James Brown
Hailed as "the hardest-working man in show business," he played every instrument as though it were a drum and, with rhythm alone, rewrote the grammar of popular music.
At a glance 🔭💭
Some coordinates adapted from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) · Pleiades (CC BY 3.0)
Companions ⏳🌊
- InfluenceLittle Richard
An elder from Macon whose raw shouts and tireless stagecraft shaped him in his early years.
- ColleagueBobby Byrd
The friend who helped win his parole and his lifelong partner, singing beside him from the Flames days through "Sex Machine."
- PatronSyd Nathan
As head of King Records he clashed with him often, yet released nearly all of his early hits to the world.
- ColleaguePee Wee Ellis
The saxophonist and arranger who co-created "Cold Sweat," he helped lay down the grammar of funk.
- ColleagueFred Wesley
The trombonist and arranger who led the J.B.'s in the 1970s, he was a pillar of that era's sound.
- DiscipleMichael Jackson
He said he grew up watching his dancing, joined him onstage in 1983, and honored him at his 2006 memorial.
I. Child of the woods · 1933–1949
(Cabin) He was born in May 1933 in a shack in the woods near Barnwell, South Carolina. His father, Joe Brown, was a laborer who tapped pine trees for turpentine sap and sold it; his mother, Susie Behling, left home when he was about four. In his autobiography he wrote that he was not breathing when he was born and that a relative revived him. When his father went off to work, he was often left alone in the cabin in the woods. (Augusta) At five or six he was sent across the river to relatives in Augusta, Georgia. The house, run by an aunt called "Honey," was a place of gambling, prostitution and bootleg liquor. He shined shoes and picked cotton, and danced for coins in front of soldiers from a nearby army base. Once he was sent home from school because his clothes were too ragged, and his formal education ended in grade school. (Church) He learned music in church and on the street. The preacher in the Black church lifting and dropping the congregation with shouts and gestures, the dancing of traveling shows, the jaunty blues of Louis Jordan pouring from the radio — these were his textbooks. He picked up piano, harmonica and drums by watching others, and even won prizes singing at neighborhood talent shows. (Prison) Poverty led to crime. In 1949, at sixteen, he was caught breaking into cars and sentenced to 8 to 16 years. He never hid this period later in life, and said in many interviews that the memory of hunger drove him all his life.
II. Brothers of Toccoa · 1949–1956
(Reformatory) He served his sentence at a juvenile correctional facility in northern Georgia. There he formed a gospel quartet with fellow inmates, and on a day when the facility's baseball team played an outside team, he met Bobby Byrd, a young man from Toccoa. Byrd remembered both his singing and his refusal to lose. (Parole) In 1952, after just over 3 years, he was paroled thanks to Byrd's family, who vouched for a job and a place to live. Barred by the terms of his parole from returning to Augusta, he found a second home in Toccoa. He worked odd jobs, boxed and played baseball, and in 1953 married Velma Warren; their first son, Teddy, was born the following year. (The Flames) Joining Byrd's gospel group, he soon became the center of the stage. The group turned to secular music and became the Flames, teaming up with Clint Brantley, who managed Little Richard in Macon, Georgia. He was deeply captivated by Little Richard's raw shouting and tireless performances, and built his name by taking over the local dates Richard left behind when he became a national star. (Debut) In 1956, a demo recorded at a Macon radio station reached the ears of Ralph Bass, a talent scout for King Records. Bass signed the group to the subsidiary Federal, and "Please, Please, Please," recorded that February in Cincinnati, rose to No. 6 on the R&B chart. Label head Syd Nathan reportedly disliked releasing it, calling it a song that just repeated one word. It was the moment the cry he had learned in church was first cut into a record.
His first recording, 4 years after leaving the correctional facility. Carrying the cry he had learned in church straight into R&B, it became his first hit despite the label head's objections.
- Listen to the vocal as he repeats the single word of the title almost as the whole song, wringing it out with a different pitch and roughness each time. It resembles the way a Black preacher builds heat by repeating the same phrase.
- The Flames support him from behind with soft harmonies while he shouts above them in a cracking voice — a texture carried straight over from the church's call and response, where leader and chorus trade lines.
- This is a 1950s R&B ballad laid over a slow, swaying rhythm that splits each beat into three (a triplet feel). Heard beside his funk 10 years later, it makes vivid how different his starting point was.
