After the Twiggs house was closed down, everybody kind of separated. Aunt Minnie and I moved into a two-room cottage by University Hospital near Fifteenth Street. There was a whole row of these unpainted two-room places up there. They called ’em cottages, but they weren’t much different from the shacks I had lived in around Barnwell.
My father came and went like he always had, but it seemed like I saw less of him after the move. Pretty soon they took him right out of the service station he was working in and put him in the Navy. He was thirty-two-years-old with a second-grade education, and he eventually wound up a second-class seaman. In the service he operated bulldozers and set dynamite for construction projects. Every month he sent Aunt Minnie a check for $37.50, and we lived on that plus whatever I could hustle.
More and more I was getting to be a street kid, getting out and getting into everything. At school I was a little roughneck, a thug. You could tell the thugs because we wore baseball caps and jeans with a pocket on the side and a handkerchief tying down the pocket. We turned the sides of our sneakers down and then tied ’em back up real tight. We took Clorox and wrote on our clothes with it to impress the girls.
I had lots of girlfriends, and the teachers couldn’t understand it. One day a teacher said to a bunch of ’em I was standing with, “I don’t see what you all like about him; he hasn’t got any money.”
“Yes, I do,” I said. I pulled out this little ratty wallet I had and kind of flashed a wad of bills stuffed in it.
“James Brown, let me see that,” she said. She grabbed the wallet and pulled out the wad. It was $3 and a lot of paper cut the size of bills.
I was something, though. There was this new kid named Henry Stallings who came from the country, and I used to take his lunch every day. He had a lard bucket, and after I started taking his biscuits and whatnot he started hiding the bucket under the schoolhouse. I’d watch him from around the corner and go get it right again. At lunchtime I’d watch him sneak back around there, pull out the bucket, look inside, and then just look all around, bewildered.
Henry was a lot more country than we were—he wore overalls instead of jeans, and his shoes were brogans—but he was a lot cleaner than we were, too; his overalls were always spotless and starched, and his shoes were always shined. That’s what I remembered about him when I ran into him years later coming out of the Theresa Hotel in Harlem and hired him to work for me. He became the first person ever able to really do my hair right.
I met another kid around this time who would mean a lot to me—Leon Austin. He was a few years older and played piano. He showed me how to play with both hands and taught me how to get rhythmic feel into it. I really wanted to practice playing, but I couldn’t always count on Robert Graham being at home, so I started sweeping out Trinity Baptist Church in order to use their piano when no one was around. At this time boogie-woogie was the big thing, and like a lot of kids I wanted to play it, but you’d better not be caught doing it in a church. I was always careful to lock the doors before I started beating on that piano. Never did get caught.
I was also hearing all kinds of new sounds around me—on the radio, on records, around town. I listened to Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Cleanhead Vinson, Louis Jordan. Jazz, rhythm and blues, it didn’t make any difference to me. I tried to play whatever I could, and I imitated all the singers no matter what their style. There was a local man named Sammy Green who had a band of maybe ten pieces, and I tried to hear them whenever I could. They were reading charts, had a horn section, everything.
When the Lenox Theater started an amateur night, I decided to enter. I must have been about eleven, and it was the first time I’d ever really sung in public. Without any accompaniment I sang “So Long” and won first prize. I think I won because even then I had a real strong voice. The other people on the program sang good, but real quiet. I sang loud and strong and soulful and the people felt it.
The Lenox was also where I first saw films of Louis Jordan performing. Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five. They played a kind of jumping R & B and jazz at the same time, and they were something else. They did a lot of comedy, but they could play a blues if they had to, or anything in between. The films were shorts of Louis doing whatever his latest song was, and they showed them before the regular picture. He played alto sax real good and sang pretty good. Louis Jordan was the man in those days, though a lot of people have forgotten it. His stuff was popular with blacks and whites, and he usually had several hits at one time, a lot of ’em that sold a million. “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie,” “Early in the Morning,” “Saturday Night Fish Fry,” and “Ain’t Nobody Here but Us Chickens” were all his. When I first saw him I think he had out “G. I. Jive” and “Is You Is, or Is You Ain’t (Ma’ Baby)?” but the one that knocked me out was “Caldonia, What Makes Your Big Head So Hard?” especially the way he’d go up real high: Cal-don-ya! I learned the words as quick as I could, picked it out on the piano, and started playing it and singing it whenever I got the chance.
