After their introduction following the Freedom Messengers’ rousing opening act, the Lumpen storm the stage with a high-energy singing and stepping performance. The instrumental groove takes center stage as “The Lumpen Theme” works around a variation of James Brown’s “There Was a Time.” Brown’s original 1967 composition was in itself a tour de force of raw rhythm, and for many, it is considered the primordial funk groove. The burning track had been rerecorded and released on Brown’s live album Sex Machine that summer of 1970, and the Lumpen represented the percolating groove with fury and dedication.
As the band jams for the first two minutes, the Lumpen lead members step, spin, stomp, wave, clap, and sing to the beat of the rhythms, coming together for the background verses: “We want freedom / to determine / the destiny / of our community.” The energy is high as drummer Minor Williams keeps a steady pulse with guitarist Mack Ray Henderson chopping the strings with a double-time rhythmic riff and bass player Thomas Wallace improvising a bottom bounce that works against the rigid rhythmic lock to make for an irresistible funk groove. The horns sweep over the rhythms with crisp, sustained notes, providing a towering melody that announces the unmistakable influence of James Brown.
As the singers repeat the chant “freedom,” bandleader and piano player William Calhoun introduces the group, to the rhythm of the song:
Freedom! / Hah! / freedom / Lookie here / freedom / James Mott / freedom / Michael Torrence / freedom / Clark Bailey / freedom / Hah! / freedom / good God / freedom / My name is Bill Calhoun / freedom / We’re from the Black Panther Party / freedom / Hah! / freedom / … I want you to / freedom / to sing along with me.
We want Freedom / to determine / the destiny / of our community …
Say it louder.
We want Freedom / to determine / the destiny / of our community…
Say it like you mean it.
We want freedom / to determine / the destiny / of our community…
The singers then begin a series of chants calling out incarcerated Panther Party members before the band takes over with a stirring, energetic groove session.
Free Bobby / freedom / free Bobby / freedom / free Bobby / freedom / free Bobby / freedom / Free Ericka / freedom / Free Ericka / freedom / Free Ericka / freedom / Free Ericka
Lead singer William Calhoun chants and shouts “good God!” in between the background voices, providing another percussive layer of vocals, and signifying on the rich vein of rhythmic soul music that the band is representing on this night. As the band plays for another two minutes, the singers vary their choruses and continue the percussive vocalizing “hah,” “unh unh unh,” “hah” until the song is brought to a crisp, sharp ending, followed by sustained crowd applause.1
Throughout their thrilling opening song, the Lumpen utilized the standards and techniques of the James Brown band. Through the use of call-and-response audience interaction, the effective use of physicality on stage, the driving rhythms and counter-rhythms by the band, and the percussive improvised vocalizing, the group signified on the rhythms of the streets while framing the political thrust of the Black Panther Party on the people’s terms. James Brown at this time was an immensely popular icon of black pride, and to some he was considered a revolutionary artist. By using the James Brown performance aesthetic, the Lumpen were asserting the revolutionary black power of their music. “Everything about my stage production I got from James Brown,” recalls Lumpen bandleader William Calhoun.2 Lumpen singer Michael Torrence recalls:
I was fourteen when I saw him at the Oakland auditorium. It was one of those shows he used to do, which was really more of a dance than a concert. It was high, high energy, nonstop. James Brown would be driving on you—he really was the hardest-working man in show business, but so was everybody up there with him. And if you were out there in the audience, same thing. So by the time you came out of it, you were ready to take a deep breath too. Once you left, you walk out the concert and say, “Whooo. How ‘bout that.” So that was the same thing we wanted to do, to have them coming out of Lumpen performances like that, going “Whooo!”3
James Brown left an indelible stamp on the collective social values and standards of expression in black American culture. In this sense, Brown and his body of 1960s-era work can be rehabilitated in terms of his impact on black consciousness, and this chapter will reexamine the achievements of James Brown as an agent of black power during the height of the black revolution.
The burning groove chosen by the Lumpen to enter the stage to at their packed Merritt College concert was a staple of the James Brown show at the time. Recorded in June 1967 during a ten-day stint at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, a four-minute version was released as a B-side to the single “I Can’t Stand Myself” in late 1967 and became a flip-side hit early in 1968, reaching number three on the R&B charts. The entire fifteen-minute performance was heard when Live at the Apollo Volume 2 was released in the summer of ‘68. The song is not so much a song as a rhythm workout, with just a semblance of melody from punching horn riffs to begin the journey. With a hyperactive rhythmic interplay between guitarists Jimmy Nolen and Alphonso “Country” Kellum, and both Clyde Stubblefield and Jabo Starks doubling up on drums (with the addition of bongos, a revolutionary idea for R&B then, played by Ronald Selico), the band keeps an incessant wiggle to the groove, making it impossible to sit still throughout the song. A heavy emphasis on what Brown calls “the One,” providing a punch on the downbeat of the song, creates yet another level of rhythmic twist. The Godfather of Soul ad-libs in time with the groove, vamping on dances, places, and party chants over a wicked riff. This song, recorded during the politically heated summer of 1967, is a prime example of James Brown’s ability to capture the moment—rhythmically—in black America.
James Brown can be heard improvising a series of rhyming verses to bring about each dance he performs, perhaps introducing the first freestyle rapping of the hip-hop era: “Lookie here, dig this / Now there was a dance / That I used to do / The name of the dance, ha / They call the boogaloo.” It was not a simple coincidence that James Brown referred to popular dances during his extemporaneous riffing on the song. Brown was as much a stage performer as a singer. His body was in motion throughout his performances. Members of his audience at this time developed their own sense of motion and rhythm by watching, imitating, and interpreting the incessant motion of Soul Brother Number One. Larry Neal writes:
The hit song “There Was a Time” traces the history of a people through their dances, and achieves in the process something of a rhythm and blues epic poem…. Quoting these lyrics hardly does justice to Brown’s genius. He invokes dances like the Camelwalk and the Boogaloo. Each dance conjuring up a definite feeling and memory. Black poetry is best understood, as the powerful force that it is, when it is recited and danced.4
James Brown onstage was providing a cultural history in every verse, in every rhymed couplet, celebrating a time and place in black cultural memory that could be collectively referenced through the dance—the collective experience of a people. In his performances—there is no studio recording of “There Was a Time,” only live recordings—James Brown was both present and past, a summation of the black experience and a signpost toward a people’s future.
Brown, with a forceful emphasis on the rhythmic groove, was forging a new approach to black poetry that would emerge in rap music only a decade later. The hard-driving, rhythm-based American music (funk and hip-hop) of the following decades can trace its existence to the Godfather of Soul and the work he was doing in the late 1960s. As for “There Was a Time,” it is ironic that a song with a title referencing the past could reflect so much of what was ahead in the music of America.
Not enough has been written about what Brown and his band did to revolutionize the rhythms of American music in the 1970s, and by extension the aesthetics and cultural politics of the world’s music. Rarely accounted for in his public biography (until his passing on Christmas Day in 2006) is the fact that James Brown was the most prominent popular entertainer to openly promote and celebrate black pride. The music of James Brown in the late 1960s was the single most unifying facet of popular black culture of the time. With recordings such as “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” in 1965, “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” in 1966, “Cold Sweat” in 1967, “Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud)” in 1968, and “Mother Popcorn” in 1969, Brown pushed an assertive, black masculine aesthetic into popular music in ways never before heard in America. A decade of Brown’s steady musical output and consistently energetic stage shows earned him a reputation as the acknowledged essential musician of the streets. His accolades and self-proclaimed titles such as “the Hardest Working Man in Show Business,” “Mr. Dynamite,” “Soul Brother Number One,” and “the Godfather of Soul” were never seriously disputed.5
Brown’s music of this period combined no-nonsense, straight-talking delivery with a unique form of rhythmic contrast and tension that exuded confidence, strength, and pride. Brown was at the forefront of a collective race conscious awakening that was taking place in black America at the time. In a 1968 essay, LeRoi Jones (later known as Amiri Baraka) wrote figuratively of Brown’s singular ability to transform public space:
If you play James Brown (say, “Money Won’t Change You / but time will take you out”) in a bank, the total environment is changed. Not only the sardonic comment of the lyrics, but the total emotional placement of the rhythm, instrumentation and sound. An energy is released in the bank, a summoning of images that take the bank, and everybody in it, on a trip. That is they visit another place. A place where Black People live.
But dig, not only is it a place where Black People live, it is a place, in the spiritual precincts of its emotional telling, where Black People move in almost absolute openness and strength.6
The James Brown experience, whether heard live or on the radio, was one that made public celebrations of blackness plausible, permissible, and overtly enjoyable.
