, Clint Brantley, who ran a club there. Brantley took them on and told them to add the word Famous to their name. Before Christmas 1955 he sent them to a local radio station to cut a demo of a song called Please, Please, Please. It became a regional hit on Macon radio, and a talent scout named Ralph Bass signed the group to Federal, a subsidiary of King Records in Cincinnati, early in 1956.[1] [2] [3]

The group re-recorded Please, Please, Please in Cincinnati, and King's founder Syd Nathan hated it. He reportedly called it the worst thing he had ever heard, just someone stuttering one word, and he nearly fired Ralph Bass on the spot. The record came out in 1956 anyway, climbed into the R&B top ten by late summer, and went on to sell more than a million copies. It was billed as James Brown and the Famous Flames, and that billing did not sit well with the others. The follow ups flopped, the manager changed to Ben Bart of the Universal Attractions Agency, and by 1957 the original Flames had quit en masse over Brown's top billing.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Brown was left with hired singers and a label ready to drop him. Pitchfork counted nine failed attempts to follow up his first hit. Then Johnny Terry brought him a ballad modeled on Jerry Butler's For Your Precious Love. Try Me was released in October 1958 and reached number one on the R&B chart early in 1959, the first of seventeen R&B chart toppers. It changed everything. Brown hired his first road band, led by J. C. Davis, and brought Bobby Byrd back, along with new Flames Bobby Bennett and Lloyd Stallworth. On the twenty fourth of April 1959 the whole revue made its debut at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, opening for Brown's idol, Little Willie John.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Mr. Dynamite and the Apollo

In the early sixties Brown built one of the tightest live shows in America, playing more than three hundred nights a year on the chitlin circuit. Hits kept coming, Think, I'll Go Crazy, Bewildered, Lost Someone. One of them came out under a fake name. In 1960 his band cut an instrumental called Mashed Potatoes for another label, credited to Nat Kendrick and the Swans because of contract problems. Its success persuaded Syd Nathan to move Brown from Federal to the main King label. In 1962 his cover of the saxophone tune Night Train became a top five R&B hit, with Brown shouting out a list of cities on his touring route, and Brown himself on drums.[1] [2] [3]

Brown was convinced the only way to capture what he did was to record it live. Syd Nathan disagreed. Nobody, he said, would buy an album of songs they already owned. So Brown paid for it himself, reportedly around five thousand seven hundred dollars. On the night of the twenty fourth of October 1962, he recorded his show at the Apollo, handing out hot coffee to fans queuing in the cold. Live at the Apollo came out in 1963 and was a sensation. It reached number two on the Billboard album chart and stayed on the chart for sixty six weeks. Black radio stations played whole sides without a break, stopping only for ads.[1] [2] [3] [4]

This was also a time of cruelty. In 1962, a seventeen year old singer named Tammy Montgomery joined the revue. She later became famous as Tammi Terrell, Marvin Gaye's duet partner. Brown, then about twelve years older, began a sexual relationship with her. It turned violent. Former Famous Flame Bobby Bennett told Rolling Stone that he saw Brown beat her so badly she was bleeding, and that she left him because she refused to be beaten. Bennett also claimed he saw Brown kick a pregnant girlfriend down a flight of stairs. Terrell escaped both the relationship and the revue, went on to Motown, and died of a brain tumor in 1970.[1] [2]

Brown's rivalry with Joe Tex, a fellow King Records act, turned dangerous in 1963. Brown had recruited Tex's former wife, the singer Bea Ford, and later wrote to Tex saying he was finished with her and Tex could have her back. Tex answered with a record called You Keep Her. At a show in Macon, Tex mocked Brown on stage by rolling on the floor in a tattered cape, begging someone to get him out of it. According to several accounts, Brown left and came back armed. Tex had already gone, but in the chaos that followed people were shot and stabbed. Brown was on parole, the matter was quietly paid off, and he was never charged.[1] [2]

In 1964 Brown tried to break King's hold by recording for Smash, a Mercury label, through a company he formed with Bobby Byrd called Fair Deal. King went to court and won an injunction that stopped him releasing vocal records for Smash, but not before a single called Out of Sight showed where he was heading, with every instrument used for rhythm. That autumn Brown and the Flames were filmed at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium for the concert film The T.A.M.I. Show. Their set, with its splits, spins and cape routine, was so ferocious that Keith Richards later said agreeing to follow him was the worst mistake the Rolling Stones ever made.[1] [2] [3] [4]

