But that’s not in the movie. And why should it be? Movies are simple. And Brown’s life was anything but that. Thus one of the most humiliating events of Brown’s life was played for laughs in a movie distributed around the world for millions to see—a film of half-truths, implying that his beloved mother, for example, who left him when he was a child, was a whore and a drunk who bummed a hundred dollars off him at the Apollo after he became a star, leaving out the fact that he took his mother back into his Georgia home after discovering her and reunited her with his father; a film that depicts his father, a gentle, funny, country man who worked hard and deeply loved his son, as a stereotypical child-beating, wife-beating, cornpone country hick—a ticking time bomb of black fury, sitting at a forlorn table in a cabin in the woods with his son James, singing a song lifted straight from anthropologist Alan Lomax’s collection of Mississippi chain-gang recordings. And the thing that would hurt James Brown most of all: the portrayal of James Brown himself, a proud man who spent his entire career trying to show, as southerners do, his best face; a guy who sat under a hair dryer for three hours after every show, because he always wanted the public to see him “clean and proper”; a man who’d spent his childhood so disheveled and dirty in appearance that for the rest of his life he kept a house as clean as a whistle and shined and cleaned himself to a tee, insisting that he be addressed as “Mr. Brown,” and addressing others, even friends, by their surnames. Yet audiences around the world are treated to a full two hours of James Brown acting like a complete wacko in a film that is roughly 40 percent fiction and that shows not one iota of sophistication about black life or the black culture that spawned him. The film portrays the black church—in this case the United House of Prayer, one of the most unusual and beloved sects of twentieth-century black Christian life and an important source of African American music—as a kind of howling extravaganza, and shows the other usual stereotypical puff and smoke: the big black “aunt” announcing to young James Brown, “You special, boy!”; the good loyal white man as manager; and the black musicians who helped Brown create one of America’s seminal art forms as a bunch of know-nothings and empty heads, including a scene showing Alfred “Pee Wee” Ellis, a musical pioneer and co-creator of American soul music, making a complete fool of himself—a scene that Pee Wee says never happened. Tate Taylor, the white director of Get On Up, is also the director of the acclaimed The Help, yet another white version of black history. “I despise most everything that’s been written about him,” says Emma Austin, seventy, who knew Brown for more than forty years. “I can’t stand to look at most of it.”
But that’s show business. And some of that public persona Brown created himself. But here’s something only a musician might think about: that film was co-produced by Rolling Stones impresario Mick Jagger. More than forty years earlier, Brown and his band of nobodies—a bunch of unknown black sidemen called the Flames—smoked Jagger and the Rolling Stones on the T.A.M.I. show. Before the show, Brown was told by the producers that the Stones, the new rock band of the moment, a bunch of kids from England, would have the honor of closing the show. According to Charles Bobbit, the producers didn’t even give Brown a dressing room. He had to rehearse his dancing on a sloped carpet on the auditorium floor. (The film Get On Up portrays Brown in a dressing room.) The snub charged Brown, and he hit the stage a man possessed: he and his high-stepping band left it in cinders. When Jagger and the Rolling Stones followed, they sounded like a garage band by comparison, with Jagger dancing around like the straw man in The Wizard of Oz. It’s all online. You can see it.
Or you can see Jagger’s version of it in the film Get On Up. Or hear Jagger’s version of James Brown in the documentary Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown (2014), which he also co-produced. Today Jagger is rock royalty, James Brown is dead, and Inaudible Productions, which oversees the licensing of Jagger’s Rolling Stones catalog, administers James Brown’s music as well.
That’s a bitter pill to swallow for those who knew the real James Brown. “Mr. Brown didn’t even like Mick Jagger,” fumes Charles Bobbit. “He had no love for Mick Jagger.”