In the early 1960s a new “Negro mood” of hope and pride had entered the public sphere, and Brown’s music was a sharp reminder of those aspirations. As the movement became more militarized and assertive, the rhythms of Brown’s music captured the essence of that aggression. In a symbolic fashion, in much the same way that the direct talk of Malcolm X served to bring about a direct dialogue about race and equality in society, Brown’s late 1960s music pushed against the traditional modes of music making to become something explicit, articulate, and assertive in ways never before heard in popular music. “Don’t give me integration / Give me true communication,” Brown sang in his 1969 black power opus “I Don’t Want Nobody to Give Me Nothin’.” “Don’t give me sorrow / I want equal opportunity to live tomorrow.”
Brown’s funk music did not turn the other cheek. It did not speak in metaphors or double meanings (as was the blues tradition), and it did not speak vaguely of longing for the future (as was the gospel music tradition). Brown’s music reflected the harsh, unvarnished truths of black American life. Yet Brown was capable of utilizing elements of the black performance tradition to generate transcendent moments of triumph and celebration above all of the trials.
Generally, soul singers were judged by their sincerity and the passion of their delivery. No other artist performed with more conviction, with more force onstage, than the Godfather of Soul. One could feel that James Brown meant what he said. Brown, in reality, did not have to sing a verse to deliver a message. As Ben Sidran writes:
It should be stressed that James Brown’s screams and the two drummers he employed to generate an enormous rhythmic dynamism were more revolutionary than were his somewhat controversial lyrics … especially because they were not recognized as being revolutionary. The techniques of the oral culture thus met with little opposition and altered the perception, and so the behavior, of young Americans in the privacy of their own homes.7
James Brown was at the center of a process of identity formation for a generation (black and white) that was beginning to understand on an intuitive, visceral, personal level what freedom was really about.
James Brown was born into poverty in 1933 in a one-room shack outside of Barnwell, South Carolina, and from the age of six was raised in his aunt Handsome “Honey” Washington’s brothel in Augusta, Georgia. Living day-to-day meant that at a young age Brown understood the bitter necessities and desperate ambitions of black life in the Jim Crow South. Sentenced to eight years for a petty crime at the age of sixteen, Brown seemed to be headed down the road of many of his contemporaries.
An epiphany involving the possibilities of stage performance led Brown to write to the parole board requesting early release to perform gospel music. Brown’s inspired gambit earned him an early release and, with the help of the family of local singer Bobby Byrd, Brown began his singing career in 1952 in the Gospel Starlighters. The Starlighters soon moved to rhythm and blues and changed their name. Once Brown became established as a backup singer and later lead singer of the Famous Flames, he took hold of his career and set new standards for black entertainers at every turn.
His first recording, “Please Please Please” for the King Records subsidiary Federal in 1956, with its sparse lyrics and repetitive soulful begging, remains a testament to Brown’s ability to reach people on their own terms. Subsequent recordings such as “Try Me” (1958) and “I’ll Go Crazy” (1960) established Brown among the most authentic and charismatic black singers of the day. On October 24, 1962, Brown recorded a live performance at the Apollo Theater in Harlem (just as the Cuban Missile Crisis had gone public). The performance solidified Brown’s reputation as an authentic soul singer. As one critic wrote: “The ten-minute-plus rendition of ‘Lost Someone’ captures the sound of Brown baring his soul with an almost unbearable intensity, which drives the audience into a manic chorus of shouts and screams.”8 The subsequent chart-topping release of the live performance cemented Brown’s reputation as Soul Brother Number One.
Throughout the decade, the James Brown performance was a centerpiece of working-class black popular culture. Even in small cities like Sacramento, hometown of Lumpen member James Mott, the influence of JB was supreme:
I remember the purple satin shirts, the tight pants, the birdies shoes, those little boots…. We looked forward to this. We would go to the fields. We picked tomatoes, we picked peaches, cut grapes, I did it all. We would take our little money. We would go buy our James Brown clothes. We would go to his concert. Under twelve or thirteen it was ninety-nine cents to see James Brown at the Memorial Auditorium…. And every time he came to town, we would make sure that we were not on restriction, that we were not grounded; we would plan for it a month in advance.9
By 1964, Brown had grown frustrated by his label’s refusal to grant him a new contract. The success of Live at the Apollo should have garnered him a new deal, Brown figured. So Brown took the bold step of recording at another label (Smash) while still under contract to King Records. The legal complications created an impasse that Brown himself crossed by creating some of the greatest music of his life. With promises from King label owner Syd Nathan, Brown returned home with a vengeance.
The February 1965 recording of “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” was a peace offering to his record label and a turning point in Brown’s career. The jerky, percussive recording reflected a change in more than Brown’s contract status. Brown was developing a revolutionary new process for making dance music. With important new musicians in the fold, including rhythm guitarist Jimmy Nolen, drummer Melvin Parker, and Melvin’s younger brother Maceo Parker on saxophone, Brown packaged the soaring talent into an efficient, propulsive rhythm machine, and Brown surfed the waves with his own particular vocal acrobatics. Brown explained the breakthrough himself:
I didn’t need melody to make music. That was, to me, old fashioned and out of step. I now realized that I could compose and sing a song that used one chord or at the most two. Although “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” has just two chords, and a melody sung over what is really a single note, it is just as musical as anything Pavarotti has ever sung. More important, it stood for everything I was about—pride, leadership, strength, intensity. And it went straight to number one on every pop and R&B chart in the world.10
Nothing else sounded like this song anywhere on the radio. The groundbreaking, hugely popular song was recorded in Charlotte, North Carolina, in February 1965, the same month Malcolm X was assassinated in Harlem. It was released on July 17, 1965, three weeks before the so-called Watts riots. Papa had a new bag indeed.
In what would later be called the first of the funk beats, on “New Bag” Brown and his band developed an exotic new rhythmic orientation, a means of arranging the music around the downbeat. The downbeat is the first pulse in a four-beat bar in Western music, what Brown would call “the One.” Most of American popular music to this time had been written around a melody that emphasized the two and the four. Handclaps are applied on the two and the four, employing foot stomps, pauses, or silence on the downbeat. James Brown explained the breakthrough in a 1993 interview: “I turned all of them around because I went on one and three as opposed to the music being written on two and the four. Then I took gospel and jazz and defied all the laws. If I played eight bars and felt like I should play nine or ten, I would play nine or ten. As long as I felt the people grooving.”11
The new rhythmic emphasis created a choppy, bouncing energy in the music. Songs seemed to percolate over layers of rhythms that had no perceptible starting or stopping points. Brown utilized the One to bring the musicians together, providing structure for rhythm players to improvise around, with a regular reference point. Meanwhile, the horns, keyboards, and vocals were typically written out in traditional songwriting fashion (hum a melody, write a verse, hum a chorus, write lyrics). A young bass player named William “Bootsy” Collins went through a funky musical apprenticeship under the mentorship of Brown when Collins joined the group in March 1970: “He always told me, ‘Son, you’ve got to play it on the one.’ And I was like, on the one? What the heck is he talking about? He said, ‘On every one, you’ve got to play a dominant note.’ “12
By playing melodies and singing in traditional modes that created an expectation of the spaces around the downbeat, Brown was able to redesign black dance music in a unique fashion, creating what is now called “funk.” Funk music plays off the rhythmic expectations implied in Western music, yet is driven percussively from a collaborative groove that could go on indefinitely, and as such was allied with the popular dance rhythms of the Caribbean islands and West Africa.
Brown’s new approach to music making was rhythm based. Unlike music derived from the blues, it was not built around a melody, or even an implied melody. This music came from the drums, bass, and guitars. And, for the first time in America, this music spoke directly from Africa. “I was hearing everything, even the guitars, like they were drums,” Brown recalled in 1986.13 The direct impact Brown’s music had on his predominantly black audience in the late 1960s was an upswelling of unbridled excitement, affirmation, and allegiance.
James Brown knew he was on to something. He understood that Papa’s new groove was a game changer. “I had discovered the power of the percussive upbeat,” he said. While he was celebrated as a soul singer extraordinaire, he was pushing the limits of self-expression, and he drove his band into the new musical space of funk. Brown explained the scope of his invention of funk music in his compelling 2005 memoir I Feel Good:
It was like opening the floodgates to a rhythm-based extension of soul, a physically performed, roots-derived configuration of music that comes straight from the heart. In that sense, soul became the perfect marching music for the civil rights era, a way to choreograph the burgeoning pride that could be found everywhere. It was, to me, like the jump beat that we always saw in films from Africa, when the Blacks were organizing against Apartheid. We’d always see them jumping in place, with the sound of the drum beneath them, giving them weight, lending them focus, providing them unity.