A brand new bag: the birth of funk

Brown returned to King with a new deal and full creative control, and in 1965 he released Papa's Got a Brand New Bag. The band hit hard on the first beat of every bar, what Brown called the one, and everything, horns, guitar and bass, played like a drum. On the tape Brown can be heard shouting that it was a hit before the band even starts. It was cut in one take, and for the single the recording was sped up, raising the pitch by a half step. It spent eight weeks at number one on the R&B chart, became his first top ten pop hit, and won him his first Grammy Award.[1] [2] [3]

Papa's Got a Brand New Bag was the first Brown record to feature a guitarist from Oklahoma named Jimmy Nolen, whose light, muted chicken scratch style became part of the funk vocabulary. Later that year came I Got You, also called I Feel Good, which reached number three on the Hot 100, the highest pop placing of his career. It grew out of an older Brown song, I Found You, that his backing singer Yvonne Fair had released in 1962 without much success. Then in 1966 came the slow, brooding It's a Man's Man's Man's World, recorded in two takes with strings, which went to number one R&B and number eight pop.[1] [2] [3]

The man who made those records was a notoriously hard boss. Band members had to show up on time in the right uniform, bow tie, cummerbund and shined patent leather shoes. Brown fined people for scuffed shoes, missed cues or wrong notes. On stage he would sometimes spin away from the audience and flash his splayed fingers at the band. Fans thought it was dancing, but he was telling an offender how much he would be fined. His drummers said you did not even need to make a mistake. Clyde Stubblefield told NPR that doing something slightly different was enough, and that he paid Brown more than once.[1] [2] [3]

In 1965 Brown hired two drummers two weeks apart, John Jabo Starks from Bobby Bland's band and Clyde Stubblefield, whom he had spotted in Macon. When Stubblefield turned up there were five drum kits on stage. Starks explained that after the band rebelled back in the days of drummer Clayton Fillyau, Brown had vowed never again to be caught without two of everything. Neither man ever had a drum lesson. Starks learned rhythm in church in Mobile, Alabama, and Stubblefield from the clatter of trains and factories in Chattanooga. Instead of competing, they became brothers, and together they laid down many of the grooves that define funk drumming.[1] [2] [3]

In May 1967 Brown recorded Cold Sweat, which some critics call the first true funk record. His new bandleader, the jazz trained saxophonist Pee Wee Ellis, said Brown grunted a bass line to him in a dressing room, and Ellis wrote the horn parts on the bus to Cincinnati, borrowing an idea from Miles Davis. The band cut it live in one take. Cold Sweat barely changes chord at all. It was also the first time Brown called for the drummer to take a break, handing Stubblefield a short solo. The producer Jerry Wexler said the record freaked out every musician he knew, because nobody could work out what to do next.[1] [2] [3]

Soul Brother Number One

By 1968 Brown was more than a hitmaker. He was a symbol of Black success and self reliance. He had released Don't Be a Drop-Out in 1966 and given the royalties to dropout prevention programs, which led to a meeting with President Lyndon Johnson. He visited the wounded activist James Meredith in Mississippi, played benefits for civil rights groups, and bought radio stations, including WRDW in Augusta, the town where he had shined shoes as a boy, and a Knoxville station renamed WJBE after his initials. Look magazine put him on its cover and asked whether he was the most important Black man in America.[1] [2]

On the fourth of April 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in Memphis, and riots broke out across the country. Brown was booked at the Boston Garden the next night. The police wanted it cancelled. Instead, Mayor Kevin White arranged for the public television station WGBH to broadcast the concert live, hoping people would stay home to watch. Brown was furious that nobody had told him, and demanded compensation for lost ticket sales. From the stage he appealed for calm, and Boston stayed largely quiet while other cities burned. The show later became known as the night James Brown saved Boston.[1] [2] [3]