- Onstage, this song was the setting for the cape routine. Collapsing in exhaustion, he would be draped in a cape by the MC and led away, only to throw it off and return to the microphone — a scene repeated for decades, preserved in its classic form in the 1964 T.A.M.I. Show footage.
III. Night at the Apollo · 1956–1963
(Lull) For nearly 2 years after the first hit, one follow-up after another failed. Nathan weighed dropping him, and the original members drifted away one by one. He rose again in 1958 when the ballad "Try Me" hit No. 1 on the R&B chart, and the billing settled into "James Brown and the Famous Flames." (Discipline) He built his name through endless touring. In 1 year he might take the stage close to 300 days, and when Ben Bart, head of a New York booking agency, became his manager, the slogan "the hardest-working man in show business" followed him. He was strict with his band to the point of harshness. He fined members who missed a beat or failed to shine their shoes, and the story that he signaled the amount of the fine with hand gestures mid-performance survives in the testimony of many band members. (Apollo) He believed his real power lay on the stage. Nathan objected that reselling already-released songs as a live record would lose money, but he paid the costs himself and recorded his show at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, New York, in October 1962. Live at the Apollo, released the following year, reached No. 2 on the Billboard album chart and stayed on the chart for more than 1 year. It was the moment his music, until then confined to Black radio and clubs, made its way onto the record shelves of white listeners. (Castle) When the money came in, he bought a castle-like mansion in St. Albans, Queens, New York. For a boy raised in a shack in the woods the house was a token of success, yet he spent most of his days on the road.
A live recording made with his own money against the label's opposition. His belief that the stage was his real power was proven by a No. 2 chart placing.
- In the opening, as MC Fats Gonder breathlessly shouts out his nicknames and hits, you can feel that the whole show is built like a single ritual.
- In "Lost Someone," which runs for nearly 10 minutes, he lowers his voice to a whisper and then drives it up to a scream, conducting the roar of the crowd. The heart of this album is the way the audience's screams blend into the recording like an instrument.
- There is almost no pause between songs. In the medley, where several songs are strung together without a break, you can hear the tension of the band changing direction all at once at a single cue from him.
- Microphones are said to have been hung above the audience as well, capturing the crowd's reaction at full volume. So the heat of stage and audience egging each other on comes across with a texture entirely unlike the studio versions.
IV. A new rhythm · 1964–1967
(Independence) In 1964, with his King contract still in force, he began releasing recordings on Smash, a Mercury imprint. After a legal battle he returned to King, but with far broader control over recording and production. That same year, in the concert film The T.A.M.I. Show, shot in California, his dancing and cape routine put the Rolling Stones, who followed him, in an awkward spot. Keith Richards later recalled that going on after him had been a mistake. (First beat) "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" in 1965 was the song where his music turned. He demanded that the band throw its weight onto the first beat of each bar — the so-called "on the one" — and the guitar and horn section were used like percussion, stamping out rhythm rather than melody. The song reached No. 1 on the R&B chart and No. 8 on the pop chart, and won him his first Grammy. (Contrast) That same year he released the jubilation of "I Got You (I Feel Good)," and the next year, in the string-laden ballad "It's a Man's Man's Man's World," he poured out in a breaking voice the confession that the world men built is empty without women. Onstage he moved between ecstasy and lament in a single evening. (Sweat) "Cold Sweat," made in 1967 with saxophonist and arranger Pee Wee Ellis, held the harmony almost to a single chord and locked every instrument together like the teeth of a rhythmic gear. Many critics name it the starting point of funk. He had grown rich enough to tour by private jet, yet never gave up the habit of collecting his fees in cash himself. That was how deep the memory of poverty ran.
Having seized the reins of production after his fight with the label, he declared his new rhythm-centered direction for the first time with this song. It won him his first Grammy.
- Rather than letting chords ring out, the guitar marks the beat with short, choked strums of the strings (the chicken scratch). It is one of the first moments the guitar is used like a percussion instrument.
- The horn section (a group of wind instruments such as trumpets and saxophones), instead of singing the melody, hits short, sharp stabs, nailing down each joint of the rhythm together with the drums.
- Listen for the feel of "on the one," with the whole band leaning its weight on the first beat of each bar. It is the sensation of your body dropping down with a jolt at the start of every bar.
- The released version was sped up from the original recording, so it sounds slightly higher in pitch and hurried in tempo. It was cut down from an original take about 7 minutes long to make the single, and in the full version released later you can also hear his voice talking to the band in the studio.