What was missing for me and my people was the rhythm of our own revolution—a soundtrack strong enough to bring us to the outside rather than keep us on the inside.14
Brown, for many, provided a “rhythm of our own revolution” in the late 1960s. It is interesting that in 2005 Brown spoke of “bringing us to the outside” rather than “keeping us on the inside.” The essence of Brown’s music provided a counterpoint to the integration efforts of the mainstream civil rights movement associated with Martin Luther King Jr. and to the integration-oriented black popular music associated with Motown Records, the popular black-owned soul music label out of Detroit. Brown’s music captured the aspirations of young people who were framing a new anti-integrationist impulse of their own. The Watts upheaval in the summer of 1965 and the release of the Autobiography of Malcolm X later that year were sentinels of a new spirit of antiassimilation that was emerging within the movement and within black American society. The emergence of the Black Panther Party on the national scene in May 1967 was part of this nationalistic evolution.
On tour through Oakland in the mid-1960s, Brown encountered Donald Warden (now Khalid al-Mansour), who had organized black radical discussion groups through his Afro-American Association and was established on local radio and television. The nationalist Warden was not a fan of the “singing and dancing of black folks,” but he saw an opportunity to spread his message through Brown’s popularity and invited Brown to his shows and to events in the community. Similarly, Brown saw an opportunity to develop his race-first politics with someone equally media savvy, and the two had frequent discussions about race politics over the years.15
In 1966 Brown began recording and releasing “message” songs with direct statements about black self-pride and achievement. “Money Won’t Change You” and “Don’t Be a Drop-Out” were the first, but there were others to follow. They were delivered with the characteristic rugged rhythms and direct dialogue for which Brown was known. In 1967 Brown and his band stretched the rhythmic contrast even further with the intense rhythms of “There Was a Time” and the inside-out grooving on “Cold Sweat,” which provided a new structure and formula for his many followers to aspire to.
Brown’s ballads began to radiate with a black masculine aesthetic. His now classic 1966 recording of “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” became a symbol of Brown’s approach to black patriarchy. Steeped in emotion and longing, the song captures the listener with its piercing strings and even more piercing screams. In the chorus, Brown exhorts “It’s a man’s, man’s, man’s world” with such pain that one almost feels he regrets the point, and the following line seems to close the deal: “but it wouldn’t be nothing / without a woman or a girl.” As a demonstration of the soul music aesthetic, Brown appears to almost break down emotionally on the recording. Yet despite the theater, Brown was also revealing his tortured background with women. Having been abandoned by his mother at the age of four and raised by his aunt in a brothel, Brown’s family values emerged from a state of crisis that appeared to manifest in his volatile relationships with his three wives. Domestic disturbance calls to local police appeared to confirm an image of a misogynistic, out-of-control black patriarch. Yet Brown understood that his role as a black public figure was to present a public face of black success that he saw as patriarchal, driven, and in control. When Brown ad-libbed lyrics such as “Man makes everything he can / but a woman makes a better man,” they fit and reinforced what was seen by many as traditional male patriarchal roles. Brown’s personal values resonated with the prevailing black masculine aesthetic of black power on the streets in an unmistakable fashion.16
The concept of “black power” in the American social justice movement of the 1960s followed an awkward path to prominence. Radical black writers and artists such as Harold Cruse and LeRoi Jones explored the concept in articles and plays, yet it did not take on an air of inevitability until the death of Malcolm X and subsequent efforts to organize in the black community. In the summer of 1966, on James Meredith’s Freedom from Fear March through Mississippi, Stokely Charmichael introduced the term black power to crowds of marchers, initiating polarizing reactions among established activists across races and political persuasions. The march itself was hastily organized as a result of the assassination attempt on James Meredith, who had vowed to walk the 220 miles from Memphis, Tennessee, along the northern border of Mississippi to the capital of Jackson. Meredith was shot on the second day of his march. The resulting notoriety brought the full weight of the civil rights leadership—including James Brown—to organize and rally the community to complete the march for Meredith. Brown flew into Memphis to visit Meredith and performed at Toogaloo College in Jackson in support of the march, which turned out to be one of the sparks for the black power movement.
In his 1986 autobiography Godfather of Soul, Brown recalled that period: “There was a lot of ferment going on, and a lot of tension inside and outside the movement…. Martin [Luther King] was trying to keep things going in a nonviolent way, and Stokely [Carmichael] and them were starting to talk about Black Power—and upsetting a whole lot of people with it too. Whitney Young and Roy Wilkins pulled out of the march because of it.” Brown, however, was unfazed by the implications of the term, and embraced it:
Black Power meant different things to different people, see. To some people it meant black pride and black people owning businesses and having a voice in politics. That’s what it meant to me. To other people it meant self-defense against attacks like the one on Meredith. But to others it meant a revolutionary bag…. I wanted to see people free, but I didn’t see any reason for us to kill each other.
Stokely [Carmichael] said I was the one person who was most dangerous to his movement at the time because people would listen to me.17
In his memoir, Brown refers to his conversations with James Meredith as being the starting point for Brown’s forays into social activism. Within days of visiting Meredith, Brown recorded “Money Won’t Change You,” and later that summer he recorded “Don’t Be a Drop-out,” which he used as the centerpiece of his social activism. Brown spoke frequently to Vice President Hubert Humphrey and contributed to Humphrey’s Stay in School program, visiting schools and telling his story of the value of education. Throughout 1967 Brown found himself a consultant to the White House on issues of race.
The crushing violence and social upheavals of 1968 proved to be a turning point in the careers of many public figures, and Brown was no exception. In February Brown purchased his first radio station, WGYW in Knoxville, Tennessee. He changed the call letters to WJBE and upgraded the format of soul, jazz, and gospel music to include news, public affairs, and children’s programs. Brown was adamant about using his clout as a black entertainer to provide for his community.
During his live stage shows, Brown would frequently bring the music down and deliver a speech or share some personal sentiments with the audience. Often Brown would have a local civic leader, activist, or entertainer come onstage to receive recognition. He did this throughout a weeklong set at the Apollo Theater in March 1968. At one of the shows he brought his accountant onstage to present a check to the civil rights organization the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and a check to the H. Rap Brown Defense Fund. H. Rap Brown was one of the most prominent black militants at the time and was under government harassment for inciting violence. The Louisiana-born Hubert Brown (now Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin) earned the name “Rap” in the early 1960s while developing his quick-witted rhyming style and playing the dozens with his neighborhood homies. He attended Southern University and quickly emerged as an activist leader. He was elected chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1967, replacing Stokely Carmichael. Rap Brown followed Carmichael’s path of making proclamations of black power, and he urged direct action to challenge the racial status quo. At one rally in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in June 1967, Rap Brown directly challenged protestors to take over some white-owned businesses: “I don’t care if you have to burn him down or run him out, you better take over them stores.” Shortly after Rap Brown left Cambridge, fires broke out in the district Rap Brown appeared to have threatened. Rap Brown was charged with arson and inciting a riot and was in and out of jails and courtrooms through the end of the decade.
Rap Brown was a compelling speaker with a penchant for memorable one-liners. Among his most famous were: “Violence is as American as cherry pie” and “If America don’t come around, we’re gonna burn it down.” Rap Brown was well versed in street slang and had a massive following of young and antiestablishment supporters. James Brown, perhaps ironically, was among them. Brown wrote, “I disagreed with Rap about a lot of things, but I also didn’t like the way the government was harassing him. And as bad as things were getting, I thought we needed to stick together. I was against violence, but I was not against self-defense.”18 Brown’s open dialogue with black power militants made him a singularly equipped black celebrity to respond when the masses exploded.
In late March, Brown visited Africa for the first time as a guest of the president of the Ivory Coast (now Côte d’Ivoire), Félix Houphouët-Boigny. There he got a taste of his formidable global cultural influence as a successful black American entertainer.
When I got there and got off the plane, I felt I was on land I should have been on much earlier. The Africans were full of pride and dignity, and they were very warm, too. It was hard to believe that they knew my music…. We were there for only two days, but I was overwhelmed by the spirit of the place. I think it made me understand some things about my roots as well.19
Brown landed in New York City on Tuesday, April 2, planning to sleep off his lengthy flight and prepare for a big night at the Boston Garden on Friday. Brown’s sleep was interrupted on Thursday with the news that Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot in Memphis. Brown had to cope with the news, figure out how to grieve, prepare to move forward with the concert, and help to ameliorate the state of his own people. James Brown was in crisis-management mode throughout that weekend and the days that followed. Local officials wanted to cancel the concert, a plan that would just as likely have sent thousands of outraged blacks into downtown Boston without a place to go.