That summer Brown went to Vietnam to perform for American troops. In August he recorded Say It Loud, I'm Black and I'm Proud, written with Pee Wee Ellis, with a chorus of about thirty children bused in from Watts and Compton in Los Angeles. According to Rolling Stone, Brown wrote the words on napkins in the middle of the night after watching a news report that disgusted him. The song spent six weeks at number one on the R&B chart and became a rallying cry for the Black Power movement. Brown later said it cost him much of his white audience, and that he did not regret it.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Brown's politics never fit a neat box. The same year he endorsed the Democrat Hubert Humphrey and released a patriotic song, America Is My Home, attacking war protesters, and some activists called him an Uncle Tom. He also made a personal sacrifice for the movement. He cut off his famous chemically straightened hair and grew a natural. He later said it was like giving something up for Lent, because the hair was part of his business. Meanwhile the Famous Flames were gone. Lloyd Stallworth had left in 1966, and in 1968 Bobby Byrd and Bobby Bennett walked away too, feeling they were not being paid properly.[1] [2] [3]

The J.B.'s and the Godfather of Soul

In March 1970, most of Brown's road band walked out on him in a dispute over money. Brown and Bobby Byrd, who had come back, hired a young Cincinnati group called the Pacemakers almost on the spot. It included an eighteen year old bassist, Bootsy Collins, and his older brother Catfish on guitar. The new band was named the J.B.'s. Soon after their first show together they recorded Get Up, I Feel Like Being a Sex Machine, built on a relentless riff from the Collins brothers and drummer Jabo Starks, with Brown and Byrd trading shouts. It was followed by Super Bad and Soul Power, some of the hardest funk ever put on tape.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The original J.B.'s lasted only about a year. Bootsy later said Brown treated him like a son, lecturing the band after every show that they had missed the one, a trick he eventually realized was meant to make them practice harder. But in 1971 Bootsy and Catfish took LSD before a show, and Brown, who banned drugs and alcohol in his band, fired them. They went on to George Clinton's Parliament Funkadelic. The trombonist Fred Wesley took charge of a new J.B.'s. That same year Brown moved to Polydor Records, toured Africa, and was made a freeman of the city of Lagos in Nigeria.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The early seventies brought trouble alongside the hits. In 1972 Brown endorsed Richard Nixon for reelection, and Black organizations picketed his shows with signs calling him Nixon's clown. His record sales slumped and the Internal Revenue Service came after him for millions in unpaid taxes. Then, on the fourteenth of June 1973, his eldest son Teddy, nineteen years old and the child he had pinned his hopes on, was killed in a car crash. Bobby Byrd left the band for good that year, frustrated by songwriting credits and wanting a family with the singer Vicki Anderson. Brown later soured on Nixon too, and recorded a song mocking Watergate.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Brown poured himself into film work. He scored the gangster movie Black Caesar in 1973, which is where the title Godfather of Soul took hold, and at the end of that year he released The Payback. Its title track took him back to number one on the R&B chart in 1974, and it became his only studio album certified gold. Two more number ones followed in 1974, My Thang and Papa Don't Take No Mess, the last of his seventeen R&B chart toppers. Around this time he also took a fatherless teenage preacher from Brooklyn under his wing. From 1973 to 1980 the young Al Sharpton served as his tour manager.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In September 1974 Brown and the J.B.'s headlined the final night of Zaire 74, a three night festival in Kinshasa built around the Muhammad Ali and George Foreman fight known as the Rumble in the Jungle. The fight was postponed after Foreman was injured in training, but the music went ahead. Brown played a marathon set, and at the last minute President Mobutu opened the stadium to the public, so that tens of thousands of people could see him. Some of that performance appears in the 2008 documentary Soul Power. The next year, according to PBS, he was paid one hundred and sixty thousand dollars to play at the inauguration of Gabon's president.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Disco, a comeback and a fall

Disco nearly buried him. His raw one chord funk sounded old next to the slick new dance records, and after 1976's Bodyheat he disappeared from the Hot 100. Fred Wesley and Maceo Parker left in 1975 for Parliament Funkadelic, which was reaching its peak with grooves borrowed from Brown. Concert attendance fell and the tax battles helped wreck his business empire, which had included radio stations and a restaurant chain. By 1979's The Original Disco Man, Brown was letting producer Brad Shapiro do most of the writing. He left Polydor in 1981 and renamed his band the Soul Generals, the name it kept until his death.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The way back began with a cameo. In 1980 Brown played a fiery preacher in The Blues Brothers, which introduced him to a new generation. In 1982 a string of sold out shows at the Reseda Country Club in Los Angeles put him back in demand. In 1984 he recorded Unity with the hip hop pioneer Afrika Bambaataa. Then came Living in America, written by Dan Hartman and Charlie Midnight for Rocky IV, where Brown performed it during Apollo Creed's ring entrance. It reached number four in the United States in early 1986, his only top ten hit in Britain, and it won him a Grammy. That January he was one of the first inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Behind the comeback, his private life was collapsing. In 1984 he married his third wife, Adrienne Rodriguez. A former backing singer, Vicki Anderson, said his use of PCP, known as angel dust, had begun before 1982, and after the marriage he and Adrienne used it together. It fueled violent outbursts. He was arrested several times for assaulting her, and she once reported that he beat her with an iron pipe and shot at her car. In May 1988, Rolling Stone reported, he was so high in a New York hotel suite that a doctor had to be called and his show was cancelled. Brown denied using the drug.[1] [2]

