James Joseph Brown was an American singer, songwriter, dancer, musician, he is often referred to as the "Godfather of Soul".
Background
James Brown was born on May 3, 1933, in Barnwell, South Carolina, to Joe and Susie Brown. His mother left the family when James was only four years old. His father, looking for work, moved the remaining family to Augusta, Georgia, to live with an aunt, who oversaw a brothel (a house for prostitutes). In his autobiography, Brown stated that he also had Chinese and Native American ancestry; his father was of mixed African-American and Native American descent, whilst his mother was of mixed African-American and Chinese descent.
Career
Growing up, Brown was heavily influenced by jazz and rhythm-and-blues, two musical types dominated by African Americans. Other influences were the circuses and traveling shows with their variety of acts, both singing, and dancing.
But Brown's musical dreams were soon drowned out by his tough childhood. He grew up fast, and by his teens, Brown had drifted into crime. At sixteen he went to jail for multiple car thefts. Though initially sentenced to eight to sixteen years of hard labor, he got out in less than four years for good behavior. After unsuccessful attempts at boxing and baseball, he formed a gospel group called the Swanees with his prison pal Johnny Terry.
The Swanees shifted toward the popular mid-1950s "doo-wop" style and away from the gospel, changing their name to the Famous Flames. Brown sang lead and played drums; their song "Please, Please, Please" was released as a single in 1956 and sold a million copies. By 1960 the group had become the James Brown Revue and was generating proto-funk dance hits like "(Do the) Mashed Potato." Deemed the "King of Soul" at the Apollo Theater, New York City's black music capital, Brown proceeded over the years to burn up the charts with singles like "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag," "I Got You (I Feel Good)," "It's a Man's Man's Man's World," "Cold Sweat," "Funky Drummer," and many others.
Brown's unique style mixed a handful of influences, but his intensity of punctuating vocal sounds—groans, grunts, wails, and screams—came right out of the southern church. His calls to sax player Maceo Parker to "blow your horn," and trademark cries of "Good God!" and "Take it to the bridge!" became among the most recognizable catch-phrases in popular music. His band—through its members shifted constantly—maintained a reputation as one of the tightest in the business. Starting and stopping on a dime, laying down merciless grooves, it followed Brown's lead as he worked for crowds the world over into a frenzy. Brown adopted a series of extravagant titles over the years, but during this period he was known primarily as "The Hardest-Working Man in Show Business."
The year 1970 saw the release of Brown's powerful single "(Get Up, I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine," a relentless funk groove featuring several hot young players, notably Bootsy Collins and his brother Phelps, also known as "Catfish." Brown soon signed with Polydor Records and took on the nickname the "Godfather of Soul," after the highly successful movie The Godfather. Further refining his hard funk sound, he released hits like "Get on the Good Foot," "Talking Loud and Saying Nothing," and "Soul Power." With the 1970s box-office success of black action films—known within the industry as "blaxploitation" pictures—Brown began writing movie soundtracks, scoring such features as Slaughter's Big Rip-Off and Black Caesar.
James Brown may have been one of the biggest pop stars in the world, but he also found himself in a fair share of trouble. In 1975 the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) claimed that he owed $4.5 million in taxes from 1969 to 1970, and many of his other investments collapsed. His band quit after a punishing tour of Africa, and most tragically, his son Teddy died in an automobile accident. Brown's wife later left him, taking their two daughters.
By the late 1970s, the arrival of disco music created career problems for the "Godfather of Soul." Things improved slightly after Brown appeared as a preacher in the smash 1980 comedy film The Blues Brothers, but his big comeback of the 1980s came with the release of "Living in America," the theme from the film Rocky IV, which he performed at the request of movie star Sylvester Stallone (1946–). The single was his first million-selling hit in thirteen years. As a result, Brown signed a new deal with CBS Records.
Through it all, Brown had been struggling with substance abuse. In May of 1988 he faced charges of assault, weapons and drug possession, and resisting arrest. In December he made national headlines when he was arrested again after leading police on a two-state car chase and was sentenced to six years in State Park Correctional Facility in Columbia, South Carolina. His confinement became a political issue for his fans, and Brown was ultimately released in early 1991.
Unfortunately, Brown's troubles were not at an end. In December of 1994, he was charged with misdemeanor domestic violence after a confrontation with his third wife, Adrienne. And on October 31, 1995, Brown was again arrested for spousal abuse. He later blamed the incident on his wife's addiction to drugs, stating in a press release, "She'll do anything to get them." Just over two months later, Adrienne died at the age of forty-seven after undergoing cosmetic surgery.
But things seemed to be getting back on track for Brown. In 1998 he released the album I'm Back.
Brown's ability for survival and the shining legacy of his work managed to overshadow such ugly incidents.