A deal was struck: the local PBS affiliate would broadcast the James Brown concert from the Boston Garden that night, and James Brown fans would be urged to stay home to watch an entire, uncut performance on television. The event, and the complex negotiations between a desperate big-city mayor and a former shoeshine boy from Augusta revealed just how much leverage the Godfather of Soul had amassed. The show would go on.
After some somber introductions by black city councilman Thomas Atkins—the first black city official elected in Boston in the century—and a stark plea from Mayor Kevin White, James Brown ushered in the band on cue and began his regular show. The James Brown Revue was a finely tuned operation, with Brown running his band with split-second efficiency. Despite the horrors of the past few hours, James Brown produced a top-notch performance, replete with exhilarating dance steps, smiling banter with his band, a delightfully sensual interlude with Marva Whitney, and the awkward comedy routines of Maceo Parker. These things could all be considered out of step with the somber moment, but Brown had to carry on and had to bring the audience up with his own brand of entertainment. James Brown had a lot on his mind that night:
Throughout the show, between songs, I talked about Dr. King and urged the people to stay calm. I announced a song title and tried to work the title into a little rap about Dr. King and the whole situation. I talked about my own life and where I’d come from. At one point, when I was reminiscing about Martin, I started to cry—just a few tears rolling out, you know, nothing anybody could really see—but it was like it was all starting to really sink in what we lost. But I pulled myself together—I thought that would do the most good—and went on with the show.
“I’m still a soul brother,” I said at one point, “and you people have made it possible for me to be a first class man in all respects. I used to shine shoes in front of a radio station. Now I own radio stations. You know what that is? That’s Black Power.”20
As Brown entered into his finale, the crowd became understandably excited, and some began to rush the stage. Initially they were politely restrained by security, but as things progressed, one white security officer shoved a young black audience member into the crowd, almost inciting a riot at the moment. Brown had to stop the music, raise the lights, and admonish the audience—and let the security officials know that he had control of the situation. Brown addressed the crowd, and the viewing audience in Boston, and patiently but authoritatively kept the place from turning to chaos.
By breaking down the show and taking charge of the moment, Brown used his considerable clout not only to maintain order at his venue, but also to address the seething frustrations of a people so deeply wounded that night. As chaotic as the moment was, the interlude was necessary for a grieving audience to witness: soul about to explode kept contained by the Godfather of Soul himself. Brown’s cool but assertive command of the crisis was striking, as Martin Luther King himself had trouble containing unruly crowds during his final years. But Brown did not utilize religious or moral grounds to pacify his audience. Brown understood the raw racial tone of the moment, and he addressed his people accordingly: “We’re black” he told the seething, grieving crowd, “we’re black, we’re black, I know I can get some respect from my own people.” Brown got the respect of the people—and the respect of the authorities, who understood the unique hold James Brown had on his people.
The next day Brown was in Washington, DC, to speak to another unruly crowd that had just spent the previous night torching black neighborhoods in the city. In all, riots in 110 cities shook the nation in the aftermath of King’s murder. Boston was one of the few major cities that was not torched that sad weekend. Brown spent the rest of the spring telling Negroes in ravaged cities across the country, “learn, don’t burn.” His ongoing relationship with Vice President Humphrey helped solidify James Brown’s self-image as a voice of his people in a critical time. Yet the overture was not universally praised. In addition, Brown’s release of a fairly patriotic song, “America Is My Home,” that summer sparked friction from his progressive supporters who were forging a deep critique of the American experiment at that time.
James Brown then made a fateful decision. He pushed forward with his plan to play for the American troops stationed in Vietnam. Brown had seen this as a no-brainer, an effort to do his patriotic duty as well as showcase his status as a national and international talent. He had repeatedly sought to travel with the regular USO organizations but was denied. In June 1968 he obtained permission from the State Department to take a small group and perform for the troops. The trip could be seen both as triumphant and tragic. The band performed in Japan and Korea, which helped to internationalize his appeal, and Brown took a small entourage to Vietnam, playing to troops directly in the fighting zone, literally dodging bullets to get from show to show. Upon his return, Brown was treated with disdain by the very community he sought to uplift. He was seen by many as a lackey of the Lyndon Johnson administration, which had supported the Vietnam war, while the vast majority of young people and African Americans opposed it.
Determined to perform there for “all of the troops” and not just the black ones, James Brown risked his reputation, and his life, in the poorly secured war zone to perform to thrilled GIs. Brown and his band did not enjoy the support of the US government at any level for his gesture. “I was packed and ready to go,” recalls Alfred “Pee Wee” Ellis, James Brown’s saxophonist, regarding the Vietnam trip. “Then at midnight the night before we were to leave, I got a call from the FBI. They said that I had an outstanding drug warrant against me from high school, and I couldn’t leave the country.” In retrospect, the level of engagement by the federal government into the actions of a rhythm and blues band in 1967 is striking.21 Brown later claimed, quite accurately it turns out, that he was put under federal surveillance after the Vietnam trip.
As was his custom during the early years of his career, Brown constantly engaged with local leaders, activists, entertainers, and interested locals in the communities in which he performed. After-hours talks in his dressing room, while often entertainment-related, could quickly become a hot spot for debates regarding nationalism, blackness, militancy, violence, Vietnam, and black capitalism. Brown encountered members of the Black Panther Party and other black radical organizations that urged him to deliver a more direct political message. One account by Brown sideman Hank Ballard states that “machine-gun-toting Black Panthers” intimidated Brown into writing direct message songs. Brown denied the claim but in his autobiography writes of finding a grenade at his door in a hotel in Los Angeles in 1968.22 Progressive leaders questioned Brown’s politics, and in an interview, journalist Earl Wilson asked Brown directly what it was like to be called an Uncle Tom. By the summer of 1968 James Brown knew he was under fire to deliver an unmistakable message song.
In early August, James Brown went to Los Angeles to appear on the Joey Bishop Show. The next day, August 7, 1968, Brown went to the Vox studio on Melrose Street in Los Angeles, had some staffers gather some children (few, if any, were black) to sing a chorus, and set about the recording of one of his most important records. Trombonist Fred Wesley’s first recording experience with Brown was on this song. In his autobiography, Hit Me, Fred: Recollections of a Sideman, Wesley recalls the event:
Just then, Mr. Bobbitt, the road manager and a bunch of people, mostly kids, walked into the studio. We stopped playing, and Mr. Brown went over and greeted them like he had expected them. I had no idea what they had to do with this recording….
Mr. Brown was in control now. Pee Wee took his place in the reed section, and James counted it off. The groove was already strong, but when James counted it off and began to dance and direct it, it took on a new power. All of a sudden, the fatigue I had been feeling was gone. The kids were doing their chant with a new energy. In fact the energy level in the whole studio was lifted. James went straight through the whole tune and that was it. After about four hours of preparation, “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud” went down in one take.23
The song hit the airwaves on August 16, less than two weeks after its one-take recording session. Brown incorporated it into his tour across Texas that same week, rousing the crowd to chant “I’m black and I’m proud!” On September 14, “Say It Loud” was in stores, soaring to number one.
The impact of “Say It Loud” could be felt everywhere. It is not an exaggeration to say that the song may have been the most important black popular music recording ever released. “ ‘I’m Black and I’m Proud,’ that was the most beautiful thing that ever happened!” recalls guitarist Mack Ray Henderson. “Because before that, it was ‘I’m black and I’m ashamed!’ “24 In October 1968, when Olympic athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their black-gloved, clenched fists on the victory stand in Mexico City during the playing of the national anthem—the effect itself causing a surge in black pride—”Say It Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud” had just peaked as the number one R&B song in the country.
The record was also a crossover hit and garnered pop radio airplay as well as a couple of awkward television performances in front of predominantly white audiences. James Brown performed the song on ABC television on Hugh Hefner’s Playboy After Dark in front of a roomful of scantily dressed women, who chanted the chorus of the song with gusto. Brown’s lifelong friend Al Sharpton described the impact of the song: “He made people all over the world, whites in America, Asians, like black music and identify with it. He had them actually singing ‘I’m black and I’m proud,’ people that weren’t even remotely black, didn’t know what the chant meant to be black in America.”25 Because of Brown’s mainstream popularity, the song was heard everywhere. However, the song would be James Brown’s last pop top-ten hit for the next seventeen years.