In 1988 Brown was arrested again and again, for assault in April, then on drug and weapons charges in May. On the twenty fourth of September, according to Rolling Stone, he walked into an insurance seminar carrying a shotgun, then led police on a high speed chase along Interstate 20, across the Georgia and South Carolina state line. Brown later claimed the officers had shot at his car without cause and harassed him for years, but local authorities found no merit in that. He was convicted of assaulting a police officer, carrying a pistol and other offenses, and sentenced to six years in prison.[1] [2] [3]

The same year, according to a former publicist named Jacque Hollander, Brown raped her. She said he pulled his van to the side of a South Carolina road and assaulted her at gunpoint. Brown was never prosecuted. When she sued years later, the case was thrown out because the time limit had passed, and in 2007 the United States Supreme Court refused to revive it. Hollander said the case failed because of who he was. A CNN investigation in 2019 said that seven people corroborated her account of being secretly watched by Brown's people for years afterward. Brown's lawyer dismissed her claims as having no substance.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Prison, parole and the final tour

Brown served more than two years, and Al Sharpton drove down from New York every two weeks to visit, bringing him his hair care supplies. While he was inside, the world was sampling him. Hip hop producers had built a whole generation of records on his breaks, and in 1991 Polydor released Star Time, a four CD box set that the critic Robert Christgau called the finest box set ever released. He was paroled on the twenty seventh of February 1991. That June he returned with a pay per view concert at the Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles, with MC Hammer, Quincy Jones and a line of rappers paying homage.[1] [2] [3]

The nineties were a mix of honors and trouble. He received a Grammy for lifetime achievement in 1992 and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1997, the same year he played the Super Bowl halftime show. But the domestic violence went on. He was arrested for assaulting Adrienne four times between 1987 and 1995. She was hospitalized after the last assault in October 1995, and on the sixth of January 1996, before he could be tried, she died after plastic surgery. The official cause was an accidental overdose of painkillers. The charges against Brown were dropped. In January 1998 he spent a week in rehab for prescription drugs.[1] [2] [3]

He was sued repeatedly. A former employee, Lisa Agbalaya, accused him of sexual harassment, and in 2002 a Los Angeles jury cleared him of that but found him liable for firing her. Another singer, Lisa Rushton, alleged he withheld pay when she refused sexual favors, and later withdrew her suit. In 2000 police were called after he was accused of charging at an electricity repairman with a steak knife. Still, honors kept arriving. In 2003 South Carolina pardoned him for his past crimes there, and that December he received the Kennedy Center Honors. He also survived prostate cancer in 2004 and was living with diabetes.[1] [2] [3]

Brown's last relationship was as tangled as the rest. He hired a singer named Tomi Rae Hynie, a former Janis Joplin impersonator, as a backing vocalist, and they had a wedding ceremony and a son, James Brown the second, born in June 2001. But Hynie was still legally married to another man at the time of the ceremony. In January 2004 Brown was arrested after Hynie said he pushed her to the floor during an argument. He pleaded no contest and forfeited a bond of just over a thousand dollars. Augusta even postponed the unveiling of his bronze statue because of the charge, finally dedicating it in May 2005.[1] [2] [3]

To the end he kept a punishing schedule on his Seven Decades of Funk tour. In 2005 he sang Papa's Got a Brand New Bag with Will Young at the final Live 8 concert in Edinburgh. In 2006 he played to a record crowd of eighty thousand at the Oxegen festival in Ireland, played the BBC Electric Proms at the Roundhouse in London, and in November was inducted into the UK Music Hall of Fame, his last televised appearance. His knees were scarred from decades of dropping onto stages. A week before he died, looking gravely ill, he handed out toys and turkeys to children in Atlanta, as he had done for years.[1] [2] [3]

