Written by Paul Tingen
James Brown was called “the Godfather of Soul,” “Soul Brother No. 1,” “Mr. Dynamite,” and “the Minister of Super Heavy Funk.” He was also known as “the hardest working man in show business,” and “King of the One-Nighters,” because at one time he performed as many as 350 gigs a year.
All these titles illustrate Brown’s importance as one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century. He invented funk, which did not only become a genre in its own right, but also a crucial influence on rock, soul, pop, hip-hop, and African and Latin American music, and so on.
Brown was one of the leading artists of his day, with 17 number one singles in the Billboard R&B charts to his name. As a singer, he moved the soul genre forwards, with a powerful vocal style that incorporated influences from blues, gospel, jazz, country and rock, as well as a stunning ability to scream in tune.
Brown also was a songwriter, bandleader, arranger, and producer, and a consummate showman, who developed spectacular and acrobatic dance routines that were a huge influence on musicians like Mick Jagger, Michael Jackson, Prince, and many more.
Finally, Brown broke down boundaries of racial segregation and championed black empowerment. In 1968, he recorded a song called “Say It Loud – I’m Black and I’m Proud,” which became a rallying call for the entire black community. The phrase continues to empower black people today.
James Brown’s life was the archetypal rags-to-riches story; but also had a darker side, with arrests for domestic violence, theft, assault, and drugs and weapons charges. Despite this, Brown was and remains a global icon, one of the few artists who changed music so profoundly that it’s possible to speak of a time before and after.
EARLY DAYS
James Joseph Brown was born in Barnwell, South Carolina, on May 3, 1933. He grew up in extreme poverty. Brown loved music, and hearing jazz and R&B singer Louis Jordan perform on the radio inspired him to become a singer and an entertainer. When Brown was 11, he won a talent contest by singing a song called “So Long.”
Brown was convicted of theft at the age of 16, and put in a juvenile detention center, where he received the nickname “Music Box,” because of his vocal talents. He also met with fellow-singers John Terry and Bobby Byrd at the center, and formed a gospel quartet.
Brown was released from the detention center in 1952 and, two years later, joined a vocal group called The Avons, founded by Bobby Bird. In 1955, after having gone through several name changes, the group took on the name The Famous Flames.
The Famous Flames started performing songs written by Brown, and one of them was “Please, Please, Please,” which he had co-written with John Terry. It was released on Federal, a sublabel of King Records, in March 1956. “Please, Please, Please,” gradually became a major hit and went on to sell a million copies. The song has since become a classic and, in 2011, Rolling Stone magazine included it in a list of 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.
The success of “Please, Please, Please,” established Brown as the undisputed leader of the group, and in 1957, the name was changed to James Brown and The Famous Flames. The group’s next nine single releases flopped. However, in 1958, the ballad “Try Me” became Brown’s first number one on the Billboard R&B charts.
THE BEGINNING OF FUNK
In April 1959, with a changed line-up, Brown and his group debuted at the Harlem Apollo in New York in April 1959. For the next few years, James Brown enjoyed several hit songs, including “I Want You So Bad,” “Think,” “Bewildered,” “Don’t Mind,” “This Old Heart,” “I’ll Go Crazy,” and “Shout and Shimmy.”
In October 1962, James Brown and The Famous Flames performed another concert at the Apollo Theater in Harlem — and in May 1963 — a 31-minute excerpt was released as Live at the Apollo. The album spent 66 weeks in the Billboard album chart, reaching number two. The album had a huge, lasting impact, and was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1998, and added to the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress in 2004.
Live at the Apollo is often described as one of the greatest live albums of all time. By this stage, Brown had developed a stage routine that involved advanced footwork and dancing, with Brown at one point pretending to fall to the floor, and then being helped up by some of his band members. A cape was part of the act, in part influenced by wrestler Gorgeous George. James Brown adopted the name “Mr. Dynamite” around this time.
A track by Brown released on the Smash label in 1964 – “Out of Sight” – has been earmarked by Brown as his first move towards funk. At the beginning of 1965, he recorded “Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag,” which was another important milestone in the development of funk. The emphasis beat’s emphasis had shifted from two and four to the first beat of the bar, or ‘the one,’ as Brown called it. Horns complemented the groove with staccato, rhythmic accents.
“Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag” was released in June 1965, and spent eight weeks at the top of the American R&B charts. It also earned Brown his first Grammy Award, in the Best Rhythm & Blues Recording category. Later that year, the single “I Got You (I Feel Good)” was released, and likewise went to both number one in the R&B charts and number three in the General Single charts.
“I Got You (I Feel Good)” was another seminal moment in the development of funk. The band laid down a funky rhythm that still sounds modern today. In February of 1966, Brown recorded a ballad that would become one of the best-known songs of his career, “It’s A Man’s Man’s Man’s World.” The song was ideally suited to Brown’s emotive singing, and he performed it for the rest of his life.
FUNK BLUEPRINT
In May 1967, James Brown recorded a song called “Cold Sweat,” that has been credited as being “the first true funk song.” “Cold Sweat” is a development of a song that Brown recorded in 1962: “I Don’t Care.” The new song was based on a bassline that the singer sang to arranger, co-writer, and saxophonist Pee Wee Ellis, who added horns parts inspired by those in Miles Davis’s “So What.”
“Cold Sweat” is mostly one chord throughout the song, with a switch up in the bridge; and has a modal feel. The overall arrangement was very sparse, and Brown’s declamatory singing style later became an influence on rapping. When it was released in July 1967, “Cold Sweat” sounded revolutionary. The song became the blueprint for funk music, and has been extensively sampled by hip-hop musicians.