“Say It Loud” proved to be a turning point in black popular music and a watershed in black popular culture. Black popular music up until that point had not reflected the bitterness of blacks toward the white man in such explicit fashion. Other, more somber critiques of white supremacy, such as Billie Holiday’s 1939 “Strange Fruit” and John Coltrane’s “Alabama” in 1963, were powerful in their own way, but they were melancholy and steeped in the blues. Nina Simone’s blistering 1964 performance of “Mississippi Goddam” worked as a show-tune parody and certainly reflected the bitterness of the southern civil rights struggle. Brown, on the other hand, was triumphant. The subtle symbolism of the other upbeat civil rights era songs such as “People Get Ready” and “Dancing in the Streets” gave way to Brown’s lyrical form of direct action: “Now we demand a chance to do things for ourself / We’re tired of beatin’ our head against the wall’ / And workin’ for someone else” was one of the revealing verses. Brown concluded the song with his trademark fire: “We’re people, we’re just like the birds and the bees / We’d rather die on our feet / Than be livin’ on our knees.” “Say it LOUD,” he demanded, and the chorus of young people shouted back, “I’m black and I’m PROUD!” It was one thing to be accepting of one’s own worth, but to shout to the world that, as a member of a once-derided race, you were now black and proud was an entirely new and triumphant state. Brown also captured the tenor of the times, using a phrase his father had taught him: “We would rather die on our feet than be livin’ on our knees.” Brown brought it into the movement of the sixties with vibrant new meaning.26
“Say It Loud” popularized the term black as the proper and preferred nomenclature for African Americans across the country and across the generations and finally ushered the term Negro out of mainstream use. In previous eras, to call someone black was a deeply seated term of derision in the community; to empower and liberate the word helped to liberate an entire population. The term Negro was an anachronism when it appeared on the 1970 census as the official designation of choice for African American citizens. Al Sharpton commented after Brown’s passing: “There were many in the movement who wanted to raise the consciousness of black America from Negro to black. James Brown did it with one song. He could reach the masses much quicker than a lot of the leaders.”27
“Say It Loud” captured the possibilities inherent in the soul aesthetic, the idea that black entertainment could generate another level of consciousness in its listeners. Further, the prevalence of Africanized rhythms aligned Brown’s music with a musical tradition that had deep roots in moralizing through the music. In a sense, Brown made far more connections with his opus than he originally anticipated.
James Brown’s song was not entirely revered by black radicals. While the Black Panthers recognized James Brown to be a consummate entertainer, their official doctrine on his black power sloganeering was that it was a superficial effort. Oakland Panther Linda Harrison wrote a critical essay in a 1969 issue of the Black Panther, “On Cultural Nationalism,” where she treated James Brown’s hit song as a distraction from the real revolution:
In the United States, cultural nationalism can be summed up in James Brown’s words—’I’m Black and I’m Proud.’ … Those that believe in the ‘I’m Black and Proud’ theory—believe that there is dignity inherent in wearing naturals; that a buba makes a slave a man…. A man who lives under slavery and any of its extensions rarely regains his dignity by rejecting the clothiers of his enslaver; he rarely regains his dignity except by a confrontation on equal grounds with his enslaver.28
The Black Panther Party saw itself as going beyond cultural nationalism, beyond identity politics, toward revolutionary action. The Panthers had their reasons at the time for disparaging cultural nationalism (see chapter 5), but Harrison’s position and the Panthers’ public posture of dismissing the party music of James Brown perpetuated the illusion that the Panthers, as revolutionaries, would not dance. Had the Lumpen managed to release their live album and become nationally known, they might have completely shattered that stoic image of the Panthers and through their performance given recognition to the impact of James Brown on black American life and culture.
For Brown himself, “Say It Loud” turned his career upside down. He stopped receiving offers to play in predominantly white venues. He rarely was invited to perform in the pop festivals, was given no more movie appearances, and with the exception of a few invitations from liberal TV talk show hosts, largely disappeared from the pop apparatus. Brown discussed this in 1986:
The song cost me a lot of my crossover audience. The racial makeup of my concerts was mostly black after that. I don’t regret recording it, though, even if it was misunderstood. It was badly needed at the time. It helped the Afro-Americans in general and the dark-skinned man in particular. I’m proud of that.29
While James Brown never showed regret for recording the song that turned his career on its head, he did lament the implication that “Say It Loud” was fodder for a militant uprising. This was not Brown’s vision of black pride. “Say It Loud” popularized black radicalism and indirectly served to sanction the activities of publicly known black radicals such as H. Rap Brown, Stokely Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver, Seale, and Newton. Many of their books, such as Cleaver’s Soul on Ice (1968) and Hamilton and Charmichael’s Black Power (1967), were selling well—in addition to the Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)—and now it seemed that James Brown had provided the movement with a black power soundtrack.
Within a year of the release of Brown’s song, there were black pride anthems appearing on the airwaves from black-oriented radio stations. The Temptations’ “Message from a Black Man,” the Impressions’ “Choice of Colors,” and Sly and the Family Stone’s “Don’t Call Me Nigger, Whitey,” presented an entirely new discourse across the racial divide in 1969. Frank discussions of racial inequality were commonplace in the daily lives of black people, and in part because of Brown they were increasingly common in mainstream black popular music.
Brown’s song generated interest in music that could “tell it like it is,” and the song energized the careers of radical poets and jazz musicians who had been seeking a larger space for their fiery antiracist, anti-integrationist, and often blatantly antiwhite works to be heard. In 1969 the political novelist and jazz poet Gil Scott-Heron was given a contract by legendary jazz and pop producer Bob Thiele to record a night of his political poetry backed by a jazz ensemble. Thiele was responsible for many of the classic 1960s sides by John Coltrane. The inner fire heard in avant-garde jazz as instrumental music was now exploding with the black fire of a new breed of righteous, straight-talking jazz poets. The recording of Small Talk at 125th and Lenox provided an early rendition of Gil Scott-Heron’s anthem of outrage and anticommercialism, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.”
Gil Scott-Heron was born in Chicago in 1949. After his parents divorced, he was raised by his grandmother in rural Tennessee. Scott-Heron witnessed southern racism firsthand as one of the first grade-schoolers to integrate the schools in Jackson, Tennessee. He spent his teenage years in the chaos of early 1960s Harlem and was writing biting poetry and fiction between stints in college. Once he began recording, a new tone of angry black soul emerged in his work. Gil Scott-Heron produced music with an angular, righteous voice of discontent that captured the imagination of a rebellious generation. Through Thiele’s Flying Dutchman records, Scott-Heron would release such biting jazz poetry as “Whitey on the Moon,” “Home Is Where the Hatred Is,” and “Who’ll Pay Reparations on My Soul?” Developing a musical collaboration with fellow Lincoln University student Brian Jackson, throughout the 1970s the two recorded many socially conscious—and funky—rhythm and blues songs such as “Johannesburg,” “The Bottle,” “Angel Dust,” and “B-Movie.” Gil Scott-Heron would go on to become one of the most important politically oriented black artists of his generation.
A New York-based stable of militant writers known as the Last Poets brought their radical street verse, recorded with minimal accompaniment (typically just a conga player), and became iconic voices of a violent time. They used their words to imagine a violent black uprising on songs such as “When the Revolution Comes,” “Black People What Y’all Gonna Do,” and “Niggers Are Scared of Revolution,” while expressing antiwhite enmity in works such as “Opposites” and “The White Man’s Got a God Complex.”
“We tried to keep that whole sense of revolutionary thought alive,” founding member Abiodun Oyewole recalled in 2009.
Are we ready to be together, are we ready to live, are we ready to die in order to live better? I mean it was like some heavy questions but it was all about black people coming together finally and trying to get rid of the negative aspects.
Now those negative aspects became the nigger. The whole movement of the Last Poets was to “de-niggerify” black people. A nigger is slovenly, a nigger is unreliable. We didn’t wage war against white people, we waged war against black people that were not being black, and those people were niggers.30
The Last Poets began when three New York street poets—Gylan Kain, Felipe Luciano, and Abiodun Oyewole—came together for a 1968 memorial on Malcolm X’s birthday, May 19. They named themselves the Last Poets, referencing a concept from the South African-born Harlem poet Keorapetse “Willie” Kgositsile, who foretold that when the inevitable uprising began, the writers would become the soldiers. The group believed that their efforts signified that they were the last of the poets before the cleansing. “The Last Poets, the last words before the guns start talking,” as Alafia Purdim stated.31
They began to work out of a Harlem art space they called East Wind. The volatile ensemble quickly grew, splintered, and diverged into two groups. One incarnation of the Last Poets, consisting of Oyewole, Umar Bin Hassan, and Alafia Purdim, recorded a groundbreaking album engineered by rock producer Alan Douglas that sold 400,000 copies on the strength of Ben Hassan’s iconic rap “Niggers Are Scared of Revolution.” Another faction, calling itself the “Original” Last Poets, composed of Kain, Luciano, and David Nelson, produced an album and film of their works in 1970 that included tracks such as “Die Nigger,” “Into the Streets,” and a track titled “James Brown,” a tribute to the Godfather’s singular impact on black identity. The passionate poem refers to “James Brown the witch doctor” who “screams, falls, scoops the moon from the river” and “showers the power of his cold sweat as his sweat becomes the river!” The crescendo of screams at the conclusion expresses the centrality of the pure soul force that James Brown delivered to his audience, an audience that included the Original Last Poets.