Here’s how music history in America works: a trumpet player blows a solo in a Philly nightclub in 1945. Somebody slaps it on a record, and fifty years later that same solo is a final in a college jazz department, and your kid pays $60,000 a year to take the final, while the guy who blew the solo out of his guts in the first place is deader than yesterday’s rice and beans, his family is suffering from the same social illness that created his great solo, and nobody gave two hoots about the guy when he died and nobody gives two hoots about his family now. They call that capitalism, the Way of the World, Showbiz, You Gotta Suck It Up, an upcoming Movie About Diversity, and my favorite term, Cultural History. I call it fear, and it has lived in the heart of every black American musician for the last hundred years.
That fear is nearly impossible to explain if you are not a musician who understands the sweat involved in making music. It’s rarely talked about in the music press, which plays along in pretending there are no race problems in the music business. Why shouldn’t it? Musicians of all colors get snookered by the biz. We all leave our blood on the floor for the Big Corporation, Big Brother, the Record Label, the Country & Western Community—whatever you want to call it. The difference is this: Most of us don’t walk through department stores buzzing with background music that plays ninth chords borrowed from our history. Most of us don’t know the feeling of sweating for hours over your music, then watching a foreigner from, say, England or Australia cop that music, ape their version of it, make a million, then call you a genius while they’re living high and you’re barely living. Most of us don’t understand the ache of hearing blues great Robert Johnson called “a legend,” knowing that poor Mr. Johnson is nothing more than a 1920s version of, say, Afrika Bambaataa or Kool Herc, the rap pioneers from the South Bronx who fell into relative obscurity after the recording industry took their music—originally written to empower poor kids and working-class women from communities in the South Bronx—and transformed it into chants that encourage kids to clobber their neighbor, pillage women, drink as much booze as possible, and blow each other’s brains out over tennis shoes. Most of us are not privy to the silent suffering of the classically trained black performers who spend their careers watching the major opera companies and orchestras in America leave port without them, knowing that nearly the same paucity of black faces that existed on board those ships fifty years ago still exists today, while hearing the same fifty-year-old excuses about why there’s no space for them in those hotbeds of nepotism and cronyism.
It’s a trick bag. You open your mouth on the subject and you’re a racist and a malcontent. You close your mouth on it and you’re a fool, because when the coin flips the other way—and it does a lot these days—you find that when blacks or other minorities climb to the top rail in show business or the arts, some are just as bad—sometimes horrifically worse—than their white counterparts.
The fact is, Brown, one of America’s greatest “cultural” creations, was a terrible businessman. And a terrible person at times, in part because he was afraid of the very world from which his music emerged. In Brown’s world, the white man—whatever that phrase means these days—defined reality. From Brown’s point of view, nothing happened in this world—the sun did not rise, the moon did not crest, red traffic lights did not turn green—unless white folks said they did. The white man’s view of history, his laughs, his money, his record business was all that counted. Without this understanding, you cannot understand James Brown or the world that spawned him, or the world that would one day forget his history and seek only his money.
But history has its own life. It moves like an erupted volcano, spreading lava that sets fires in places far distant because of the enormous heat contained within it. In Brown’s story, that heat is the business of race. Brown’s rags-to-riches Horatio Alger story has helped mushroom the lawsuits surrounding his valuable estate i
nto a toxic cloud, creating—years after his 2006 death—exactly what he predicted it would. “A mess,” is what he told his manager. “Mr. Bobbit, when I die, it’s gonna be a big mess.”
And with forty-seven lawsuits comprising more than four thousand pages of litigation, an estimated ninety lawyers—most of whom never knew James Brown—and ten years of court fighting, a mess it is.