Christmas Day 2006

On the twenty third of December 2006, Brown turned up hours late to a dentist in Atlanta looking weak and dazed. The dentist refused to work on him and sent him to a doctor. The next day he was admitted to Emory Crawford Long Hospital for observation and treatment, with a cough that had lingered since a trip to Europe. He still expected to make his New Year's Eve shows in New Jersey and New York. In the early hours of Christmas Day, his manager of about forty years, Charles Bobbit, was at his bedside. Bobbit said Brown told him he was going away that night, took three long, quiet breaths, and died. It was about a quarter to two in the morning. He was seventy three.[1] [2] [3]

The Godfather of Soul had three farewells. On the twenty seventh of December his body was taken to New York for a procession and a public memorial at the Apollo Theater, where thousands of fans gathered. There was a private service in North Augusta, and then on the thirtieth a public celebration at the newly renamed James Brown Arena in Augusta, run like a soul revue. Michael Jackson spoke, MC Hammer danced, Bobby Byrd sang, and Bootsy Collins played bass with the Soul Generals. Al Sharpton officiated at every service. His longtime emcee Danny Ray later draped the famous cape over a microphone at the Grammy Awards in his honor.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Then the fighting started. Tomi Rae Hynie found the gates of the Beech Island estate padlocked and was photographed sobbing and shaking them. When the will was read on the eleventh of January 2007, it named six adult children, but not Hynie or her son. His body lay unburied in a gold casket in cold storage for more than two months while family members argued. He was finally laid to rest on the tenth of March 2007, in a crypt at a daughter's home in Beech Island, meant to be temporary until a public mausoleum could be built. The family also hoped to turn the house into a shrine like Graceland, but by 2021 that plan had never gotten off the ground.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In February 2019 CNN published a long investigation based on interviews with nearly one hundred and forty people. It found at least thirteen people who wanted an autopsy or a criminal inquiry into his death, including Dr. Marvin Crawford, who signed the death certificate and said Brown's condition changed too fast. Crawford said a nurse told him about drug residue in a breathing tube. His daughter Yamma declined an autopsy at the time. The investigation also revisited the 1996 death of Adrienne Brown. No criminal investigation into James Brown's death has been announced, and officially he died of heart failure brought on by pneumonia.[1] [2] [3]

The estate and the most sampled man alive

Brown had wanted most of his fortune to fund education for poor children in South Carolina and Georgia. Instead, his estate became one of the longest fights in music history. In 2015 a judge ruled that Hynie was his legal widow. In 2018 an appeals court agreed. But on the seventeenth of June 2020, the South Carolina Supreme Court ruled that she had never been legally married to him, because her earlier marriage had not been annulled in time. In July 2021 the parties reached a settlement, ending a fifteen year battle. That December the company Primary Wave bought the estate's music rights and his Beech Island home for a reported ninety million dollars.[1] [2] [3] [4]

His musical legacy is almost impossible to measure. He is often called the most sampled recording artist in the world. Clyde Stubblefield's short drum break on Funky Drummer, recorded in 1969, became one of the most used pieces of music ever, on records by Public Enemy, N.W.A, LL Cool J and the Beastie Boys. But Stubblefield had no songwriting credit and was paid no royalties for the samples. He told the New York Times it was disrespectful not to pay people for what they use. When he fell ill with kidney disease, Prince quietly paid about eighty thousand dollars of his medical bills. Stubblefield died in 2017.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The people who stood beside him have had their own reckoning. In 1986 Brown was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame alone, without the Famous Flames. It took until April 2012 for the Flames to be inducted, and by then only Bobby Bennett was still alive to accept. In 2003 Bobby Byrd, Vicki Anderson, Bennett and Stallworth had sued Brown and Universal over royalties, a case dismissed because it was filed too late. Byrd still said he loved Brown, and sang at his funeral. He died in September 2007. Brown himself was ranked seventh on Rolling Stone's list of the greatest artists of all time.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 2014 two films revisited his life, both produced by Mick Jagger. Alex Gibney's documentary Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown aired on HBO, and the drama Get On Up starred Chadwick Boseman, who did all of his own dancing. Some critics complained that the biopic left out key parts of his story. His home in Beech Island was found almost exactly as he left it, down to a Christmas tree in the foyer with unopened presents underneath. Brown once told Rolling Stone that in the year three thousand people would still be asking who James Brown was, and that only God knew the full answer.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The people around James Brown

