By the time I got back from Vietnam people were on my case about “America Is My Home,” calling me an Uncle Tom, saying the song was a sellout, things like that. Some of the more militant organizations sent representatives backstage after shows to talk about it. “How can you do a song like that after what happened to Dr. King?” they’d say. I talked to them and tried to explain that when I said “America is my home,” I didn’t mean the government was my home, I meant the land and the people. They didn’t want to hear that. I told them I was all for self-defense, but it made no sense for us to burn down our own communities. They didn’t like that, either.
I was taking flak about having a white bass player, too. Over the years I have had several white cats in my bands, but Tim Drummond was the first and it upset a lot of people. When he first joined, we were playing the Regal. There were certain people I thought would get very heavy with him if they saw him on stage, so I told him to set up offstage and watch me for cues during the show. Right before the show, though, I said, “No, let’s get it over with. You go on out there.”
During the band’s set, before I came on, there was a big, mean looking cat in the wings motioning to Tim to get off the stage. Tim ignored him for a while. Finally, during one of Maceo’s solos, he laid down his bass and came off. The fella told him, “You’re not supposed to be on this stage.” Tim asked him who he was. He let on that he was with the union and with the Regal, so Tim came to my dressing room while the band was still on and told me about it. I cornered the cat and said, “You don’t want him to play because he’s white. Well, he’s going to play, and if he doesn’t, I’ll pull my show out of here right now. I don’t care if you’re with the union or the theater or who. Now get out of my sight.”
Another time, in Washington, I received an unsigned telegram that said, “You have a white man working for you and a black man needs a job.” A lot of people didn’t like the rap I gave in the show, either. I talked about my background—going from shining shoes to running radio stations and owning a jet. I talked about the importance of education. “Learn,” I said, “don’t burn. Get an education, work hard, and try to get in a position of owning things. That’s Black Power.” I said we had a lot of problems in the black community that we had to solve ourselves—wasn’t anybody could do it for us.
A lot of people didn’t want to hear that and didn’t understand it. There were bomb threats, death threats. Once we were ordered by the police to evacuate a hotel in Atlanta. Sometimes there were threats about disrupting concerts with stink bombs, things like that. Some of the threats came to Mr. Neely and King Records. I didn’t pay any attention to them. You couldn’t. Entertainers get threats like that all the time. You can never really be sure where they’re coming from anyway—it could be political or somebody with a personal grudge or people trying to muscle in on the business. It’s hard to tell.
Pop wanted me to back off doing political things, too. From the time I first got into integrating concerts, we got into long discussions about it. They got a little more heated now.
“Why jump off into that?” he said. “Wait until your real hot run is over, then if you want to dabble in politics, do it as a kind of elder statesman, but not now. You can’t do anything for anybody else if you don’t have anything.”
“If anybody’s going to listen to me, it’s going to be now. It would be a shame to have this big audience, with all that’s going on, and not try to do some good.”
He was afraid it would hurt my popularity. He turned out to be right, but he didn’t understand that I didn’t care. I had to say what I thought either way—whether it upset Afro-Americans or Caucasian Americans.
Meantime, my music was getting funkier and funkier. What I’d started on “Get It Together” and “I Can’t Stand Myself,” I took even further with “Licking Stick—Licking Stick.” Pee Wee Ellis, Byrd, and I put it together, and I released it at the same time as “America Is My Home.” It was another one-chord song like “I Can’t Stand Myself,” but it had even more of a funk groove. It was a rhythm section tune and exactly what the title said, a licking stick. If the people who were on me about “America Is My Home” wanted to know who James Brown was, all they had to do was listen to “Licking Stick.” My music said where I stood.
There were some changes in the band, too. When Tim Drummond came down with hepatitis from Vietnam, Charles Sherrell replaced him on bass. “Sweet” Charles we called him. He hasn’t gotten the credit as a bass player that he should have. A lot of the stuff that Bootsy Collins and some other bass players did later—like thumping the strings—Sweets did first. Fred Wesley replaced Levi Raspbury on trombone and turned out to be a real innovator and a real creator as an arranger. Around the same time trumpeter Richard “Kush” Griffith and a third drummer, Nate Jones, also joined.
I got back from Vietnam on June 17 and five days later played Yankee Stadium. Pop and I had a discussion about that, too. He wanted me to add a whole lot of extra acts to the show so I wouldn’t embarrass myself with an empty stadium. I told him I wanted to prove a soul act could fill a place like that. I believe I had forty-eight thousand people there. I dreamed a lot of dreams in my life, but I could never have imagined playing Yankee Stadium. I called the show the National Soul Festival and took it around to huge places that summer like Soldier Field to show that somebody besides the Beatles could fill venues like that. I thought it would give a sense of pride to little black kids like the one I overheard at Yankee Stadium who said, “The Yankees can’t even fill Yankee Stadium.”