Here’s the known-world material: Brown was born in a house in Barnwell, South Carolina, in May 1933 or thereabouts. He was an only child. His mother left his father when Brown was four, five, or six, depending on whom you ask. Whether she was driven away or departed on her own is an open question, as she is dead and no one can seem to remember—though his close friends insist that his parents had a bad fight and she was driven off. Young James gathered coal, picked cotton, and hunted squirrels with his father, Joe Brown, a former sharecropper, who raised James with the help of extended family in the Ellenton, South Carolina, area, with female cousins who were more like sisters to Joe than cousins. Joe later took young James, nicknamed Junior, to nearby Augusta, Georgia, to stay with one of those female cousins—a cousin James called Aunt Honey—when Brown was still in grade school. Her Augusta home was filled with relatives and boarders and functioned, at times, as a brothel. “I was nine before I got my first pair of underwear from a store,” Brown recalled. “All my clothes were made from sacks and things like that.”
He attended segregated schools in Augusta until the seventh or eighth grade, and at fifteen was busted for stealing car parts and given an eight-to-sixteen-year sentence, of which he served three years and a day in a juvenile prison in Toccoa in northeast Georgia. He was released at age nineteen on ten years’ probation, provided he stay out of Augusta, so he stayed in Toccoa, where he began to sing in churches for a local gospel group that eventually called themselves the Famous Flames. Their first record, “Please, Please, Please,” recorded as a demo in a radio station, was rerecorded and released nationally by Cincinnati-based King Records under the name James Brown and the Famous Flames, and it launched Brown’s career in 1955. After nine straight bombs and two years on the “chitlin circuit,” the string of theaters and eating joints that constituted black entertainment life in the forties and fifties for black bands, he resurfaced and rose to stardom as, basically, a solo act with a hit called “Try Me,” in October 1958, and entered the 1960s as a bona fide soul master.
Brown was a way-out star from the start, a guy with a pushed-in face, a hoarse voice, and a style of music seen by some white critics as the same song sung over and over again. The late Albert Goldman, a talented music critic of that era, writing in The New York Times, called him “The greatest demagogue in the history of Negro entertainment…dragging out the oldest Negro dances, the most basic gospel shouts, the funky low down rhythms of black history…playing the shoeshine genius, the poor boy who rose from polish rags to riches.”
But it’s not that simple, really. Nothing is simple when you’re poor. Poverty, for example, is very loud. It’s full of traffic, cussing, drinking, fisticuffs, wrong sex, anguish, embarrassments, and psychic wounds that feed all sorts of inner ailments and create lots of loose ends. For Brown, those loose ends made great grist for the entertainment rags, especially after his career tanked in his middle years and his marriages ended up a public mess.
But beneath all that complexity was resolve. Brown propelled himself to the top of a vicious business that swallowed many groundbreaking black artists of supreme if not greater skill, most notably Louis Jordan, the 1940s star after whom Brown patterned himself. Jordan vanished into obscurity after the fifties. Brown, with lesser musical skill but arguably more creativity, hit the chitlin circuit nearly alone after “Please, Please, Please” vanished from the charts after 1955, hiring pickup bands and working as a one-man howling show, even after his record label essentially had given up on him as a one-hit wonder. Those were dark years, moving about the circuit from roughly 1956 to 1960, clawing his way up the greasy pole back to radio, black fans, and eventually white listeners, where the big money was. As a black child growing up in the South, he was an expert at knowing what white people expected of him, secure in the knowledge that white folks didn’t care enough about him, or black history, or black music, to even pay attention to what he said. As long as you could dance and sing and entertain them, they didn’t care what you did or did not do. Sell yourself and get paid. They were going to believe whatever they wanted to about you anyway. So tell ’em anything.