James Brown and Bobby Byrd. They met across a baseball diamond at a juvenile prison in 1952, and Byrd's family sponsored Brown's release. Byrd founded the group that became the Famous Flames, then watched Brown take top billing. He left, came back, found the J.B.'s for him in 1970, and finally walked away in 1973 over song credits. He later sued over royalties but said he still loved Brown, and he sang at his funeral.[1] [2]

James Brown and Syd Nathan. The King Records boss hated Please, Please, Please, refused to fund Live at the Apollo, and went to court to stop Brown recording for another label. Brown said Nathan even had it written into his contract that he could not play and sing on the same record. Yet Brown never denied the debt, saying Mr. Nathan was the first man willing to take a chance on him.[1] [2] [3]

James Brown and Little Richard. Brown idolized Little Richard, and their paths crossed in Macon in 1955, where Richard steered the Flames to his manager Clint Brantley. By Etta James's account, Richard even scribbled the words please, please, please on a napkin that Brown carried around. Brown later credited Richard and his band the Upsetters with being the first to put funk into the rock and roll beat, and borrowed his taste for capes.[1] [2] [3]

James Brown and Joe Tex. Labelmates turned bitter enemies. Tex claimed Brown stole his dance moves and microphone tricks, and Brown recorded Tex's song Baby You're Right with a co-writing credit. Brown took up with Tex's former wife, and in 1963 their feud ended in gunfire at a Macon club. Tex spent the late sixties disputing Brown's Soul Brother Number One title, and Brown reportedly answered with a dismissive who on one of his records.[1] [2]

James Brown and Tammi Terrell. She joined his revue at seventeen in 1962 and recorded for his Try Me label under her real name, Tammy Montgomery. Brown, about twelve years older, began an abusive relationship with her. A member of the Famous Flames said he saw Brown beat her until she bled. She left him in 1963, found fame at Motown singing duets with Marvin Gaye, and died in 1970.[1] [2]

James Brown and Al Sharpton. They met in 1971, and Brown took the fatherless teenage preacher under his wing, drawing even closer after his own son Teddy died in 1973. Sharpton was his tour manager from 1973 to 1980, took the name Al on Brown's advice, and said Brown taught him you have to be dramatic to make people see things. He visited Brown in prison, and officiated at every one of his funeral services.[1] [2] [3] [4]

James Brown and Adrienne Rodriguez. His third wife, married in 1984. Their marriage was violent and drug fueled. They used PCP together, and he was arrested four times between 1987 and 1995 for assaulting her, once accused of beating her with an iron pipe. She died in January 1996 after plastic surgery, before he could be tried, and the charges were dropped. A friend later alleged she was murdered, which was never proven.[1] [2] [3]

James Brown and Tomi Rae Hynie. A backing singer and former Janis Joplin impersonator, she had a wedding ceremony with Brown and a son, James Brown the second, born in 2001. Brown was arrested in 2004 after she said he pushed her to the floor. Because she was still married to someone else at the time of the ceremony, her status as his widow was fought over for years until the South Carolina Supreme Court ruled against her in 2020.[1] [2] [3]

Clyde Stubblefield and John Jabo Starks. Brown hired both drummers in 1965, two weeks apart, expecting them to compete. Instead, one blues and church trained, one self taught from factory rhythms, they split the drum seat and created the grooves of Cold Sweat, Funky Drummer, Sex Machine and The Payback. Both were sampled endlessly without credit. They called themselves brothers, and Stubblefield said they never once argued.[1] [2] [3]

James Brown and Bootsy Collins. Bootsy was a teenager when Brown hired his band the Pacemakers after the 1970 walkout. Bootsy said Brown was the father figure he never had, lecturing him nightly about missing the one to make him work harder. Within a year Brown fired him and his brother for taking LSD before a show. Bootsy became a funk star with Parliament Funkadelic, and played bass at Brown's funeral.[1] [2]

James Brown and Pee Wee Ellis. The jazz trained saxophonist joined in 1965 and within two years was Brown's music director, co-writing twenty six songs with him. Ellis turned Brown's grunted bass lines into horn arrangements, writing Cold Sweat on a tour bus and arranging Say It Loud. He said his jazz background meeting Brown's rhythm and blues is what created funk. He left in 1969 and later worked for years with Van Morrison.[1] [2]

