James Brown

James Joseph Brown (May 3, 1933 – December 25, 2006) was an American singer, songwriter, dancer, musician, and record producer. The central progenitor of funk music and a major figure of 20th-century music, he is referred to by various nicknames, among them "Mr. Dynamite", "the Hardest-Working Man in Show Business", "Minister of New Super Heavy Funk", "Godfather of Soul", "King of Soul", and "Soul Brother No. 1". In a career that lasted more than 50 years, he influenced the development of several music genres. Brown was one of the first ten inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on January 23, 1986. His music has been heavily sampled by hip-hop musicians and other artists.

Brown began his career as a gospel singer in Toccoa, Georgia. He rose to prominence in the mid-1950s as the lead singer of the Famous Flames, a rhythm and blues vocal group founded by Bobby Byrd. With the hit ballads "Please, Please, Please" and "Try Me", Brown built a reputation as a dynamic live performer with the Famous Flames and his backing band, sometimes known as the James Brown Band or the James Brown Orchestra. His success peaked in the 1960s with the live album Live at the Apollo and hit singles such as "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag", "I Got You (I Feel Good)" and "It's a Man's Man's Man's World".

During the late 1960s, Brown moved from a continuum of blues and gospel-based forms and styles to a new approach to music-making, emphasizing stripped-down interlocking rhythms that influenced the development of funk music. By the early 1970s, Brown had fully established the funk sound after the formation of the J.B.s with records such as "Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine" and "The Payback". He also became noted for songs of social commentary, including the 1968 hit "Say It Loud – I'm Black and I'm Proud". Brown continued to perform and record until his death from pneumonia in 2006.

Brown recorded and released 17 singles that reached No. 1 on the Billboard R&B charts. He also holds the record for the most singles listed on the Billboard Hot 100 chart that did not reach No. 1. Brown was posthumously inducted into the first class of the Rhythm & Blues Music Hall of Fame in 2013 as an artist and then in 2017 as a songwriter. He received honors from several other institutions, including inductions into the Black Music & Entertainment Walk of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame. In Joel Whitburn's analysis of the Billboard R&B charts from 1942 to 2010, Brown is ranked No. 1 in the Top 500 Artists. He is ranked seventh on Rolling Stone's list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time, and at No. 44 on their list of the 200 Greatest Singers of All Time.

James Joseph Brown was born on May 3, 1933, in a small wooden shack located in Barnwell, South Carolina, to a 16-year-old young American Black woman named Susie (née Behling; 1916–2004), and 21-year-old American Black and Native-American Joseph Gardner Brown (1912–1993) Brown's name was supposed to have been Joseph James Brown, but his first and middle names were mistakenly reversed on his birth certificate. The Brown family lived in poverty in Elko, South Carolina, which was an impoverished town in 1933. They moved to Augusta, Georgia when James was four or five. His family first settled at one of his aunts' brothels and later moved into a house shared with another aunt. Brown's mother eventually left the family after a contentious and abusive marriage and moved to New York.

Brown began singing in talent shows as a young child, first appearing at Augusta's Lenox Theater in 1944, winning the show after singing the ballad "So Long". While in Augusta, Brown performed buck dances for change to entertain troops from Camp Gordon at the start of World War II as their convoys traveled over a canal bridge near his aunt's home, where he first heard the legendary blues musician Howlin' Wolf play guitar. He learned to play the piano, guitar, and harmonica during this period, and became inspired to become an entertainer after hearing "Caldonia" by Louis Jordan and his Tympany Five. In his teen years, Brown briefly had a career as a boxer.

At the age of 16, Brown was convicted of robbery and sent to a juvenile detention center in Toccoa. There, he formed a gospel quartet with four cellmates, including Johnny Terry. Brown met singer Bobby Byrd when the two played against each other in a baseball game outside the detention center. Byrd discovered that Brown could sing after hearing of "a guy called Music Box", which was Brown's nickname at the prison. Byrd has since said he and his family helped to secure an early release, which led to Brown promising the court he would "sing for the Lord".

Brown was released on a work sponsorship with Toccoa business owner S. C. Lawson, who was impressed with Brown's work ethic and secured his release with a promise to keep him employed for two years. Brown was paroled on June 14, 1952. Brown went on to work with both of Lawson's sons, and came back to visit the family from time to time throughout his career. Shortly after being paroled, he joined the gospel group the Ever-Ready Gospel Singers, featuring Byrd's sister Sarah.