The Next Step included Brown's final single, "Killing Is Out, School Is In". Both albums were produced by Derrick Monk. Brown's concert success, however, remained unabated and he kept up with a grueling schedule throughout the remainder of his life, living up to his previous nickname, "The Hardest Working Man in Show Business", in spite of his advanced age.
In 2003, Brown participated in the PBS American Masters television documentary James Brown: Soul Survivor, which was directed by Jeremy Marre.
Brown celebrated his status as an icon by appearing in a variety of entertainment and sports events, including an appearance on the WCW pay-per-view event, SuperBrawl X, where he danced alongside wrestler Ernest "The Cat" Miller, who based his character on Brown, during his in-ring skit with The Maestro. Brown then appeared in Tony Scott's short film Beat the Devil in 2001. He was featured alongside Clive Owen, Gary Oldman, Danny Trejo, and Marilyn Manson. Brown also made a cameo appearance in the 2002 Jackie Chan film The Tuxedo, in which Chan was required to finish Brown's act after having accidentally knocked out the singer.
In 2002, Brown appeared in Undercover Brother, playing himself.
In 2004, Brown performed in Hyde Park, London as a support act for Red Hot Chili Peppers concerts. The beginning of 2005 saw the publication of Brown's second book, I Feel Good: A Memoir of a Life of Soul, written with Marc Eliot. In February and March, he participated in recording sessions for an intended studio album with Fred Wesley, Pee Wee Ellis, and other longtime collaborators. Though he lost interest in the album, which remains unreleased, a track from the sessions, "Gut Bucket", appeared on a compilation CD included with the August 2006 issue of MOJO. He appeared at Edinburgh 50,000 – The Final Push, the final Live 8 concert on July 6, 2005, where he performed a duet with British pop star Will Young on "Papa's Got A Brand New Bag". The previous week he had performed a duet with another British pop star, Joss Stone, on the United Kingdom chat show Friday Night with Jonathan Ross.
In 2006, Brown continued his "Seven Decades of Funk World Tour", his last concert tour where he performed all over the world. His final U.S. performances were in San Francisco on August 20, 2006, as a headliner at the Festival of the Golden Gate (Foggfest) on the Great Meadow at Fort Mason. The following day, August 21, he performed at Humboldt State University in Arcata, CA, at a small theatre (800 seats) on campus. His last shows were greeted with positive reviews, and one of his final concert appearances at the Irish Oxegen festival in Punchestown in 2006 was performed for a record crowd of 80,000 people. He played a full concert as part of the BBC's Electric Proms on October 27, 2006, at The Roundhouse, supported by The Zutons, with special appearances from Max Beasley and The Sugababes.
Brown's last televised appearance was at his induction into the UK Music Hall of Fame in November 2006, before his death the following month. Before his death, Brown had been scheduled to perform a duet with singer Annie Lennox on the song "Vengeance" for her new album Venus, which was released in 2007.
On December 23, 2006, Brown became very ill and arrived at his dentist's office in Atlanta, Georgia, several hours late. His appointment was for dental implant work. During that visit, Brown's dentist observed that he looked "very bad ... weak and dazed". Instead of performing the work, the dentist advised Brown to see a doctor right away about his medical condition.
Brown went to the Emory Crawford Long Memorial Hospital the next day for medical evaluation and was admitted for observation and treatment. According to Charles Bobbit, his longtime personal manager, and friend, Brown had been struggling with a noisy cough since returning from a November trip to Europe. Yet, Bobbit said, the singer had a history of never complaining about being sick and often performed while ill. Although Brown had to cancel upcoming concerts in Waterbury, Connecticut, and Englewood, New Jersey, he was confident that the doctor would discharge him from the hospital in time for his scheduled New Year's Eve shows at the Count Basie Theatre in New Jersey and the B. B. King Blues Club in New York, in addition to performing a song live on CNN for the Anderson Cooper New Year's Eve special. Brown remained hospitalized, however, and his condition worsened throughout the day.
On Christmas Day, 2006, Brown died at approximately 1:45 am EST, at age 73, from congestive heart failure, resulting from complications of pneumonia. Bobbit was at his bedside and later reported that Brown stuttered, "I'm going away tonight," then took three long, quiet breaths and fell asleep before dying.
In 2019, an investigation by CNN and other journalists led to suggestions that Brown had been murdered.
The increasingly militant stance of many African American activists in the late 1960s led Brown—by now among an elite group of influential African Americans—to flirt with the "Black Power" movement. Even so, the singer generally counseled nonviolence and won praise from President Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) when a broadcast of his words helped head off a race riot. He was also saluted by Vice President Hubert Humphrey (1911–1978) for his pro-education song "Don't Be a Dropout." Brown's music did begin to incorporate more obvious political messages, many of which stated his belief that African Americans needed to take control of their economic destinies.