“Caldonia” was a song you could really put on a show with, and I guess that Louis Jordan short is what first started me thinking along those lines. That and the preachers. The circus and the minstrel shows that came through town played a part, too.
Johnny J. Jones was my favorite circus. Junior and I used to crawl through a hole in the fence in the back of the fairgrounds to see him. Since he stayed for a whole week, they called it a fair, but it was really a circus. A circus is supposed to do all its stuff in one night and then move on to the next town, the way I did with my show years later.
We had to pay to get into the minstrel shows, but only because we couldn’t figure out a way to sneak in. Silas Green from New Or-leans was the best. He presented a complete varied program with singers, dancers, musicians, and comics. That’s what I tried to do fifteen years later when I put together the James Brown Revue.
It’s strange: Even though I’d seen just about everything there was to see in the house on Twiggs Street, I thought the short dresses on Silas Green’s girls were unbelievable. To me, those brown-skinned models were the prettiest things in the world. I saw some top talent in those shows, too, like Willie Mae Thornton, who first did “Hound Dog.” I saw a lot of great comedians, too. In those days the comics still worked in blackface, but like everybody else I just thought it was funny.
What wasn’t funny was some of the things that happened to me in the streets. Two incidents really stand out in my memory. The first involved a fella who tied kids to trees to try and break their spirit. His name was James, and he was a big, heavy, muscular fella. He’d been in the service, had gotten wounded in the war, and had a plate in his head. One day he grabbed ahold of me and said he was going to tie me to a tree.
“I’m not going to resist,” I said, “but if you tie me up and then turn me loose, I’m going to kill you.”
He laughed and started tying me to a chinaberry tree. First he tied my arms, then my legs, me not fighting it at all, while the other kids stood around watching and laughing. When he got me all tied up he stepped back and waited for me to try wriggling loose, but I never did. I just kept still. I was ready to stay tied to that tree for as long as he wanted. After a good while, he got bored and untied me. I never said a word. I just walked away, and he forgot about me and started bothering some other kid. In a lot next to a beer parlor nearby I found a big, heavy, broken-off tap. I picked it up, went back across the street, walked straight up to him, and hit him right on the head with it. It knocked him out, and he stayed knocked out for a long time. After that he didn’t bother me again.
The second incident involved three white fellas who tried to electrocute me. Junior and I were working with them draining a ditch and putting in some fence on farmland owned by a man who ran the filling station next to it. They had an electric air compressor or pump of some kind and somehow it slipped down into the water in the ditch. When they saw what had happened they started talking among themselves and laughing, and one of them turned to me.
“Cut on that air tank there,” he said.
“Nosir,” I said, “I don’t want to.”
“Goddammit, boy, I said cut it on!”
I stepped in the water and turned it on. When I did, it felt like a whole herd of horses was galloping over me. I couldn’t let go of the tank—the electricity froze me to it. Junior was jumping around and yelling, “Turn it off, turn it off!” But the men stood there, grinning. Junior ran into the filling station and got the man we were working for. He came running, and when he saw what was happening he pulled the plug.
I collapsed, and Junior dragged me under a tree. When I came to, I just glared at the fella who’d told me to turn on the tank, but I didn’t say anything. I didn’t dare. The amazing thing is that when I recovered we all went back to work.
I don’t know why I wasn’t killed, but I decided from that day on I’d never take any mess like that again. There were still a lot of lynchings around Georgia and South Carolina in those days, but I was more aware of the everyday occurrences, black men getting kicked in the butt or beat up real bad, things like that. I wasn’t angry, but I promised myself it wasn’t ever going to happen to me again.
Later, I used to walk down the street with my first wife in Toccoa, Georgia, and smile a crocodile grin, and just pray that the white man didn’t come up and mess with me like he messed with them other people. “Lord, don’t let it happen,” I’d say. Because if it did, I knew I was going to kill the man.
But when I was a kid, standing in that ditch water with all that electricity running through me, I was just beginning to put the race thing together. There was still a lot I didn’t understand—like the end of the war. When the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, we were glad because we knew it meant my father would be coming home soon. We were glad, too, because from the first we were a lot madder at the Japanese because of Pearl Harbor than at the Germans. Now I think about it a lot differently because I realize that a bomb like that would never be dropped on white people.