Brown joined Bobby Byrd's group in 1954, having evolved from the Gospel Starlighters, an a cappella gospel group, to the Avons, an R&B group. He reputedly joined the band after one of its members, Troy Collins, died in a car crash. Along with Brown and Byrd, the group consisted of Sylvester Keels, Doyle Oglesby, Fred Pulliam, Nash Knox and Nafloyd Scott. Influenced by R&B groups such as Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, the Orioles, and Billy Ward and his Dominoes, the group changed its name, first to the Toccoa Band and then to the Flames. Nafloyd's brother Baroy later joined the group on bass guitar. Brown, Byrd and Keels switched lead positions and instruments, often playing drums and piano. Johnny Terry later joined, by which time Pulliam and Oglesby had long left.

Berry Trimier became the group's first manager, booking them at parties near college campuses in Georgia and South Carolina. The group had already gained a reputation as a good live act when they renamed themselves the Famous Flames. In 1955, the group contacted Little Richard while performing in Macon. Richard convinced the group to get in contact with his manager at the time, Clint Brantley, at his nightclub. Brantley agreed to manage them after seeing the group audition. He then sent them to a local radio station to record a demo session, where they performed their own composition "Please, Please, Please", which was inspired when Little Richard wrote the words of the title on a napkin and Brown was determined to make a song out of it.

The Famous Flames eventually signed with King Records' Federal subsidiary in Cincinnati, Ohio, and issued a re-recorded version of "Please, Please, Please" in March 1956. The song became the group's first R&B hit, selling more than a million copies. None of their follow-ups gained similar success. In 1957, Brown replaced Clint Brantley as manager and hired Ben Bart, chief of Universal Attractions Agency. In 1957 the original Flames broke up, after Bart changed the name of the group to "James Brown and The Famous Flames".

In October 1958, Brown released the ballad "Try Me", which hit number one on the R&B chart in the beginning of 1959, becoming the first of seventeen chart-topping R&B hits. Shortly afterwards, he recruited his first band, led by J. C. Davis, and reunited with Bobby Byrd who joined a revived Famous Flames lineup that included Eugene "Baby" Lloyd Stallworth and Bobby Bennett, with Johnny Terry sometimes coming in as the "fifth Flame". Brown, the Flames, and his entire band debuted at the Apollo Theater on April 24, 1959, opening for Brown's idol, Little Willie John.

Federal Records issued two albums credited to Brown and the Famous Flames. Both contained previously released singles. In 1960, Brown began multi-tasking in the recording studio involving himself, his singing group, the Famous Flames, and his band, a separate entity from the Flames, sometimes named the James Brown Orchestra or the James Brown Band. In 1960, the band released the top ten R&B hit "(Do the) Mashed Potatoes" on Dade Records, owned by Henry Stone, billed under the pseudonym "Nat Kendrick & the Swans" due to label issues. As a result of its success, King president Syd Nathan shifted Brown's contract from Federal to the parent label, King, which according to Brown in his autobiography meant "you got more support from the company". While with King, Brown, under the Famous Flames lineup, released the hit-filled album Think! and in 1961 released two albums with the James Brown Band earning second billing. With the Famous Flames, Brown sang lead on several more hits, including "Bewildered", "I'll Go Crazy" and "Think", songs that hinted at his emerging style.

As a vocalist, Brown performed in a forceful shout style derived from gospel music. Meanwhile, "his rhythmic grunts and expressive shrieks harked back farther still to ring shouts, work songs, and field cries", according to the Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History (1996): "He reimported the rhythmic complexity from which rhythm and blues, under the dual pressure of rock 'n' roll and pop, had progressively fallen away since its birth from jazz and blues."

For many years, Brown's touring show was one of the most extravagant productions in American popular music. At the time of Brown's death, his band included three guitarists, two bass guitar players, two drummers, three horns and a percussionist. The bands that he maintained during the late 1960s and 1970s were of comparable size, and the bands also included a three-piece amplified string section that played during the ballads. Brown employed between 40 and 50 people for the James Brown Revue, and members of the revue traveled with him in a bus to cities and towns all over the country, performing upwards of 330 shows a year with almost all of the shows as one-nighters.