James Brown and Charles Bobbit. Bobbit was Brown's personal manager for about forty years, the man sent out in the middle of the night to find a studio, musicians and thirty children to record Say It Loud. Bobbit later said Brown had lived with undiagnosed diabetes for years and never complained about being sick. He was at the hospital bedside on Christmas morning 2006 and covered Brown with a blanket after he died.[1] [2]

Rare facts about James Brown

• James Brown's first and middle names were accidentally swapped on his birth certificate. He was meant to be named Joseph James Brown, after his father Joseph. The clerk reversed the names, and he went through life as James Joseph Brown.[1]
• In prison, Brown's first nickname was Music Box. His gospel group in juvenile detention made its own instruments, including a washtub bass and drums built from lard tubs. Brown played a homemade mandolin fashioned from a wooden box, and the inmates called him Music Box.[1] [2]
• He met his lifelong partner Bobby Byrd at a baseball game played at a juvenile prison. In 1952 the detention center team in Toccoa played a local side that included Bobby Byrd. Byrd befriended Brown, and his family then sponsored the young singer's early parole.[1] [2]
• Brown was paroled on condition that he never go back to his hometown of Augusta. When he was released in June 1952, the terms said he could not return to Augusta. So he settled in Toccoa, living with Bobby Byrd's family and washing dishes.[1] [2]
• Syd Nathan's contract reportedly barred Brown from playing an instrument and singing on the same record. Brown told Rolling Stone that his King Records boss never believed he could play keyboards, and wrote the restriction into his contract. Brown said Nathan was dead wrong.[1]
• His 1960 hit Mashed Potatoes was released under the fake name Nat Kendrick and the Swans. Contract trouble meant the band could not use Brown's name on the Dade Records single. When it became a top ten R&B hit, King moved Brown from Federal to its main label.[1]
• Brown wrote Out of Sight under the pen name Ted Wright. The 1964 single, recorded for Smash during his contract war with King, carried the pseudonym Ted Wright. Brown later called it the real beginning of his new rhythmic direction.[1]
• The master tape of Live at the Apollo was lost for years and found by accident. The jazz historian Phil Schaap was searching a vault of about one hundred thousand reels for a Max Roach tape when he pulled out an anonymous box marked Second Show James Brown. That allowed the first proper CD release in 1990.[1]
• Brown said he lost seven to ten pounds of sweat at every show. Rolling Stone reported that each performance cost him seven to ten pounds, some of it sweating straight through the soles of his boots. He left the stage with bleeding knees.[1] [2]
• His famous cape routine was inspired by a professional wrestler. Brown wrote in his 2005 memoir that the flamboyant wrestler Gorgeous George helped create the James Brown people saw on stage, from the cape to the outfits. Little Richard's capes played a part too.[1] [2]
• Those dance moves on stage were sometimes secret signals announcing fines. When Brown spun to face the band and flashed his splayed fingers, audiences thought it was choreography. He was actually telling a musician how much he would be fined for a mistake.[1]
• After a band rebellion, Brown vowed never to be without two of everything. Jabo Starks told NPR that after an earlier drummer led a revolt, Brown kept spare players on every instrument. When Clyde Stubblefield arrived to audition, five drum kits were on stage.[1]
• The single of Papa's Got a Brand New Bag was sped up, raising its pitch by a half step. The band recorded it in one take and, Brown admitted, they were tired. The released single was edited and sped up. The original speed version only appeared in 1991 on Star Time.[1]
• I Got You began life as a flop called I Found You by his backing singer Yvonne Fair. Brown wrote I Found You, and Fair released it in 1962 with little success. Reworked as I Got You, it became his biggest pop hit, reaching number three in 1965.[1]
• The title It's a Man's Man's Man's World is a play on a 1963 comedy film. The name riffs on It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. In 2002 Brown sang the song as a duet with Luciano Pavarotti at a benefit for Angolan refugees.[1]
• The horn line of Cold Sweat was inspired by Miles Davis. Pee Wee Ellis said he borrowed the idea from Miles Davis's So What and wrote the parts on the tour bus. The band recorded it live in a semicircle around one microphone, in a single take.[1]
