James Brown

James Joseph Brown was born on the third of May 1933 at the Snelling pine-mill camp at Barnwell, South Carolina, the only child of Joseph and Susan Brown. His mother left the household when he was four; he was raised in the impoverished pine-belt of southeastern Georgia and South Carolina by his great-aunt Honey Washington at her brothel and rooming house in the Black district of Augusta, Georgia. He attended the Silas X. Floyd Elementary School and the Augusta High School through seventh grade and was expelled in 1949 at sixteen for what the school administration called inappropriate clothing. He spent the years 1949 to 1952 at the Georgia Industrial Boys' Reformatory at Toccoa for breaking and entering.

He joined at twenty-one the gospel quartet the Ever Ready Gospel Singers and renamed it in 1955 the Famous Flames. The Famous Flames recorded "Please Please Please" for the Federal label at the King Records studios in Cincinnati on the fourth of February 1956; the recording reached number five on the Billboard R&B chart and established Brown's national career.

The Famous Flames evolved across the following decade into the JBs — the rotating ensemble of session musicians who provided across the 1960s the principal rhythmic platform for Brown's vocal performances. The 1963 Apollo Theater live album Live at the Apollo, the 1964 Smash single "Out of Sight," and the August 1965 King single "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" established the rhythmic transition that produced the founding moment of funk music as a discrete genre. The "Brand New Bag" recording removed the chord changes of the conventional twelve-bar blues progression and emphasised the first beat of every measure — the so-called "one" — through staccato horn punches and syncopated bass.

His decisive late-1960s political moment was the eighth of April 1968 concert at the Boston Garden on the night of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. (placed in this archive). The performance — broadcast live by WGBH at Boston Mayor Kevin White's urgent request — kept fifteen thousand Boston Black residents off the streets through the four hours of the rioting that began in Washington and Chicago that same evening. The August 1968 single "Say It Loud — I'm Black and I'm Proud" was the founding popular-music document of the Black Power era.

He received the Kennedy Center Honors in 2003 and was the first inductee at the founding of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986.

He died of complications of pneumonia at Atlanta on the twenty-fifth of December 2006, at seventy-three.

He is honored here as the Godfather of Soul.