Several more essential funk releases followed in quick succession, including “Give It Up or Turnit A Loose,” “Licking Stick – Licking Stick,” “Funky Drummer,” “Ain’t It Funky, “I Got The Feeling,” and “Mother Popcorn.” The run culminated in, arguably, the greatest and most famous funk track of all time, “Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine;” released in early 1970.
Like on “Cold Sweat,” Brown’s funk tracks in the late-sixties and early-seventies featured music stripped down to its bare bones, with all focus on the rhythm, and other instruments playing interlocking, repetitive patterns. Rhythmic influences include New Orleans funk, as well as Afro-Cuban and African rhythms. Brown’s innovation of putting the emphasis on the one was foundational to the rhythm, and freed up space for the band to be creative and add more heavily syncopated accents.
THE HEYDAY OF FUNK
Many of Brown’s late sixties and early seventies recordings would become enormously influential in later decades, and still are today. “Funky Drummer” in particular has become one of the most sampled pieces of music of all time. The drum break, played by Clyde Stubbefield, is often seen as foundational to the hip-hop genre.
The “Funky Drummer” drum break has been used by countless hiphop acts, including Public Enemy, Run-DMC, Kanye West, and even pop artists like George Michael, Britney Spears, Ed Sheeran, and thousands of others.
While it’s easy to say Brown’s influence reached far into the future, his recordings had an immediate impact on his contemporaries. Funk became a separate genre in the US within months of Brown releasing his ground-breaking funk tracks in the late sixties. Many funk bands emerged, among them: Sly and the Family Stone, Funkadelic, Booker T. & the M.G.s, and The Pacemakers.
Brown’s new band, after March 1970, contained two members from The Pacemakers, brothers William Earl “Bootsy” Collins on bass and Phelps “Catfish” Collins on guitar. Both Collins brothers would go on to play crucial roles in one of the greatest funk ensembles of all time, Parliament-Funkadelic.
Brown’s new band recorded “Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine” on April 25, 1970. They also recorded classic funk tracks like “Super Bad,” “Soul Power,” and “Talkin’ Loud and Sayin’ Nothing;” all of which have been frequently sampled since. The 1970 double album, Sex Machine, is widely regarded as one of Brown’s most important albums.
He further developed his funk style on his 1971 album, Hot Pants, which was his first for Polydor Records. This process continued through 1972 with There It Is and Get On The Good Foot. The Payback, released in December 1973, is regarded as one of Brown’s most coherent studio albums, and was rewarded with a number one position on the US R&B album charts. The title track has, again, been widely sampled.
Next up was a double album, Hell, made with arranger David Matthews, and released in June, 1974. It spawned two number one hit singles, “My Thang” and “Papa Don’t Take No Mess.” Reality was released in 1974 as well, but critics began to notice a lack of musical progression in Brown’s music over the past couple of years. There also was a decline in the chart positions of his songs and albums. Reality did, however, contain the popular track “Funky President (People It’s Bad),” which was widely sampled.
CONTEMPORARY SOUND
By the mid-seventies, Brown was dealing with multiple issues. His support for Richard Nixon during the presidential campaign of 1972 had cost him a large part of his black audience. His income was declining as a result, and to compound the problem, the IRS began chasing him for tax payments in 1973. All this led to the collapse of his businesses a few years later.
On an artistic level, Brown seemed unsure where to go next. Sex Machine Today, released in 1975, was a rather obvious attempt to both revive the good old days and connect with the disco trend of the day, and it flopped. Brown’s next album, Get Up Offa That Thing, released in 1976, did better, and the title track was arguably his last hit in his own funk style.
Brown did enjoy a few more hits in the late seventies, including the ballad “Kiss in ‘77” and the disco-influenced “It’s Too Funky In Here.” The latter appeared on an album called The Original Disco Man, released in 1979. It was characterized by a contemporary sound, with synthesizers as well as a modern mix and production.
Brown left Polydor in 1981, blaming the record company for the lack of success of his records. During the final 25 years of his life, Brown released another ten albums. Like those found in The Original Disco Man, many of the tracks in Brown’s later albums were written and produced for him by others, which dramatically changed the feel of his music.
Brown enjoyed a major hit in 1985 with the song “Living In America,” from his Gravity album, which was released in 1986. It earned Brown a Grammy Award nomination for Best R&B Song and a Grammy Award for Best Male R&B Vocal Performance.
CULTURAL FORCE
By the end of the eighties, Brown’s darker side caught up with him, when he was arrested for assault, and on drugs and weapons charges. He spent nearly three years in prison, and was released in February 1991. There also were several civil suits for sexual harassment, as well as arrests for domestic violence.
After his release from prison, Brown grew more and more into the role of living legend. Brown’s last television appearance occurred with his induction into the UK Music Hall of Fame, in November 2006. He died on December 25th, 2006.
The contributions James Brown made to the world of music are so enormous, that they are hard to overstate. Funk has become a dominant music genre, and he played a part in both breaking down racial segregation and instilling pride in the African-American community.
Brown also received many prizes, awards, and honors—including an induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986, a Grammy Award for lifetime achievement in 1992, and a Kennedy Center Honor. Today, funk influences can be heard throughout popular music, and in hip-hop, Brown remains the most-sampled artist of all time.
He put it very well in his autobiography, “Others may have followed in my wake, but I was the one who turned racist minstrelsy into Black soul, and by doing so, became a cultural force.”