At the end of July I campaigned for Mr. Humphrey in Watts. That wasn’t too popular, either. Mr. Humphrey didn’t even have the nomination yet, and a lot of people blamed him for the way the war in Vietnam was going. And a lot of Afro-Americans, including me, had really been behind Senator Kennedy, and it was hard to get over his death, coming so soon after Dr. King’s. Some couldn’t forgive Mr. Humphrey for being against Senator Kennedy. It’s funny, though. When the election rolled around, Mr. Humphrey almost won. It took all that time for people to see he was his own man and that he was a good man.
He campaigned in Watts for several days. It was very difficult. The Saturday before I joined him, some militants booed him off the stage there. His security people didn’t want him in Watts at all. When I joined him the following Monday, the security was unbelievable. Police were on all the rooftops looking over the crowd with binoculars. There were dozens of other policemen and Secret Service men all up and down the street and mingling with the crowd. I’m not sure, but I think maybe they had to know from their own informers about the threats I’d been getting.
I didn’t just get up and endorse Mr. Humphrey flatly. I tried to get him into a discussion right there on the platform. I wanted him to make some promises not just to me but to the people. I said to the crowd, “I won’t endorse Mr. Humphrey unless he promises to give the black man what he wants—ownership. He wants his own things: houses, banks, hotels. He wants to be able to walk into a bank and see people of all origins working there so he’ll feel comfortable asking for a loan. When he goes to a hospital emergency room, he wants to see priority given to the people with the worst ailments, not the lightest skin.”
Mr. Humphrey stepped up to the mike and said he had been for those things for years. “If you elect me president,” he said, “you’ll get them. I promise you that.”
“I got the feeling,” I said. “I endorse him.” The band they had there struck up, and I even got the vice president to do a little dance. “You can do the boogaloo, man, if you have soul.”
While I was in Los Angeles I planned to cut something that had been on my mind a long time—“Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud.” There was a vamp we’d been playing on the show for quite a while, and during my last tour I wrote some words for it while we were flying from Canada to Seattle. I was ready to go into the studio with it, but I needed some kids to be a chorus. I got all the fellas in the band and people traveling with the show to invite their friends and relatives with kids to come to the studio in Hollywood that night.
People were still getting very heavy with me about “America Is My Home” and the Humphrey thing, and the night we were supposed to cut, a strange thing happened. I was in my hotel room fixing to go to the studio when I heard a loud knock on the door. When I went to answer it, nobody was there, but sitting on the carpet was a grenade with “James Brown” painted on it. I’d seen enough grenades in prison and in Vietnam to know it wasn’t live, but it was the thought that counted.
We were late getting started and most of those who were supposed to bring kids didn’t show up. That was okay because I knew the thing needed a lot of work, and it was going to be way past bedtime for most kids anyway. We worked on the arrangement and I kept changing the lyrics, stopping the rehearsal and working on them. Somebody suggested we just put down the instrumental track and come back later for the vocal. I said no because I thought it ought to have a live feel to it to be inspiring, the way I intended it. We worked all night until I was satisfied. Then I was ready to cut, and when I’m ready, I’m ready. But we didn’t have any kids. I told everybody to scatter outside the studio and just get kids off the street. Byrd got a bunch from a Denny’s restaurant nearby. Other people brought them in from here and there. After a while we had about a dozen. We rehearsed them and explained about being quiet when they weren’t singing. Each time I sang “Say it loud” all they had to do was answer with “I’m black and I’m proud!” The funny thing about it is that most of ’em weren’t black. Most of ’em were white or Asian.
The song is obsolete now. Really, it was obsolete when I cut it, but it was needed. You shouldn’t have to tell people what race you are, and you shouldn’t have to teach people they should be proud. They should feel it just from living where they do. But it was necessary to teach pride then, and I think the song did a lot of good for a lot of people. That song scared people, too. Many white people didn’t understand it any better than many Afro-Americans understood “America Is My Home.” People called “Black and Proud” militant and angry—maybe because of the line about dying on your feet instead of living on your knees. But really, if you listen to it, it sounds like a children’s song. That’s why I had children in it, so children who heard it could grow up feeling pride. It’s a rap song, too.
The song cost me a lot of my crossover audience. The racial makeup at 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 Afro-Americans in general and the dark-skinned man in particular. I’m proud of that.