Long before anyone called him the Godfather of Soul, James Brown was a kid on the streets of Augusta, dancing for spare change and dreaming bigger than anyone around him could imagine. Georgia raised him, and he never let anyone forget it.
An Augusta childhood
James Brown was born in 1933 just across the river in Barnwell, South Carolina, and moved to Augusta as a young boy. He grew up poor, shining shoes, picking cotton, and dancing for tips. Music was his way out, and he chased it with a work ethic that would later earn him another nickname: the hardest working man in show business.
Macon, the Famous Flames, and a breakthrough
As a teenager in Toccoa, in Northeast Georgia, he met Bobby Byrd, whose gospel group would become the Famous Flames. Brown’s voice and stage presence quickly took over. In 1956 the group cut a demo of “Please, Please, Please” at a radio station in Macon, the same town that raised Otis Redding, and the record that came out of it became an R&B hit. Georgia soul was on the map.
His live shows became legend. In 1963, Live at the Apollo captured the sweat, the splits, and the screams, and it sold like nothing a live album had sold before.
Photo: Uncredited photographer for the Jambalaya, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Inventing funk
In the mid 1960s, Brown did something nobody had done before. He moved the beat to the first count of every measure, stripped the song down to a groove, and let the rhythm do the talking. “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” and “I Got You (I Feel Good)” changed popular music almost overnight. Funk was born, and nearly every style that followed, from disco to hip hop, owes him a debt.
He kept the hits coming into the 80s and beyond. In 1985, “Living in America” from the movie Rocky IV put him back in the Top 10, and a whole new generation found out what their parents already knew.
Photo: Cherie Diez, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Photo: Cary Bass, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Augusta remembers
When James Brown died on Christmas Day in 2006, fans filled Broad Street in Augusta with flowers, candles, and handwritten notes at the bronze statue the city had unveiled in his honor the year before. Today the James Brown Arena and James Brown Boulevard carry his name, and the city still claims him as its own.
The next time one of his grooves comes on and you cannot sit still, you are feeling a little bit of Augusta, Georgia.
Want the full history? Read more about James Brown in the New Georgia Encyclopedia.
Hear James Brown and all your Continuous Georgia Classics on 95.9 FM in Athens and Northeast Georgia, in the TGC Radio app, or just say “Alexa, play TGC Radio.”
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Featured image credit: Heinrich Klaffs, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