A ballad released in a period when he was pushing rhythm hard, it reveals the face of lament hidden behind the stage of ecstasy.
- The strings lay down a heavy, desolate floor, and the brass swells dramatically and then subsides. The slow, swaying beat lends the song the weight of a funeral march.
- He starts low, almost speaking, then cracks his voice toward the end and drives it into a howl. The climax is the moment in the final passage when the line between speech and scream collapses.
- It is a mode of address that lists, one by one, the things men have built, only to confess, as if collapsing, that none of it means anything without a woman. Listen for the structure that begins as a boast and ends as a confession.
- In concert he would stretch the song out at length, carrying it on like a sermon. On live recordings from the 1970s you can hear the band hold fast to a single chord while he improvises, driving the emotion ever higher.
Written with Pee Wee Ellis, it is a song that strips away harmony and leaves only rhythm. Many critics name it as the starting point of funk.
- Most of the song stays on what is nearly a single chord. Rhythm, rather than melody or chord changes, drives it forward, and the reason it never grows dull lies in the way the instruments interlock.
- Pee Wee Ellis recalled that he took the idea for the horn section's short riff (a brief repeated phrase) from Miles Davis's “So What.” It is the moment a jazz sensibility entered the body of R&B.
- Clyde Stubblefield's drums scatter tiny, softly struck ornaments (ghost notes) between the main beats, so the rhythm writhes ceaselessly in place.
- Midway through, when he shouts that he's going to give the drummer some, the other instruments drop out and a break of drums alone follows. Running on into Maceo Parker's saxophone solo, this is where the song catches its breath once and then takes off again.
V. Say it loud · 1968–1975
(Boston) On April 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. His Boston Garden concert, scheduled for the following day, was nearly canceled, but city officials decided to hold it and broadcast it live on television. On that night, when he personally talked down the fans who rushed the stage and sent them back, Boston, it is recorded, stayed calmer than other cities where riots spread. (Pride) That summer he entertained American troops in Vietnam, and in August he released “Say It Loud — I'm Black and I'm Proud,” fronted by a chorus of children. A song celebrating Black pride, it became a slogan of the era, but he recalled that it cost him part of his white audience. His politics did not run in a single direction. When he declared his support for President Nixon in 1972, he was met by protesters outside his concerts. (The band) In March 1970, his band, unhappy with their pay, refused to perform and walked out en masse. He called in young musicians from Cincinnati, the brothers Bootsy Collins on bass and Catfish Collins on guitar, to form 'J.B.'s', and promptly recorded “Sex Machine.” Later, Fred Wesley on trombone and Maceo Parker on saxophone held up his 1970s sound. Around the same time, Sly and the Family Stone blended his rhythms with rock and won over young listeners, and funk branched off in two directions. (Loss) His first marriage ended in 1969, and he remarried the following year. The hits kept coming after his move to Polydor in 1971, but in 1973 his eldest son, Teddy, was killed in a car accident at nineteen. “The Payback,” released at the end of that year, an album that broods over betrayal and retribution atop a low, cold groove, became the defining work of his 1970s.
In the year Dr. King was assassinated, this was the political statement he made through music. As it became a slogan of its time, it came at a price for him too.
- When he throws out the lead line, a chorus of children gathered in Los Angeles answers with full force. It is the moment the church's call and response turns into a chant at a protest.
- Its delivery is closer to a speech or a sermon than to song, and this way of laying words over rhythm is often cited as a distant ancestor of rap.
- Bass and guitar repeat a short riff relentlessly while the horns jab in between. Pushing one groove without showy changes, it builds the force of the chant.
- Its heart is the unabashed proclamation of Black pride, and it reached No. 1 on the R&B chart. He recalled that after this song some of his white audience turned their backs on him.
Recorded right after the band walked out en masse, it was the first fruit of the J.B.'s, newly assembled from young Cincinnati musicians. A crisis turned into a new sound.
- Bootsy Collins, then barely eighteen, builds the song's skeleton with a bass riff that bounces like a rubber band in the low register, repeated over and over. The groove is audibly younger and more elastic than that of the previous band.
- His longtime partner Bobby Byrd answers his shouts, taking the response vocal. The quick back-and-forth between the two drives the whole song.
- Midway through, the song turns over at the point where he and the band trade question and answer about taking it to the bridge (the middle section that changes the song's mood). There is also a short keyboard passage he plays himself.
