Brown, James

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Brown, James

May 3, 1933

Singer and songwriter James Joe Brown Jr. was born near Barnwell, South Carolina, to Joe Brown, a turpentine worker, and Susan Behlings. After his mother left the family when the boy was four years of age, Brown spent his formative years in a brothel run by his aunt Handsome Washington in Augusta, Georgia. After the authorities closed the brothel in 1943, he lived with his aunt Minnie Walker, receiving occasional tutoring on drums and the piano from neighbors and showing early promise on the harmonica and organ. He absorbed the music of the black church and of the minstrel shows that passed through Augusta, he heard the blues his father learned in the turpentine camps, and he listened to pop music on the radio. Fascinated by "soundies" (filmed musical numbers that preceded the feature at movie theaters), he paid close attention to those of Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five, who performed jump blues and novelty songs with great showmanship. Singing Jordan's "Caldonia," Brown entered and won local talent contests while not yet in his teens. At thirteen he formed the Cremona Trio, his first musical group, performing the songs of such rhythm-andblues artists as Jordan, Amos Milburn, Wynonie Harris, Charles Brown, and the Red Mildred Trio.

These early musical endeavors were cut short when Brown's habit of stealing clothes and other items from unlocked automobiles earned him a harsh eight- to sixteen-year prison sentence, which he began serving at Georgia Juvenile Technical Institute (GJTI) in Rome, Georgia, in 1949. In GJTI, he formed a gospel quartet with three other inmates, including Johnny Terry, who would later become one of the original Famous Flames. After serving three years, he was paroled in Toccoa, the small town in northeast Georgia to which GJTI had been moved. He soon formed a gospel group with several youthful Toccoa musicians, including Bobby Byrd, a talented keyboard player, who would remain a central figure in James Brown's musical endeavors into the early 1970s.

The fledgling gospel group soon began playing rhythm and blues and performed for dances and in small clubs throughout eastern Georgia and neighboring areas of South Carolina until Little Richard's manager induced them to come to the vital music scene centered in Macon, Georgia. At a Macon radio station, the group, soon to be known as the Famous Flames, recorded a demo of "Please, Please, Please," which attracted the attention of Cincinnati-based King records. Rerecorded in Cincinnati and released in 1956, the song eventually climbed to number six on the rhythm-and-blues record chart. During the next two years, Brown sought to duplicate the success of "Please," essaying a number of rhythm-and-blues styles and occasionally imitating the differing approaches of Little Richard and King labelmates Hank Ballard and the Midnighters and the Five Royales. In 1958, with the recording of "Try Me," a pleading ballad steeped in gospel, he achieved the number one position on the rhythm-andblues chart and began to realize his own distinctive style.

Brown soon became a headliner at Harlem's Apollo Theater and toured tirelessly, playing as many as three

hundred dates annually and presenting a stage revue complete with comedians, warm-up acts, dancers, and a full orchestra. As a singer, he developed a powerful shouting style that owed much to gospel, but his rhythmic grunts and expressive shrieks harked back farther still to ring shouts, work songs, and field cries. As a band leader, he developed one of the most disciplined bands in entertainment and maintained it for more than three decades. He reimported the rhythmic complexity from which rhythm and blues, under the dual pressure of rock and roll and pop, had progressively fallen away since its birth from jazz and blues. As one of the greatest vernacular dancers in rhythm and blues, he integrated the latest dance crazes with older black popular dance styles and integrated them into a seamless whole that came to be known as "the James Brown." He became one of the most exciting live performers in popular music, capping his performances with a collapse-and-resurrection routine that became his trademark.

With the album Live at the Apollo (1963), Brown brought the excitement of his stage show to record buyers throughout the world. Through the mid-1960s, he enjoyed enormous success with such compositions as "Out of Sight" (1964), "I Feel Good (I Got You)" (1965), "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" (1965), and "Cold Sweat" (1967). These infectious, rhythmically complex dance hits propelled him to international stardom and heralded funk, his most original and enduring contribution to popular music around the world. Dispensing almost entirely with chord changes, Brown by the late 1960s had stripped the music to its rhythmic essence. Horns, guitars, and voices—including Brown's rich assortment of grunts, groans, shrieks, and shouts—were employed percussively. Rhythmic emphasis fell heavily on the downbeat at the beginning of each measure, imparting a sense of overwhelming propulsiveness to the music while leaving ample room for complex rhythmic interplay.

From the late 1960s through the mid 1970s, Brown and his band, assisted by gifted arrangers Pee Wee Ellis and Fred Wesley, produced powerful, polyrhythmic funk music that included inspired dance tracks as heard on albums such as Sex Machine (1970) and Super Bad (1971). He also wrote inspirational political and social commentary such as the anthem of black pride "Say It Loud—I'm Black and I'm Proud" (1968). Brown also became something of a political figure; several presidential candidates sought his endorsement. Following the murder of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in April 1968, Brown helped quell riots in Boston and Washington, D.C. In 1971 he produced a single about the dangers of drug use, "King Heroin."

Although Brown's records sold well through the early 1970s, the magnitude of his accomplishment was obscured by the rise of disco. Plagued by personal problems, including the break-up of his second marriage, the death of his oldest son, a federal tax case, and troubles with his numerous business enterprises, he briefly went into semiretirement, though he never entirely stopped performing, and he recorded numerous albums during this period, including Hot (1976) and Bodyheat (1976).

In the early 1980s he staged a successful comeback. He made cameo appearances in numerous motion pictures such as The Blues Brothers (1980). A series of retrospective albums, including The Federal Years (Part 1 and 2, 1984) and Dead on the Heavy Funk (1985), traced the development of his music from 1956 to 1976, and he returned to extensive recording and performing. His music was also widely sampled by rap artists, though in the 1990s he became a vocal supporter of a movement to persuade rap artists to avoid obscene lyrics. In 1986 he performed "Living in America" in the film Rocky IV and in 1987 became one of the first performers inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

In 1988, after leading police in Georgia and South Carolina on a high-speed chase that ended when the police fired some two dozen bullets into his truck, Brown was sentenced to six years in prison for failing to stop for a police officer and aggravated assault ("I aggravated them and they assaulted me," he famously stated). Although the lengthy sentence sparked a national outcry for Brown's pardon, he remained incarcerated for more than two years, earning early release in 1991. He had further legal problems in the 1990s, including a domestic violence charge and a marijuana and illegal firearm arrest in 1998. Nevertheless, he reemerged to be seen as one of the towering figures of popular music throughout the world. His musical innovations inform rock and jazz-funk hybrids, dance pop, reggae, hip-hop, and much African and Latin popular music. Critics, formerly ignoring him, now generally recognize him as one of the most influential American musicians of the past half century. His output has been prodigious, including more than seventy albums. In 1991 he released Star Time, a seventy-one-song, four-CD compilation of his greatest hits, and in 2003 50th Anniversary Collection was released. He has also produced hundreds of recordings by other artists. In 1992 he was given an Award of Merit at the American Music Awards ceremony for lifetime achievement, and in 2003 he received a Kennedy Center Honor.