Before James Brown appeared on stage, his personal MC gave him an elaborate introduction accompanied by drumrolls, as the MC worked in Brown's various sobriquets along with the names of many of his hit songs. The introduction by Fats Gonder, captured on Brown's 1963 album Live at the Apollo is a representative example:

So now ladies and gentlemen it is "Star Time". Are you ready for "Star Time?" Thank you and thank you very kindly. It is indeed a great pleasure to present to you at this particular time, national[ly] and international[ly] known as "The Hardest-Working Man in Show Business", the man that sings "I'll Go Crazy"..."Try Me"..."You've Got the Power"..."Think"..."If You Want Me"..."I Don't Mind"..."Bewildered"... the million dollar seller, "Lost Someone"... the very latest release, "Night Train"... let's everybody "Shout and Shimmy"... "Mr. Dynamite", the amazing "Mr. Please Please" himself, the star of the show, James Brown and the Famous Flames!!

James Brown's performances were famous for their intensity and length. His own stated goal was to "give people more than what they came for — make them tired, 'cause that's what they came for.'" Brown's concert repertoire consisted mostly of his own hits and recent songs, with a few R&B covers mixed in. Brown danced vigorously as he sang, working popular dance steps such as the Mashed Potato into his routine along with dramatic leaps, splits and slides. His horn players and singing group, The Famous Flames, typically performed choreographed dance routines, and later incarnations of the Revue included backup dancers. Male performers in the Revue were required to wear tuxedoes and cummerbunds long after more casual concert wear became the norm among the younger musical acts. Brown's own extravagant outfits and his elaborate processed hairdo completed the visual impression. A James Brown concert typically included a performance by a featured vocalist, such as Vicki Anderson or Marva Whitney, and an instrumental feature for the band, which sometimes served as the opening act for the show.

Brown's main social activism was in preserving the need for education among youths, influenced by his own troubled childhood and his being 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 dropout-prevention charity 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. In 1968 James Brown endorsed Hubert Humphrey. Later, Brown gained the confidence of President Richard Nixon, to whom he found he had to explain the plight of Black Americans.

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 performing for troops stationed in Vietnam.

On April 5, 1968, a day after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee, Brown provided a free citywide televised concert at the Boston Garden to maintain public order and calm concerned Boston residents, over the objections of the police chief, who wanted to call off the concert, which he thought would incite violence. The show was later released on DVD as Live at the Boston Garden: April 5, 1968. According to the documentary The Night James Brown Saved Boston, then-mayor Kevin White had strongly restrained the Boston police from cracking down on minor violence and protests after the assassination, while religious and community leaders worked to keep tempers from flaring.

White arranged to have Brown's performance broadcast multiple times on Boston's public television station, WGBH, thus keeping potential rioters off the streets, watching the concert for free. Angered by not being told of this, Brown demanded $60,000 for "gate" fees, money he thought would be lost from ticket sales on account of the concert being broadcast for free, and then threatened to go public about the secret arrangement when the city balked at paying up afterwards, news of which would have been a political death blow to White and spark riots of its own. White eventually lobbied a behind-the-scenes power-brokering group known as "The Vault" to come up with money for Brown's gate fee and other social programs, contributing $100,000. Brown received $15,000 from them via the city. White also persuaded management at the Garden to give up their share of receipts to make up the differences. Following this successful performance, Brown was counseled by President Johnson to urge cities ravaged from riots following King's assassination to not resort to violence, telling them to "cool it, there's another way".

In 1962, Tammi Terrell joined the James Brown Revue. Brown became sexually involved with Terrell—even though she was only 17—in a relationship that continued until she escaped his physical abuse. Bobby Bennett, former member of the Famous Flames, told Rolling Stone about the abuse he witnessed: "He beat Tammi Terrell terrible", said Bennett. "She was bleeding, shedding blood." Terrell, who died in 1970, was Brown's girlfriend before she became famous as Marvin Gaye's singing partner in the mid-1960s. "Tammi left him because she didn't want her butt whipped", said Bennett, who also claimed he saw Brown kick one pregnant girlfriend down a flight of stairs.