• Funky Drummer was not released on an album until 1986. It was a modest single in 1970. Its first album release came on the 1986 compilation In the Jungle Groove, put out precisely because hip hop DJs were already hungry for the break.[1] [2]
• Prince paid about eighty thousand dollars of Clyde Stubblefield's medical bills. The Funky Drummer received no royalties for decades of samples. When kidney disease left him needing dialysis, Prince, a great admirer, quietly covered much of the cost.[1]
• Brown owned a radio station whose call letters were his own initials. In November 1967 he bought a Knoxville station for a reported seventy five thousand dollars and renamed it WJBE. Its slogan was 1430 Raw Soul.[1]
• The Say It Loud chorus was sung by about thirty children from Watts and Compton. The kids were gathered on a bus in Los Angeles and taught the call and response on the spot. Brown wanted the song to sound like a children's song so children would grow up proud.[1] [2] [3]
• In 1968 Brown dressed as Santa Claus to hand out three thousand free Christmas dinners in New York. PBS reports it was part of a program he launched called Operation Black Pride, giving certificates for Christmas dinners in poor Black neighborhoods of New York City.[1]
• Brown cut off his trademark processed hair as a gesture to the Black Power movement. He told Rolling Stone that growing a natural was like giving something up for Lent, because his hair was a real attraction to his business.[1]
• The 1970 Sex Machine album sounds live, but much of it was recorded in a studio. The ten minute version of Sex Machine on the album had reverb and overdubbed crowd noise added to disguise its studio origins.[1]
• His band once released a single as A.A.B.B., the Above Average Black Band. It was a tongue in cheek reply to the Scottish group the Average White Band and their hit Pick Up the Pieces. The J.B.'s version reached number 108 in 1975.[1]
• The Payback was James Brown's only studio album certified gold. Despite decades of hits, the 1973 double album was his only studio record to earn a gold certification from the Recording Industry Association of America.[1]
• In 1971 Brown was made a freeman of the city of Lagos, Nigeria. The honor came from the Oba of Lagos, Adeyinka Oyekan, during Brown's first African tours, for his influence on Black people around the world.[1]
• A bridge in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, is named the James Brown Soul Center of the Universe Bridge. Residents voted on a new name in 1993 and that one won with 7,717 votes. Brown came to the ribbon cutting, and a rancher petition to change it back failed.[1]
• In 1993 Brown re-recorded Sex Machine for a Japanese Cup Noodles campaign. The new version was released in connection with his sponsorship of Nissin's miso flavored Cup Noodles in Japan.[1]
• The talking robot from Rocky IV went on tour with James Brown. The robot, called SICO and built in New York, was written into the film after helping Sylvester Stallone's son. It toured with Brown in the 1980s.[1]
• In 2001 a company made a singing James Brown toy. Gemmy Industries, the firm behind the Big Mouth Billy Bass, released an animatronic Brown figure that sang I Got You.[1]
• Brown and Muhammad Ali used to compete to see who could stop Manhattan traffic for more blocks. According to Rolling Stone, the two friends would hop out of a limo at busy intersections, with Al Sharpton along, to see whose fans would bring the streets to a halt.[1]
• Brown's Beech Island home was found with its Christmas tree and unopened presents still in place. When Primary Wave took over the estate years after his death, the house was almost untouched, down to the tree in the foyer and food in the cabinets.[1]
• Brown's groundskeeper drove him to hospital on his final trip and still looks after the house. David Washington, hired in the late 1980s at double his mill wage, drove Brown to hospital in December 2006, and as of 2024 was still caring for the property.[1]
• Augusta changed its official slogan to We Feel Good in his honor. In 2005 local campaigners won approval for the slogan, and the city's civic center was renamed the James Brown Arena, where his public funeral was held.[1]
• The statue of Brown in Augusta was delayed a year because of a domestic violence charge. The life size bronze on Broad Street was meant to be dedicated in 2004, but was put on hold after his arrest over Tomi Rae Hynie, and unveiled in May 2005.[1]
• Brown was the voice of himself on The Simpsons in 1993. He appeared in the episode Bart's Inner Child. He also made cameos in the Jackie Chan film The Tuxedo and in Undercover Brother.[1]
• Every time RB Leipzig scores at home, the stadium plays I Got You. The German football club uses Brown's song as its goal music at its stadium in Leipzig.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.