During the 1968 presidential campaign, Brown endorsed Democratic presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey and appeared with Humphrey at political rallies. Brown began supporting Republican president Richard Nixon after being invited to perform at Nixon's inaugural ball in January 1969. Brown's endorsement of Nixon during the 1972 presidential election negatively impacted his career during that period with several national Black organizations boycotting his records and protesting at his concert shows. Brown stated he was neither Democratic nor Republican despite his support of Republican presidents such as Nixon and Ronald Reagan. In 1999, when being interviewed by Rolling Stone, the magazine asked him to name a hero in the 20th century; Brown mentioned John F. Kennedy and then-96-year-old U.S. Senator, and former Dixiecrat, Strom Thurmond, stating "when the young whippersnappers get out of line, whether Democratic or Republican, an old man can walk up and say 'Wait a minute, son, it goes this way.' And that's great for our country. He's like a grandfather to me." In 2003, Brown was the featured attraction of a Washington D.C. fundraiser for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Following the deaths of Ronald Reagan and his friend Ray Charles, Brown said to CNN, "I'm kind of in an uproar. I love the country and I got – you know I've been around a long time, through many presidents and everything. So after losing Mr. Reagan, who I knew very well, then Mr. Ray Charles, who I worked with and lived with like, all our life, we had a show together in Oakland many, many years ago and it's like you found the placard."
Views
Brown's main social activism was in preserving the need for education among youths, influenced by his own troubled childhood and his forced to drop out of the seventh grade for wearing "insufficient clothes". Due to heavy dropout rates in the 1960s, Brown released the pro-education song, "Don't Be a Drop-Out". Royalties of the song were donated to charity used for dropout-prevention programs. The success of this led to Brown meeting with President Lyndon B. Johnson at the White House. Johnson cited Brown for being a positive role model to the youth. A lifelong Republican, who gained the confidence of President Richard Nixon, to whom he found he had to explain the plight of Black Americans. He was also harassed by J. Edgar Hoover and the IRS, probably because Hoover thought it "dangerous" that a young "Black radical" had the ear of the president.
Throughout the remainder of his life, Brown made public speeches in schools and continued to advocate the importance of education in school. Upon filing his will in 2002, Brown advised that most of the money in his estate go into creating the I Feel Good, Inc. Trust to benefit disadvantaged children and provide scholarships for his grandchildren. His final single, "Killing Is Out, School Is In", advocated against murders of young children in the streets. Brown often gave out money and other items to children while traveling to his childhood hometown of Augusta. A week before his death, while looking gravely ill, Brown gave out toys and turkeys to kids at an Atlanta orphanage, something he had done several times over the years.
Though Brown performed at benefit rallies for civil rights organizations in the mid-1960s, Brown often shied away from discussing civil rights in his songs in fear of alienating his crossover audience. In 1968, in response to a growing urge of anti-war advocacy during the Vietnam War, Brown recorded the song, "America Is My Home". In the song, Brown performed a rap, advocating patriotism and exhorting listeners to "stop pitying yoursel[ves] and get up and fight". At the time of the song's release, Brown had been participating in performing for troops stationed in Vietnam.
Quotations:
In the book about his life, Living in America, James Brown told the author, "I never try to express what I actually did, " regarding his influence on the American soul scene. "I wouldn't try to do that, 'cause definition's such a funny thing. What's put together to make my music-it's something which has real power. It can stir people up and involve 'em. But it's just something I came to hear. "
"I'm wherever God wants me to be and wherever the people need for me to be, " he told the New York Times.
"I came from nothing and I made something out of myself," Brown commented in a New York Times interview. "I dance and I sing and I make it happen. I've made people feel better. I want people to be happy."
Personality
At the same time, Brown's harshness as a leader meant that bandmembers were constantly facing fines for lateness, flubbed notes, missed cues, violating his strict dress code, or even for talking back to him. His musicians also complained of overwork and insufficient pay, and some alleged that Brown took credit for ideas they had developed.
According to Charles Bobbit, his longtime personal manager and friend, Brown had been struggling with a noisy cough since returning from a November trip to Europe. Yet, Bobbit said, the singer had a history of never complaining about being sick and often performed while ill.
For most of his career, Brown had a strict drug- and alcohol-free policy for any member in his entourage, including band members, and would fire people who disobeyed orders, particularly those who used or abused drugs and alcohol. Some early members of Brown's vocal group the Famous Flames were fired due to alcohol use. Despite the policy, some of the original members of Brown's 1970s band, the J.B.'s, including Catfish and Bootsy Collins, intentionally took LSD during a concert gig in 1971, causing Brown to fire them after the show because he had suspected them to be on drugs all along.
