James Brown

James Joseph Brown was born on the third of May 1933 in a small wooden shack at Barnwell, South Carolina, the only child of Joseph and Susie Brown. He entered the world into deep poverty; his mother, Susie, left the household when he was four, and his father soon moved the family to Augusta, Georgia, where the boy was raised for a time in the home of an aunt and knew hardship and want throughout his childhood.

Out of that hard soil rose one of the most consequential artists of the twentieth century. Brown came to prominence in the mid-1950s as the driving voice of the Famous Flames, and across a career spanning more than five decades he reshaped the sound of American music. From the raw gospel-charged fervor of his early records he forged, in the mid-1960s, an entirely new rhythmic language — funk — built on the downbeat, the groove, and the body in motion.

Crowned the Godfather of Soul, and known too as Mr. Dynamite and the Hardest-Working Man in Show Business, he was celebrated for performances of relentless power and precision. His innovations seeded soul, funk, disco, and hip-hop, and he stood among the first inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986. He died on the twenty-fifth of December 2006.

Born with nothing and giving the world a new rhythm to move by, James Brown is honored here as an architect of modern music whose every beat still carries the pride and pulse of the people from whom he came.