Right after the war I formed my first band, the Cremona Trio. I don’t know where I got the name and can’t even remember the names of the others in it, but I know we thought we were hot stuff. We had to borrrow instruments from the school or from anybody who would lend us a beat-up old guitar or a snare drum or whatever. I played piano when the places we gigged had one, and I sang and sometimes played the drums. We started off as a trio and eventually went to five members, which we called a combo, but we still used the name Cremona Trio.
I had won the Lenox Theater amateur night several times by then and had a small—very small—local following. Every now and then we got invited to play at a black elementary school or the high school and eventually we worked our way up to playing the noncommissioned officers club at Camp Gordon. We did stuff by Amos Milburn, Charles Brown, Wynonie Harris, and the Red Mildred Trio. I learned a lot from imitating all those different singers. For instance, Amos Milburn and Red Mildred both did “Bewildered”; Red Mildred sang high, in falsetto, and Amos Milburn sang sweet and low, but I sang like both of them. Charles Brown was the featured vocalist with Johnny Moore and the Three Blazers, and he could really sing ballads. Wynonie Harris had a real strong voice. I sang like both of them, too. But no matter who I sang like, I was always powerful. While other singers eventually gave out, I could sing at top volume all night.
When the Lenox closed, the Harlem Theater on Gwinnett Street started the Harlem Talent Review on Wednesday nights, and it wasn’t long before I won their contest singing “Caldonia.” I sang for my classmates, too, to raise money for the school. Like a lot of black schools in those days, Floyd didn’t get nearly enough money from the Board of Education or anywhere else. Books, supplies, upkeep, everything was a struggle, and the school needed every penny it could get, so I sang and the other kids paid a dime each to see me. At first I did it in the classroom, singing and dancing without any accompaniment, but there were enough kids willing to pay that my teacher, Miss Garvin, moved the show to the library, where there was a piano. Then I really worked out, especially on that Louis Jordan tune. As often as the principal let her, Miss Garvin put me on and charged admission.
Even though I was getting into music more and more, I still didn’t have a burning desire to be a professional musician. People who knew me thought I was going to play baseball because I was much better at baseball than at singing. I was a left-handed pitcher with a good fastball, a sharp curve, and a wicked floater—what they call a knuckleball today. Ty Cobb had lived in Augusta, and I knew all about him. The Detroit Tigers held their spring training there, and the city also had a Tigers farm club in the Sally League. We’d climb the trees across from the ball park and watch the games from there.
But what I really wanted to do was box. My idol was Beau Jack, the lightweight champion of the world whose real name was Sidney Walker. He was from Augusta and had shined shoes at Ninth and Broad, same as I did. All through the forties he fought at Madison Square Garden, and we listened to his fights on the radio. In 1944, when he fought Bob Montgomery for the fourth time, you had to buy war bonds to get in; they sold more than $35 million worth that night. Later on, I met Beau and had several semi-pro fights with some of the boxers he handled, but during this time I was doing most of my fighting in the school yard, in the streets, and at the Bethlehem Community Center for Negroes.
I boxed like I pitched—left-handed. It always confused the person I was up against. I had developed a reputation for being a tough little kid, so there was always somebody wanting to test it. It didn’t hurt my reputation for toughness when I broke my leg playing football and played after that with a cast on. I broke the same leg again when I jumped off a railroad trestle, and I played football with that cast on, too. I wore out both casts that way and earned the nickname “Crip.”
Because of my reputation the other kids always pointed me out to the white men who came around to recruit scrappy black boys to be in the battle royals they put on at Bell Auditorium. In a battle royal they blindfold you, tie one hand behind your back, put a boxing glove on your free hand, and shove you into a ring with five other kids in the same condition. You swing at anything that moves, and whoever’s left standing at the end is the winner. It sounds brutal, but a battle royal is really comedy. I’d be out there stumbling around, swinging wild, and hearing the people laughing. I didn’t know I was being exploited; all I knew was that I was getting paid a dollar and having fun. A lot of good boxers started out in those things. I think Beau himself, when he was a kid, was in battle royals at the Augusta National Country Club. I was too classy for battle royals, though, because I could really box.
So I boxed and played baseball and football and sang from time to time or did some little gig with my group. The Cremona Trio wasn’t too much happening, but it lasted, on and off, for about three years. It was also during this time that I wrote my first song, “Goin’ Back to Rome.” I had never been to Rome, Georgia, in my life—I just liked the way “Rome” sounded in the song. But it turned out to be prophetic.