However, by the mid-1980s it was alleged that Brown himself was using drugs. After he met and later married Adrienne Rodriguez, she and Brown began using PCP ("angel dust"). This drug usage resulted in violent outbursts from him and he was arrested several times for domestic violence against Rodriguez while high on the drug. After a 1988 arrest for allegedly hitting his wife with a lead pipe and shooting at her in their car during an argument, Brown went on the CNN program Sonya Live in L.A. and appeared to be behaving erratically in response to questions asked by host Sonya Friedman, refusing to discuss the domestic issue with Rodriguez, and wanting instead to focus on his professional life. At one point during the interview, Brown began shouting out his song titles to one of Friedman's questions. The interview later went viral and led some to assume that Brown, who refused to take off his shades throughout the interview, was either drunk or on drugs.
One of Brown's former mistresses recalled in a GQ magazine article on Brown some years after his death that Brown would smoke PCP "until that got hard to find", and cocaine, mixed with tobacco in Kool cigarettes. In January 1998, he spent a week in rehab to deal with an addiction to prescription drugs. A week after his release, he was arrested for unlawful use of a handgun and possession of cannabis. Prior to his death in December 2006, when Brown entered Emory University Hospital, traces of cocaine were found in the singer's urine. His widow suggested Brown would "do crack" with a female acquaintance.
Quotes from others about the person
As trombonist Fred Wesley told Living in America author Cynthia Rose, "James was bossy and paranoid. I didn't see why someone of his stature would be so defensive. I couldn't understand the way he treated his band, why he was so evil. "
Charles Shaar Murray ventured in his book Crosstown Traffic that "playing with James Brown was a great way to learn the business and to participate in the greatest rhythm machine of the sixties. It was a very poor way to get rich, to get famous, or to try out one's own ideas. "
Connections
Brown was married four times. His first marriage was to Velma Warren in 1953, they had three sons together. Over a decade later, the couple had separated and the final divorce decree was issued 1969; they maintained a close friendship that lasted until Brown's death. Brown's second marriage was to Deidre "Deedee" Jenkins, on October 22, 1970. They had two daughters together. The couple was separated by 1979, after what his daughter describes as years of domestic abuse, and the final divorce decree was issued on January 10, 1981. His third marriage was to Adrienne Lois Rodriguez (March 9, 1950 – January 6, 1996), in 1984. It was a contentious marriage that made headlines due to domestic abuse complaints; Rodriguez died in January 1996. Less than a year after her death, Brown hired Tomi Rae Hynie to be a background singer for his band. They married in 2001.
On December 23, 2002, Brown and Hynie held a wedding ceremony that was officiated by the Rev. Larry Flyer. Following Brown's death, controversy surrounded the circumstances of the marriage, with Brown's attorney, Albert "Buddy" Dallas, reporting that the marriage was not valid; Hynie was still married to Javed Ahmed, a man from Bangladesh. Hynie claimed Ahmed married her to obtain residency through a Green Card and that the marriage was annulled but the annulment did not occur until April 2004. In an attempt to prove her marriage to Brown was valid, Hynie produced a 2001 marriage certificate as proof of her marriage to Brown, but she did not provide King with court records pointing to an annulment of her marriage to him or to Ahmed. According to Dallas, Brown was angry and hurt that Hynie had concealed her prior marriage from him and Brown moved to file for an annulment from Hynie. Dallas added that though Hynie's marriage to Ahmed was annulled after she married Brown, the Brown–Hynie marriage was not valid under South Carolina law because Brown and Hynie did not remarry after the annulment. In August 2003, Brown took out a full-page public notice in Variety featuring Hynie, James II and himself on vacation at Disney World to announce that he and Hynie were going their separate ways. In 2015, a judge ruled Hynie as Brown's legal widow.
Brown had numerous children and acknowledged nine of them including five sons – Teddy (1954–1973), Terry, Larry, Daryl, and James Joseph Brown Jr. and four daughters – Lisa, Dr. Yamma Noyola Brown Lumar, Deanna Brown Thomas and Venisha Brown (1964–2018). Brown also had eight grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. Brown's eldest son, Teddy, died in a car crash on June 14, 1973. According to August 22, 2007, article published in the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph, DNA tests indicate that Brown also fathered at least three extramarital children. The first one of them to be identified is LaRhonda Pettit (born 1962), a retired air stewardess and teacher who lives in Houston. During contesting of Brown's will, another of the Brown family attorneys, Debra Opri, revealed to Larry King that Brown wanted a DNA test performed after his death to confirm the paternity of James Brown Jr.—not for Brown's sake but for the sake of the other family members. In April 2007, Hynie selected a guardian ad litem whom she wants appointed by the court to represent her son, James Brown Jr., in the paternity proceedings. James Brown Jr. was confirmed to be his biological son.