Collectively, the Last Poets’ first three albums and film of poetry in performance (all released between 1969 and 1971) reveal both the popularity of black radicalism and the increasing militancy found in black popular entertainment. While the membership of the Last Poets would vary through the years, their incendiary poems of black revolutionary consciousness were released to wide acclaim and became known as precursors of the politically charged rap music that would emerge from the Bronx a decade later.
With Brown’s recording of “Say It Loud” and the explosion of musical militancy that appeared to follow it, one might have concluded that James Brown had entered the movement. As the most popular black entertainer of the decade, James Brown was a celebrity of undisputed credibility with his audience. His message songs, charitable contributions, investments in black businesses such as soul food restaurants and black radio stations, made Brown an indispensable icon of black success and social responsibility. In 1969 Look magazine published a cover story on Brown, and along with his picture on the cover was the curious phrase, “Is James Brown the most important Black man in America?”32
Brown’s music influenced the entirety of the black music spectrum, including the Motown standard bearers. A young Michael Jackson emulated Brown’s dances during the Jackson 5’s audition for the storied Motown label in 1968. Jazz musicians expanded their repertoire to include rhythm-driven instrumentals inspired by Brown’s supremely talented backing band. Brown’s performance was one space where blacks of all political and economic persuasions could enter and be validated.
Brown was also the envy of the burgeoning Black Arts movement. The poets and playwrights, visual artists, novelists, social theorists, and jazz critics that composed a palpable wave of new black arts activity in major cities saw Brown as the pinnacle of what the black arts could become if properly directed. Amiri Baraka referred to Brown as “Our No. 1 black poet.”33 Black Arts movement activist Larry Neal explained Brown’s influence in a 1987 essay that summarized the “Social Background to the Black Arts Movement” of the 1960s:
We began to listen to the music of the rhythm and blues people, soul music…. The big hero for the poets was James Brown. We all thought that James Brown was a magnificent poet, and we all envied him and wished we could do what he did. If the poets could do that, we would just take over America. Suppose James Brown had consciousness. We used to have big arguments like that. It was like saying, “Suppose James Brown read Fanon.”34
To imagine Brown reading Frantz Fanon is of particular interest, as the Martinique-born psychologist and theorist of a “Third World Revolution” was required reading in the political education classes in the formative years of the Black Panther Party. Fanon’s 1961 opus, Wretched of the Earth, written as he was battling cancer as well as working alongside the Algerian resistance against French colonial rule, was for many the bible of the Third World revolution. That book and other of his writings resonated because of Fanon’s ability to deconstruct the psychology of colonization, which girded Fanon’s prescriptions for violence in the overturning of the colonial state. Wretched of the Earth was popular worldwide and was widely read in the United States once it was translated in 1963. For the Black Panthers—who were Fanonists in a very strong sense—to produce a James Brown-styled band like the Lumpen speaks volumes about the potential—the revolutionary potential—of the music, of the culture, of the people. Larry Neal’s fanciful notion of James Brown reading Fanon was perhaps best incarnated in the music and performances of the Lumpen.
The revolutionary potential of a funky black entertainer was not missed by the state. Brown was correct when he assumed he was put under surveillance in 1968. In a siege of his finances initiated by the FBI, the IRS, and the FCC, Brown was forced to sell off his radio stations, private property, and the lease to his private jet plane to pay millions of dollars in back taxes he claimed he knew nothing about. Despite his public appearances with Presidents Johnson and Nixon and Vice President Humphrey (or perhaps because of them), nothing could stop the pressure applied to him by the federal government. Brown discussed this in 2005:
It has since been proved that J. Edgar Hoover, with who knows whose permission, had a mandate to prevent the rise in America of a new Black leader. All of us who were Black and in the public eye were put under intense surveillance, harassed by the IRS, and subjected to all forms of underhanded activities to discredit us in an effort to take away our hard-earned money, and therefore our potential political power. No matter what it took.
Sure enough, I suddenly had new troubles with the IRS. Out of nowhere—or at least it seemed that way to me—they claimed I owed four million dollars in back taxes, which was crazy. There’s no other word for it (except maybe prejudicial, vindictive, politically motivated, etc.) … The next thing I knew, the IRS and the FCC had taken away the rest of my few remaining radio stations in order to satisfy that tax lien. In doing so, they also happened to silence one of the strongest and most vital voices that spoke directly to America’s Black community.35
In 1970 Brown’s amassed wealth and public presence as a black media entrepreneur was a highly admired aspect of Brown’s cultural leadership. While his many business ventures often appeared haphazard, to many of Brown’s fans it appeared inexplicable that a steadfast black capitalist of the stature of Brown, whose properties were well known and admired throughout the black community, could manage to lose control of his empire within a few short years. It was later revealed that Brown was a victim of the Special Services Committee of the IRS, which illegally spied on US citizens in an effort to harass, discredit, and destroy political opponents of President Richard Nixon. In 1974 a congressional investigation of the doomed Nixon administration found that, at the request of the president, the IRS illegally spied on thousands of individuals and organizations that it claimed harbored “extremist views and philosophies.” The investigation produced a list with more than eleven thousand names. James Brown’s name was on it. While Brown continued to record and perform worldwide, his empire was quietly dismantled, and his ability to build a black-oriented economic infrastructure based upon his vast popularity was sabotaged. It was done quietly, but a case can be made that Brown was seen by the government as a political threat and was made an example by forces beyond his control specifically because he was a black entertainer with a political vision for his people.36
The amount of state repression imposed on black entertainers who had the potential to energize, politicize, and call to action their constituency leaves intriguing evidence as to how much of a threat to the social order these individuals appeared to be. Robert Nesta (Bob) Marley, the Jamaican singer and adherent to Rastafarianism, for example, was known worldwide for music that railed against an unjust social system. Marley delivered reggae, a hypnotic, humanistic brand of rhythm-based music, to the world. Although Marley remained publicly neutral about Jamaican politics, his musical message of redemption for the impoverished was closer to that of the socialist-leaning Jamaican prime minister, Michael Manley. Street gang violence was rampant at the time, but the 1976 shooting attempt on Bob Marley’s life, only days before a massive Smile Jamaica concert supported by Manley and only weeks before national elections, was considered by many to have been initiated by Manley’s opponent, Edward Seaga. Bob Marley’s visibility and perceived influence in Jamaican politics revealed the significance of Marley’s power as an entertainer.37
While he is recognized worldwide as a creative visionary, much of Bob Marley’s musical orientation owes a debt to black American soul music in general, and James Brown in particular. Many of the vocals in Jamaican popular music are finely crafted interpretations of American R&B, sung over the syncopated rhythms of the island. The early 1960s Jamaican singing groups, including Bob Marley and the Wailers, initially had the look and feel of doo-wop singers in the states.