- The crowd roar that makes it sound live was dubbed over a studio recording. It shows his showman's instinct for carrying the heat of the stage onto record.
Only a modest hit on release, it later became the song holding the drum passage most reused in the hip-hop era.
- Late in the song, a break follows in which the other instruments drop out and only Clyde Stubblefield's drums remain for a few bars. This is the very passage counted among the most sampled drum breaks in hip-hop.
- Finely subdividing the hi-hat (two metal cymbals stacked together) and mixing tiny ornaments (ghost notes) into the snare, he creates a rhythm that is simple yet sways without pause.
- It is closer to a jam (a group improvisation) he leads on the spot than to a set song. Follow the flow as the instruments enter and leave at his terse commands.
- Stubblefield said in numerous interviews that he received almost no royalties while this passage was used in countless songs. The light and the shadow of the sampling era are held together in these few bars.
VI. Glory and the fall · 1976–1991
(Disco) As disco took over the clubs in the late 1970s, his chart fortunes sank. The IRS demanded back taxes, and the radio stations he had bought changed hands after financial struggles. In 1980 his role as a preacher in the film “The Blues Brothers” reintroduced him to young audiences. (Heirs) At a 1983 concert in Los Angeles, he called Michael Jackson up from the audience onto the stage. Jackson, who had long said he grew up imitating Brown's dancing on television as a child, re-created his steps, and then Prince came up and played guitar. His rhythm and dance had already become the language of the next generation. (Comeback) In 1985 “Living in America,” from the film “Rocky IV,” reached No. 4 on the pop chart, giving him his first big hit in years and winning him his second Grammy. In 1986 he became one of the first inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Around then, hip-hop producers were cutting drum breaks and shouts from his old records to build the frames of new songs, but little of the proceeds came back to him and his musicians. (Fall) His life was unraveling. He married Adrienne Rodriguez in 1984 but was arrested on charges of assaulting her, and his drug problems deepened. In September 1988, after a disturbance with a shotgun at his own office building in Augusta, he was caught following a police chase across Georgia and South Carolina and sentenced to 6 years in prison. He served a little over 2 years and was paroled in February 1991. It was his second incarceration since the age of sixteen.
VII. The Godfather's last stage · 1991–2006
(Return) In June 1991, four months after his release, he returned to the stage with a Los Angeles concert broadcast on pay-per-view. The following year he received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, and in 1993 Augusta named a downtown street after him. In 1996 his wife Adrienne died. Into his 60s and 70s he kept touring the world every year, and he was as strict as ever in driving his band. (Convictions) He stressed Black self-reliance and enterprise over government aid, and often urged young people to get an education, holding himself up as an example of someone who left school early. He received the Kennedy Center Honors in 2003, and in 2005 a statue of him was erected in downtown Augusta. It stood not far from the streets where he had shined shoes as a boy. (Farewell) In 2004 he underwent surgery for prostate cancer. In December 2006 he was admitted to an Atlanta hospital with pneumonia and died in the early hours of Christmas Day at 73. His body lay in state on the stage of New York's Apollo Theater, where countless mourners came to pay their respects, and at the memorial in Augusta, Michael Jackson bade him farewell. (Will) He left most of his fortune to a scholarship fund for poor children in Georgia and South Carolina. Protracted wrangling over the estate long delayed his wishes, but the last plan left by a boy who never finished school was education. His drum breaks and shouts still ring out across hip-hop and R&B today.
Lesser-known stories
His signature cape routine came not from church but from professional wrestling. He said in interviews that he took the idea from the showmanship of Gorgeous George, the wrestler who made his entrance on 1950s television draped in a flamboyant robe. Danny Ray, the emcee who laid the cape over him as he collapsed, played that part for decades. Because his stage brimmed with religious fervor, the scene is often understood purely as a gospel ritual, but it was in fact a device borrowed from the mass entertainment of the television age. The story of how the 1968 Boston concert came about is also more complicated than the feel-good version usually told. When city officials considered canceling the show, he raised the losses that ticket refunds would cause, and only after the city promised to cover them did the live broadcast go ahead. The inside story of these negotiations came to light belatedly through the 2008 documentary “The Night James Brown Saved Boston,” among others. From the late 1960s on, he sought to put Black economic self-reliance into practice through business. He bought several radio stations, including Augusta's WRDW, and opened a chain of soul food restaurants bearing his name. Most were wound up amid the financial troubles and tax problems of the 1970s, and, overshadowed by his musical achievements, they are scarcely remembered. His landmark album “The Payback” was originally made as the score for the film “Hell Up in Harlem.” The producers didn't use it, and he released the rejected tracks as an album just as they were. Just before that he had also scored the same team's film “Black Caesar.” A discarded film score, in other words, became his finest work of the 1970s.