And he did. The first few lines of Brown’s autobiography, The Godfather of Soul, written with the capable white biographer Bruce Tucker, is a good example. Here is Brown on his family history: “When I look at my family tree,” he wrote, “the hardest thing to figure out is where the African came in.” He describes his father as half Indian and part white, and his mother as “Asian-Afro, but she was more Asian.” This from a guy who was stone-cold black American. The black man. Said Bobbit, who was there when Brown did his autobiography, “I was laughing because Brown didn’t even want to do that book. He just told the guy anything he wanted.” This is the same man whose few words scrawled on a napkin in 1968, “Say it loud, I’m black and I’m proud” (with music penned by his musical director Pee Wee Ellis), would in one fell swoop change the self-image of an entire Negro nation. Hell, I was ten years old with a black father and white mother and I figured out where the African came in: it came in the form of James Brown! “Say it loud! I’m black and I’m proud!” I loved that song. As a kid, I dreamed of being in his band. Who cared that my mother was white! Brown’s sax man, Maceo Parker, was the saxophonist, the coolest, and James would holler for him, “Maceo! C’mon blow!” Here Maceo would come, grooving with pure D soul. The guys in the band were gods, and James Brown was their Supreme Leader of Cool and Funk. That feeling lasted in my mind for years.
And it wasn’t just me. Some years back I did a recording session with the late saxophonist Grover Washington, Jr. Grover is the unsung pioneer of the “smooth jazz” sound, an underrated stylist and a very versatile player—his last record was an album full of arias—and in terms of R&B groove, Grover was a master. I asked him, “You ever play with James Brown?” Grover laughed and said, “You kidding? I wasn’t funky enough.” And Grover, believe me, was plenty funky.
It wasn’t “funkiness” that makes Brown important, though. That word is overused, misunderstood, and misrepresented anyway. The true substitute for it, really, is the term sound, or influence. Brown’s musical sound—acknowledged as supreme among the greats in African American music, from Miles Davis to the avant-garde Art Ensemble of Chicago to the fabulously talented bassist Christian McBride—is what sets him apart, as well as the longevity he achieved in a tough musical world. Brown arguably outlasted or overshadowed every single major black star of the fifties, sixties, and seventies, a period that birthed some of the mightiest figures that American music had ever seen and will likely ever see: Little Richard, Ruth Brown, Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Little Willie John, Ray Charles, Jackie Wilson, Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, Joe Tex, Isaac Hayes, Earth, Wind & Fire, Sly and the Family Stone, and of course the Motown heavy hitters of the seventies, to name just a few. It could be argued that the only two stars out of the brilliant cadre of Motown artists who equaled or bettered Brown creatively are Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder, and both had to push past the boundaries of soul music to do it, rewriting the genre to create their own brand. Jackson redefined pop music. Wonder, an underrated musical genius with perfect pitch and instant music recall, is a genre unto himself.
There are other great American pop-music wonders of those years whose work will stand up to history: the extraordinary team of Donald Fagen and Walter Becker of Steely Dan and Prince come to mind, along with several others. But there is little question that Brown stands unique among them, in part because the man nicknamed Mr. Dynamite, the Hardest Working Man in Show Business, Soul Brother Number One, and the G
odfather of Soul stitched into his work an element that still has bone and muscle in this Internet age overflowing with flabby musical jive posing as “product,” where every high school kid with a trumpet is walking around with a self-recorded compact disc or online links to their own original music:
Content. Plain old content.
His unique blend of hollers, grunts, and squeals did little in his early years to move white critics, who saw Brown as a scream at the end of the radio dial, where most of the black radio stations lived. But it was catnip to black listeners, who understood Brown’s inner struggle and loved him as a member of the family. Twice during the urban upheavals following Martin Luther King’s 1968 murder he quelled riots in entire cities, first in Boston, later in Washington, DC, both at the requests of the mayors of those towns. His message to his followers at those fabled events was an intensified version of what he preached to his mostly black audiences over the years: I’m like you. If I can succeed, so can you. Educate yourself. Be somebody. During the 1960s, his concerts featured ninety-nine-cent tickets for kids ten and under. Howard Burchette, a radio DJ who grew up in the New York City area, remembers seeing Brown at a 1971 Apollo Christmas concert dressed as Santa Claus. “He always gave out free bicycles and prizes to kids in the audience,” Burchette recalls. “He talked about education. And bettering yourself. I’m glad I saw it all with my own eyes.” It’s hard to imagine seeing many of today’s major African American stars comporting themselves that way onstage, or staying so close to the communities that produced them.