But the music of Jamaica has always had a heartbeat pulse to it. Reggae is an amalgam of Western pop melodies and harmonies performed over traditional African-rooted rhythms. “The basic parts of the music were the drum and the bass. Because you know drums are the first instruments in music. So the drum is the heartbeat, and the bass is the backbone,” says Wailers bass player Aston Barrett. “Reggae is a concept of all different types of music,” Barrett continues. “You got funk, you got rhythm and blues, you got soul, and it’s very jazzy, when it’s ready.”38
In the 1950s the rhythms of Jamaican music were heavily influenced by British pop music and the swinging rhythms of ska music that combined gentle calypso-styled syncopations with a two-step swing borrowed from jazz. Marley biographer Timothy White asserts that it was the music of James Brown that influenced Jamaican musicians to abandon the Euro-pop influenced ska sound in favor of a more roots-oriented, downtempo rhythm of rocksteady (a direct precursor to the edgier riddims of reggae). When American rhythm and blues developed a more assertive rhythmic foundation in the mid-1960s, Jamaican musicians followed suit. Brown’s focus on the One was a key to the transformation of American popular music, and evidently Jamaican music as well. In Catch a Fire, the definitive biography of Bob Marley, White claims: “Marley was on target when he linked James Brown with the transition, since R&B was to ska what soul was to rock steady.”39
Bob Marley spent most of 1966 in the United States, living with his mother in Delaware. There, he soaked up the sounds of soul music on the radio and developed a deeper sense of his own style, as well as a keen affection for the smooth croonings of Curtis Mayfield and the raw soul of James Brown. (Ironically, Marley missed the much-heralded April 21, 1966, visit to Jamaica by Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, the legendary “King of Kings” to the Rastafarians, whose worldview Marley was beginning to immerse himself in.) When Marley returned to Jamaica in the fall, he is said to have told Bunny Wailer that he “no longer wanted to be a smooth singer, but rather he preferred to be a rough and militant vocalist like James Brown.”40 In 1969 Marley and his group recorded a militant race pride oriented single, “Black Progress,” which featured verses from Brown’s “Say It Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud,” some Brown-influenced black power chants, and an opening guitar riff from Sam and Dave’s “Soul Man.”
On the first album attributed to Bob Marley and the Wailers, called Soul Rebel, Marley is heard shouting out black American popular dances like the mashed potato, the funky chicken, and the alligator on the song “Soul Almighty.” The album also features an interpolation of James Brown’s “Try Me.” Soul was an undeniably strong influence on Bob Marley (and most Jamaican musicians), and Marley was an avid follower of the Godfather’s music, as he stated in a 1975 interview:
People like I, we love James Brown an’ love your funky stuffs, an’ we dig inta dat American bag. We didn’t want ta stand around playin’ dat slower ska beat anymore. De young musician, deh had a different beat—dis was rock steady now! Eager ta go!41
That “slower ska beat” would develop into a downbeat as a result of American R&B, and the work of James Brown. In America, Brown is the one credited with pushing R&B into what was called soul. Brown’s adaptation of funky rhythms and his unapologetic and urgent celebrations of pride and pleas for social justice served to push a new worldview onto an international audience that was searching for a method to voice its own aspirations.
Brown’s influence traversed the Atlantic as well. The Nigerian bandleader Fela Anikulapo Kuti gained worldwide prominence as a musician playing his own variation of the popular highlife African music style in the 1970s, employing the techniques of music popular among the people combined with explicit messages of resistance to oppression. This world-renowned bandleader and social critic developed a strong stance against what he saw as corruption within the Nigerian government in the 1970s. On extended tracks like “ITT (International Thief Thief),” “Coffin for Head of State,” and “Teacher Don’t Teach Me Nonsense,” Kuti railed against the colonial mentality of the elites in his land and abroad, openly preaching that music is the weapon for social change.
Kuti’s career, like that of many West African musicians, was heavily influenced by James Brown. As one of the most popular artists in Africa in the 1960s and 1970s, James Brown’s highly percussive rhythms, fiercely aggressive vocals, and improvisations carried over radio in Africa and had a transfixing and transforming effect on the younger generations. As African nations such as Ghana, Nigeria, and Côte d’Ivoire sought out their political independence, the strikingly anti-Western (yet still Western) music of James Brown was exhilarating. From city to city on the west coast of Africa in the mid to late 1960s, American soul music was the dominant musical entertainment form, and James Brown was the undisputed king. James Brown imitators with names like Geraldo Pino, Pepe Dynamite, “Elvis J. Brown,” and “James Brown Jr.” performed regularly along the African west coast, competing in scream contests and soul contests along the way. Fela Kuti saw it all happening and tried to find his own space.
Soul music took over. James Brown’s music, Otis Redding took over the whole continent, man. It was beautiful music though, I must agree. I said to myself, I must compete with these people. I must find a name for my music, so I gave my music [the name] “afrobeat” to give it an identity.42
Seeking to expand his music beyond an imitation of Africanized soul music, Kuti traveled to the United States to study jazz. However, he arrived at the height of the black revolution in 1969. In Los Angeles, Kuti met the young activist Sandra Smith (later Sandra Isadore), who had ties to the Black Panther Party. Her influence on Fela Kuti would change the world’s music. Smith exposed Kuti to the works of Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Martin Luther King Jr., and Elijah Muhammad. They were a revelation to Kuti, who would return to Africa on a mission to energize his audience with politically conscious music under the slogan “Music Is the Weapon.” Kuti explained the revelation of Malcolm X in 1982:
This book, I couldn’t put it down. The Autobiography of Malcolm X … This man was talking about the history of Africa, talking about the white man…. I never read a book like that before in my life…. I said, “This is a man!” I wanted to be like Malcolm X…. I was so unhappy that this man was killed. Everything about Africa started coming back to me.43
Sandra Isadore was an adept musician herself and had keen observations about Fela’s musical experiments at the time. She imparted upon Fela the necessity of a message in the music. She recalled:
At that time, James Brown had “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud.” Fela was singing in Yoruba, you couldn’t understand anything he was saying, but the music was getting better and better. He was getting deeper into his African roots. African music is about the chanting. Fela had all these rhythms and all these arrangements, and it was getting so dynamic! But when I asked him what he was saying, he said he was talking about what he likes in his soup! And I was saying, “No. You need to sing some conscious lyrics. You can pass a message on in the music.”44
Upon his return to Nigeria, Fela Kuti recorded constantly with his band, Africa 70. They created a series of blistering twelve- to twenty-minute afrobeat workouts that were palettes for Kuti’s diatribes against the Nigerian government and the colonial power structure. In his heyday, Kuti was frequently referred to as “the African James Brown,” a designation that connotes the towering scope of each cultural leader.
James Brown and his band visited Nigeria in the fall of 1970. During their visit, members of Brown’s band went to Fela Kuti’s compound outside of Lagos and caught their performances. Brown did not go. Bassist William “Bootsy” Collins was a part of the band at the time, and he was transfixed by the experience of meeting Fela and of hearing him play. He recalled in an interview with Jay Babcock:
Everybody was talkin’ about Fela when we got there, and about how he was like the African James Brown. And everybody was tellin’ us he was THE man. So after we did one gig in Lagos, Nigeria, we all just went over. Me, Bobby Byrd, Vicki Anderson, Jabo …
He was still in the dressing room. And man, we walked in the room and the smoke knocked us down! … So we vibed with him, we talked, and we went out to see the show. He came out and did his thing, man, and we had never seen NOTHIN’ like that, or FELT anything like that, you know. It was AMAZING, and I guess by going there and seeing that, I kind of absorbed whatever I was hearing and whatever I was seeing. I just brought it back with me, and it became a part of me.45
The physicality of African music and the physicality of Brown’s funk should not be ignored as parallel developments. Fela and most musicians in the tropics experienced a visceral connection between the sounds of the music and the sensations of the natural body (dance, sweat, sex) as part of their daily activities. For black American artists, this was often a bittersweet reality, as their expressiveness was both their blessing and a curse because it contrasted with the Western notions of polite civility. No small amount of white racism was imparted on black entertainers specifically because of their affectation with the body and their ability to get whites in touch with theirs. Bootsy Collins once explained the funk in the most physical of terms, connecting it to his Cincinnati youth: “Funk was like the way we lived. All of us kids sleeping in one room, it’s 105 degrees outside, no air-conditioning. That’s funk.”46
The popularity of the funky, Africanized rhythms of Bootsy Collins and others became a hallmark of early 1970s black party music as an interactive polyrhythmic cross-pollination took place, one which facilitated the rise of funk and disco in the United States. The Cameroonian saxophone player Manu Dibango scored a worldwide hit in 1972 with a James Brown-derived, pulsing dance number, “Soul Makossa.” The incessant groove and chanting-babbling of Dibango influenced the Afrocentric New Jersey funk band Kool and the Gang to spin an African-oriented groove on one of their biggest hits, the hard-driving funk classic “Jungle Boogie.”
However, for Fela Kuti, the music was not only about fun and games. Because of his prominent voice against the Nigerian government and the corrupt elites Kuti saw as exploiting his people, Kuti was repeatedly attacked, detained, and harassed by the Nigerian government. After recording the song “Zombie” in 1977, which railed against the Nigerian military, Fela’s compound was raided, his mother was thrown from a second-story window (causing fatal injuries), and he and his bandmates were severely beaten. The harassment increased when Kuti announced he would run for president of Nigeria in 1979. However, the government refused to recognize Kuti’s party, the Movement of the People. The state repression had a deleterious impact on Kuti’s political career and his potential to manifest his larger vision of pan-African liberation. He nevertheless established himself as a singular voice of resistance during an era of postcolonial repression across Africa.