Notes on terms 📚🔎
Funk
(Meaning) The English word funk was originally slang for the smell of sweat or a musty odor. Among Black jazz musicians, however, funky came to be used as praise for playing that was unadorned, earthy, and felt straight in the body. (In pop) A genre James Brown refined in the late 1960s, it centers on repeated rhythms and bass lines, with clipped guitar and horns, rather than showy melodies or chord changes. Every instrument takes a share of the beat, like a drum. If classmates each take one part, clapping, stomping or drumming on desks, and build a rhythm together, bodies start to bounce on their own even though nobody sings a melody, and funk works on exactly that principle. (Elsewhere) Korean writes it the same way, peongkeu, but it is an entirely different word from punk, the rough, fast rock that emerged in 1970s Britain.
On the one
(Meaning) The one is the “one” you say when you count a bar as one, two, three, four; in other words, the first beat. On the one means riding on top of that first beat. (In pop) The R&B and rock and roll of the time often hit hard on beats two · four, but James Brown demanded that the whole band gather its force on the first beat and land on it together. That gives the rhythm a clear center of gravity each time it comes around, so a dancer's body drops down squarely onto the first beat. It is like a long jump rope, where everyone stamps at once the instant the rope hits the ground.
Call and response
(Meaning) Call means a summons, response an answer. Just as the words say, one person calls and many reply. (In pop) It is a structure in which one person throws out a lead line and a chorus, the audience or the instruments fire back a short answer. It grew out of the Black church tradition of the congregation answering the preacher's cries, and James Brown made respondents of his band, his audience and even a children's choir. It works on the same principle as a classroom where the teacher calls out 'One, two, three!' and the whole class answers in one voice with a set phrase. In Korean folk songs, too, a leader sings a line and the many take it up in the same pattern.
Horn section
(Meaning) Horn originally meant an animal's horn; starting from the old pipes carved out of horn, it became a word for wind instruments in general. Section means a group, a part. (In pop) A handful of wind players — trumpet · saxophone · trombone and the like — arranged as a single unit. Rather than singing out long melodies, James Brown's horn section struck short, sharp, clipped hits that stamped out the beat like a drum. Just as the soprano or alto part in a choir competition moves as one body of many voices, a horn section has several players hitting the same rhythm as if they were one.
Break
(Meaning) Break means to cut off, to pause for a moment. (In pop) The stretch in the middle of a song where the other instruments drop out for a while and only the drums or rhythm instruments remain. It is brief, but it lays the bare skeleton of the rhythm open, so later hip-hop DJs played just this part back and forth on two records, stitching it together without end, and people danced on top of it. The name breakdancing came from here too. Picture the few seconds when a whole class singing together suddenly stops and a single friend keeps clapping alone. (Elsewhere) On a car or a bicycle, the device that slows you down is called the brake.
Sampling
(Meaning) Sample means a specimen, a taste. (In pop) A production method that cuts a fragment out of already recorded music and reuses it, over and over, as material for a new track. From the 1980s on, hip-hop producers borrowed the drums and shouts of James Brown's records more eagerly than anything else, and questions of the original artist's permission and royalties followed in their wake. It resembles a collage assignment, where you cut photos out of magazines and paste them into a new picture — right down to needing permission from whoever took those photos. (Elsewhere) In statistics and science, picking out part of a whole to study it is called sampling.
Gospel
(Meaning) Gospel comes from the Old English godspel — good (god) news (spel) — and means the Christian good news. (In pop) Sacred music that grew up in Black American churches. Its hallmarks are hand clapping and shouts, the back-and-forth between preacher and congregation, and a way of singing that lets the voice burst out wherever the feeling swells; a great many soul and R&B singers learned to sing here. It resembles the heat of the cheering section at a school sports day, where everyone claps along and follows one person's lead, raising their voices higher and higher. (Elsewhere) In Christianity it refers to the Gospels, which record the life of Jesus, and in English it is also used to mean an unquestionable truth.