Brown was married three times. His first marriage was to Velma Warren in 1953. They had one son together. Over a decade later, the couple had separated. They divorced in 1969. They maintained a close friendship that lasted until Brown's death. After Brown's death, Warren contended that the couple had never legally divorced, but her claim was quickly disproved.

At the end of his life, Brown lived in Beech Island, South Carolina, directly across the Savannah River from Augusta, Georgia. According to his longtime manager Charles Bobbit, Brown had been living with Type 2 diabetes, which went undiagnosed for years. In 2004, Brown was successfully treated for prostate cancer. Regardless of his health, Brown maintained his reputation as the "hardest working man in show business" by keeping up with his grueling performance schedule.

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 physician right away about his medical condition.

The following day, Brown went to the Emory Crawford Long Memorial Hospital 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 and his condition worsened throughout the day.

Brown died at approximately 1:45 a.m. EST (06:45 UTC) on Christmas Day 2006, 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.

Brown received awards and honors throughout his lifetime and after his death. In 1993, the City Council of Steamboat Springs, Colorado, conducted a poll of residents to choose a new name for the bridge that crossed the Yampa River on Shield Drive. The winning name, with 7,717 votes, was "James Brown Soul Center of the Universe Bridge". The bridge was officially dedicated in September 1993, and Brown appeared at the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the event. A petition was started by local ranchers to return the name to "Stockbridge" for historical reasons, but they backed off after citizens defeated their efforts because of the popularity of Brown's name. Brown returned to Steamboat Springs, Colorado, on July 4, 2002, for an outdoor festival, performing with bands such as the String Cheese Incident.

During his long career, Brown received many prestigious music industry awards and honors. In 1983 he was inducted into the Georgia Music Hall of Fame. Brown was one of the first inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at its inaugural induction dinner in New York on January 23, 1986. At that time, the members of his original vocal group, the Famous Flames, Bobby Byrd, Johnny Terry, Bobby Bennett, and Lloyd Stallworth, were not inducted. On April 14, 2012, the Famous Flames were automatically and retroactively inducted into the Hall of Fame alongside Brown, without the need for nomination and voting, on the basis that they should have been inducted with him in 1986.

On February 25, 1992, Brown was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 34th annual Grammy Awards. Exactly a year later, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 4th annual Rhythm & Blues Foundation Pioneer Awards. A ceremony was held for Brown on January 10, 1997, to honor him with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

On June 15, 2000, Brown was honored as an inductee to the New York Songwriters Hall of Fame. On August 6, 2002, he was honored as the first BMI Urban Icon at the BMI Urban Awards. His BMI accolades include an impressive ten R&B Awards and six Pop Awards. On November 14, 2006, Brown was inducted into the UK Music Hall of Fame, and he was one of several inductees to perform at the ceremony. In recognition of his accomplishments as an entertainer, Brown was a recipient of Kennedy Center Honors on December 7, 2003. In 2004 Rolling Stone magazine ranked James Brown as No. 7 on its list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time. Rick Rubin wrote in appreciation: In one sense, James Brown is like Johnny Cash. Johnny is considered one of the kings of country music, but there are a lot of people who like Johnny but don't like country music. It's the same with James Brown and R&B. His music is singular — the feel and tone of it. James Brown is his own genre. He was a great editor — as a songwriter, producer and bandleader. He kept things sparse. He knew that was important. And he had the best players, the funkiest of all bands. If Clyde Stubblefield had been drumming on a Motown session, they would not have let him play what he did with James on "Funky Drummer." James's vision allowed that music to get out. And the music always came from the groove, whereas for so many R&B and Motown artists at the time it was more about conventional songs. James Brown's songs are not conventional. "I Got You," "Out of Sight" — they are ultimately vehicles for unique, even bizarre grooves ... I first saw James Brown around 1980, between my junior and senior years in high school. It was in Boston. It was in a catering hall, with folding chairs. And it was one of the greatest musical experiences of my life. His dancing and singing were incredible, and he played a Hammond B3 organ tufted with red leather, with "Godfather" in studs written across the front.

In a 2010 article for Rolling Stone, Robert Christgau called Brown "the greatest musician of the rock era". He appeared on the BET Awards June 24, 2003, and received the Lifetime Achievement Award presented by Michael Jackson, and performed with him. In 2004, he received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement presented by Awards Council member Aretha Franklin.