James Brown turned interlocking rhythm into funk itself
James Brown (1933–2006), the Hardest-Working Man in Show Business, began in Toccoa gospel and mid-1950s Famous Flames hits like Please, Please, Please. By the late 1960s he stripped songs to interlocking grooves that defined funk—then rode the J.B.s into the early 1970s.
Brown was born in a small wooden shack in Barnwell, South Carolina, to a 16-year-old mother and a 21-year-old father; his first and middle names were swapped by mistake on the birth certificate. As a boy in Augusta he danced for coins for soldiers from Camp Gordon crossing a canal bridge, and in 1944 he won a talent show at the Lenox Theater singing So Long.
At 16 he was convicted of robbery and sent to a juvenile centre in Toccoa, Georgia, where he formed a gospel quartet with cellmates and earned the nickname Music Box. Bobby Byrd met him across a baseball diamond outside the facility. A local businessman, S. C. Lawson, impressed by his work ethic, promised him two years of employment, and he was paroled on 14 June 1952. In 1954 he joined Byrd's group, which had evolved from a gospel act into an R&B outfit and soon became the Famous Flames.
Little Richard steered them to his manager in Macon, and a re-recorded Please, Please, Please, issued by King's Federal label in March 1956, sold over a million. Follow-ups flopped until Try Me hit number one on the R&B chart in early 1959, the first of 17 chart-toppers. On 24 October 1962 Brown paid for a live recording at the Apollo himself; released in June 1963, Live at the Apollo reached number two on the album chart, sold more than a million and stayed charted for 14 months.
A 1964 attempt to record for Mercury's Smash label brought an injunction from King. Back with King, he released Papa's Got a Brand New Bag in 1965, his first pop top ten and first Grammy winner, followed by I Got You. No artist has placed more songs on the Hot 100 without one of them topping it, and in 2013 he entered the first class of the Rhythm and Blues Music Hall of Fame.
Source: James Brown