Kuti died of AIDS in 1997. Shortly afterward, more than a million people attended the Fela memorial at his original compound in Lagos. His slogan, “Music Is the Weapon,” and his irrepressible body of work would live on.
It is important to note that Bob Marley and Fela Kuti—acknowledged worldwide as political artists—both considered James Brown to be a significant influence on their careers. All three of these men harnessed the power of African rhythms to produce music with a transcendent energy and force for liberation, while each man—both artistically and literally—pushed against the repressive apparatus upholding racial and economic injustice. And all three were subjected to a remarkable level of repression by the state.
The similarities of the artistic activism of each of these men are underscored by the sweeping global milieu of anticolonial agitation and change taking place in the 1960s. In his book, Fela: The Life and Times of an African Musical Icon, Michael Veal explains the circumstances surrounding Fela Kuti’s political growth:
African American culture figures crucially among the foreign cultural elements informing Fela’s work and radical vision…. The 1950s and 1960s were an era of nationalism in Africa and the Caribbean and civil rights in America. These movements paved the way for what might be called the internationalization of black power during the late 1960s and 1970s—a brief moment in which counterhegemonic protest in these places shared a rhetoric derived from the civil rights and postcolonial struggles.47
The “internationalization of black power” was a central element in the re-Africanization of black popular music. The driving, assertive funk beats employed by James Brown, combined with his moralizing and extemporaneous social commentary, all reinforced the conception that Brown’s innovations were a part of something larger and not entirely his own.
Brown was recognized around the world as an artist who came from among the people and could identify with common folks. This was related frequently during Brown’s visits to Africa, beginning in 1968. Brown was revered as a hero to millions of fans in Africa who appeared to have a special understanding of Brown’s work and musical vision. John Miller Chernoff wrote in his 1979 book, African Rhythms and African Sensibility, that while he was in Africa studying the highlife music of West Africans, they were constantly querying him about their American music hero, James Brown:
The tradition of using songs to express philosophical, ethical or satirical themes is so much a part of African musical idioms that it has continued, along with many rhythmic characteristics, within the development of Afro-American styles, and songs continue to serve as guides in practical philosophy to the people who listen to them.
… So to a [Ghanaian] fan, James Brown’s lyrics in particular are “thick with proverbs comparable to the most philosophical Highlife songs.” In fact, many of my friends who were most eager to help me understand their Highlife songs were just as eager for my help in translating James Brown’s slang, which they interpreted with no end of enjoyment and delight.48
James Brown was popular worldwide because of the virility, the tone, and earnestness of his presentation, and because of his highly poly-rhythmic grooves that spoke simultaneously to the past and the future of African people. James Brown and his music stood at a unique crossroads of American social change, black identity formation, and the transformation of American musical traditions.
The long-term impact of James Brown on the popular rhythms of the world is evident in Brown’s foundational status in the creation of hiphop music. Hip-hop, a global phenomenon that many see as a means for members of a voiceless social strata to rediscover their own sense of self and to articulate their issues—through lyrics rhymed over syncopated, funky beats—would not exist if it were not for the work of the Godfather of Soul.
At the end of the 1960s, James Brown’s performances and dancefunk recordings focused an energy that encapsulated the black power emanating from the streets. Brown created a space—at his shows and in the minds of his audiences—inhabited by highly charged rhythms, assertive attitudes, and free-form vocal improvisation. With self-aggrandizing titles such as “Superbad,” “Sex Machine,” “The Payback,” and “Papa Don’t Take No Mess,” Brown’s records provided thematic and rhythmic palates for younger disc jockeys to generate dance-floor pandemonium. The edgy and relentless rhythms allowed young dancers to find their own robotic, acrobatic moves within the rhythmic space of the grooves. Brown’s charged, syncopated, often improvised lyrics, grunts, and chants became basic ingredients for up-and-coming rappers to personalize their own syncopated deliveries. For the first DJs, the first breakers, and the first rappers, James Brown endures as a founding father of hip-hop.
In the summer of 1973 Clive Campbell, known as DJ Kool Herc, brought the block party to the streets of the South Bronx. He is recognized as the first of the hip-hop DJs. Campbell was a Jamaican immigrant and, like Bob Marley, was also a James Brown fan. He explained the roots of his own craft to Davey D:
I was born in Jamaica and I was listening to American music in Jamaica. My favorite artist was James Brown. That’s who inspired me. A lot of the records I played was by James Brown. When I came over here I just put it in the American style and a perspective for them to dance to it. In Jamaica all you needed was a drum and bass. So what I did here was go right to the ‘yoke.’ I cut off all anticipation and played the beats. I’d find out where the break in the record was at and prolong it and people would love it. So I was giving them their own taste and beat percussion-wise, ‘cause my music is all about heavy bass.49
In the 1980s, when digital sampling technology became available and rap producers compiled their tracks from existing sounds, the choice James Brown beat, grunt, scream, horn riff, or melody became the essential element of hip-hop production. Further, dance music producers tasked with sequencing a segment of music that repeated throughout a song would key into “the One” to keep time. The strong pulse on the downbeat was and remains the timekeeper for Afro-diasporic dance music worldwide. “It all goes back to the Godfather of Soul, James Brown,” hip-hop pioneer Afrika Bambaataa has stated.
James Brown helped to internationalize the rhythms of black music, and in the process he helped create a musical movement that has swept the world in the form of rap music, heard and performed on every continent on Earth. This worldwide phenomenon spawned because James Brown was in touch and in tune with the rhythms of the streets when those streets were on fire.
In 1971, on his third Live at the Apollo recording, titled Revolution of the Mind, James Brown stirred up the audience on his finale by chanting the mantra of the Black Panther Party. With the Apollo crowd in a frenzy, Brown had them shouting, “Soul Power! Soul Power! Power to the People! Power to the People!” Brown understood the mood on the streets like no other artist of the time.
By forcefully affirming black pride and celebrating black power, James Brown initiated a populist thrust toward black consciousness. As a result, Black Nationalism came home to roost at his doorstep—literally, in the form of black radicals urging Brown forward into a more radical stance toward the black revolution. Brown stood his ground as both an inspiration and a moderating/negating force on elements of change during this tumultuous period.
At the height of the black power era, James Brown saw his role clearly. He knew that an upheaval of black consciousness was taking place, and he believed that he could turn black pride into black economic success. Among his many business ventures, in 1969 Brown collaborated with Donald Warden and former Oakland Raiders football player Art Powell to create “Black and Brown trading stamps” with Brown’s face on them. Shoppers in the black community would be able to accumulate stamps with each purchase and redeem them for cash and discounted items later. It was a means to help promote purchasing in the black business community. Brown also invested in a soul food restaurant, the Gold Platter, and engaged in a great deal of publicity in the Macon, Georgia, area. His self-made entrepreneurial success led him toward one of his most controversial decisions.50
James Brown would sully his standing as Soul Brother Number One by endorsing Republican president Richard Nixon for reelection in 1972. Brown’s self-help mantra overlapped with Nixon’s manipulative “Black Capitalism” campaign, and many who followed Brown and regarded him as a figure for social change presumed he was duped or coerced into the endorsement. While he is rarely mentioned among the nation’s prominent black Republicans, Brown never wavered in his position on Nixon and even penned a song in 1973 essentially dismissing Nixon’s Watergate troubles. “You Can Have Watergate, Just Gimme Some Bucks and I’ll Be Straight” sought to give a street-level, stylized dismissal of the Nixon scandal. Despite his ideological contradictions, James Brown never lost the groove. David Hilliard sums up Brown’s impact on the Panthers:
Shit, we danced to James Brown, “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag.” James Brown was all right until he started doing these affairs with Nixon. James Brown wasn’t really considered a political animal. Remember we came from the community, and politicizing gained our political consciousness out of the necessity of the times, but we were people who came from the community, and James Brown was the consummate entertainer.51
The black revolution affected blacks of all walks of life—the activists, the entrepreneurs, the militants, the lovers, the families, the children, the loners, the leaders, the dreamers, and the prisoners—and James Brown could get them all to meet on the dance floor. At the most important moment, James Brown stepped up to the plate, took on the challenges placed upon blacks in the public arena, and did not shy away from them. He may have been “the most important black man in America.” Brown’s longtime friend Al Sharpton reflected on the gravity of James Brown:
I think the difference between James Brown and other icons is that he was one of the few—the only one I can think of—who made it on his terms, which is why he was so loved. Because he never changed. There were other entertainers who became the first blacks to go mainstream. He was the first to make the mainstream go black.52