James Brown

Maybe someone else would have invented funk had it not dawned on James Brown to strip his furiously physical take on soul down to the bare essentials and then employ each of these ingredients strictly in the service of the groove.

But chances are that without the innovative contributions of the Godfather of Soul, Mr Dynamite and Soul Brother Number One, to utter just a few of Brown's well-deserved grand titles, the use of the world's favourite f-word would today be limited to describing a foul smell, our opportunities to get on the good foot would be seriously compromised and the existence of - to name just a few artists whose output is deep in dept to the Hardest Working Man in Showbusiness - Prince, Beck, Fela Kuti and the entire hip hop genre as we know them would be in doubt.

Brown is known as a hard, if not ruthless taskmaster to his bands and non-musical staff, handing out hefty fines for musicians for the tiniest of mistakes and firing anyone with ideas above their station – at one point he sacked his own father when the elderly Brown Sr. failed to meet his expectations – but the reasons for his demanding, cold-hearted nature in business dealings can probably be found in Brown’s early life, the settings of which could hardly have been more deprived.

James Brown was born to abject poverty in Barnwell, South Carolina in 1933. His parents separated when he was four, and Brown was brought up in his aunt’s brothel in Augusta, Georgia. He left school on the seventh grade, and a succession of low-paying manual odd jobs led to involvement in armed robbery and imprisonment at 16.

A chance meeting with Bobby Byrd, probably the most loyal and durable of Brown’s musical sidekicks, led to a complete change of course for the by-now paroled James Brown. He joined the Georgia gospel group The Flames, quickly directing the band’s sound towards the then-new R&B style and employing every iota of his considerable talent, charisma and inexhaustible energy to move centre-stage from the organist’s bench to lead the wrenching ballad ‘Please, Please, Please’, the band’s – and Brown’s – first stab at the charts.

Brown struggled to match the success of his debut single, but after years of toiling on the so-called chitlin circuit (the toilet pub venue equivalent of the deep South) his determination paid off in the form of ‘Try Me’, the follow-ups to which also triumphed in the R&B charts. The hyper-energetic recording of Brown’s exhilarating stage act, the 1963 album 'Live at the Apollo', meanwhile, turned Brown into a bona fide pop star, and the subsequent singles – ‘Out of Sight’, ‘Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag’, ‘I Got You (I Feel Good)’ – cemented Brown’s career whilst steering his music to a more rhythmically tight direction with their insistent horn stabs and razor-sharp ensemble performances.

The late 1960’s was the era of both Brown’s greatest commercial success and his growing public profile as a representative of the black community. His music, with the aid of a superb backing group capable of almost telepathic interplay, became even funkier, with melody and lyrics eschewed almost entirely in favour of insistent rhythms, repetitive riffs and Brown’s own chanting, screaming and sloganeering centred on good old-fashioned sexual boasting, self-empowerment and the emerging black pride ethos.

Brown continued to score hits in the early 1970’s, but the despite sheer funkiness of minimalist masterpieces such as ‘Make It Funky’, ‘The Boss’, ‘The Payback’ and ‘Get on The Good Foot’ he started to lose his grip on his hard-won pop audience while also facing severe financial problems and the unwanted attentions of the IRS. A musical re-think was clearly in order but by the mid-70’s Brown, having already both played a key role in the transformation of R&B into soul and single-handedly invented funk, was short of ideas for the first time in his career. The result was an extended period during which Brown treaded water musically, relying on his outstanding success as a live performer while the hits continued to evade him.

The mid-80’s comeback of smash singles ‘Unity’ (with Africa Bambaataa, highlighting hip hop’s massive dept to and endless sampling of Brown’s innovative rhythms) and ‘Living in America’ was dimmed somewhat by Brown’s descent to hard drug abuse and a trial for domestic violence, an odious territory Brown has sadly re-visited since. Poignantly for a man whose back catalogue includes such potent broadsides against drug-fuelled self-destruction as ‘King Heroin’, Brown’s PCP-influenced erratic and threatening behaviour culminated when he was sentenced to another spell in the slammer in 1988 for waving a loaded gun around in public.

James Brown passed away suddenly on Christmas Day 2006 in Atlanta, Georgia at the age of 73. His influence on popular music remains massive.