One : The Life and Music of James Brown (9781101561102) (4 page)

A
hand-tinted photograph, James Brown at nine. He must have just gotten a haircut, his cranium a dome, smooth and hard. His expression is striking for a nine-year-old, eyes slits, mouth unsmiling, the head tilted at an angle that sends a message—got something for me? That orb hunkers down on shoulders, squashes his neck. The boy looks uncomfortable in these clothes, his long-sleeve striped shirt, slacks, a thin belt around a slender waist.

The way Brown remembered it, Joe parked him at the house of a family member he called Aunt Honey. Her name was Hansone
Washington, though many mistakenly heard it as Handsome. Her address was 944 Twiggs Street. The new US Highway 1 passed right by the house, so one could look out a window and watch folks drive from Florida to New York and beyond. On Twiggs there were truck stops and gas stations and boarding houses renting rooms to truckers and travelers. Strangers coming, strangers going. It was a smart place for somebody to set up a whorehouse. Aunt Honey was smart enough.

Prohibition was on and Honey was also selling bootleg whiskey from a hollow space beneath the house’s wood floor. Customers called it “scrap iron,” because it was made in galvanized drums and had a metallic taste.

There were sometimes as many as fourteen or fifteen men living in the house, and Honey rented out rooms for working girls and their johns. Honey would sometimes cook the boy a potato pone because she knew he loved it, and he’d eat the whole thing by himself. But Honey had a business to run, and a rambunctious relation was an obstacle to profit. Aunt Honey beat James and told him he was ugly, making him hide in the closet when men were over. Honey’s brother Melvin Scott was a bootlegger with a temper who was often around. The police raided the place once and Scott thought Brown had tipped them off; he tied the boy in a croaker sack, hung him from the ceiling, and beat him with a belt.

Joe remained a presence, bringing money in when he could, always looking for work. He was around, but not of the household: Aunt Minnie most of all watched over James, as did Honey.

An important part of Brown’s story, a detail he told over and over and put in his press material, was that his mother left the family back in Barnwell, and that the son would not see her again for decades.

That was James Brown’s recollection. Complicating—and deepening—his memories, however, is evidence strongly suggesting Susie Brown
did
come to Augusta, and that she, Joe, and James lived under the same roof for a period of time. First of all, there is the information found in the annual Augusta city directories.
These books list who lived at every address in town. The 1947–48 and the 1949 directories both list a “colored” Susie Brown living with Joseph in Augusta. The 1947–48 entry records this Joseph’s job as a porter at a gas station, and gas station attendant was Joe’s regular occupation for many years. Also living at that address, according to the 1947–48 directory, was Minnie Walker, the woman who blew life into the sickly newborn.

In a 2009 memoir, Augusta journalist Don Rhodes cites conversations he had with two longtime associates of Brown who remembered Susie and Joe living together. Susie “did not willingly abandon her family,” an Augusta friend of Brown told Rhodes. So what happened to Susie? One source says Joe threw her from a second-or third-story window of the Twiggs house, in the midst of a fight. He threatened to kill her, and Susie moved out.

Perhaps the son picked up the story told by his father; perhaps he even believed it. “Pop had a version of why they didn’t stay together, and that had been passed on to Mr. Brown,” said Emma Austin, a family friend who grew up in the Terry.

Joe was certainly violent; he regularly beat James, who said his dad was “dangerous.” It would have been easier to talk about abandonment than about the beating you took, and witnessed, at the hand of the father who was raising you. As soon as he had a life story others wanted to hear, Brown was crafting it to suit his emotional needs. There’s something simpler, cleaner, about being abandoned, than about the violence that Brown experienced and could not stop.

Another inference can be drawn first from Brown’s tale. Pop’s violence was something his son could forgive. His abandonment by his mother, that was unendurable. What life taught Brown was that men beat people up, and men beat women, and that a beating was to be endured.

Home was where you went when there was absolutely nowhere else to go. In lieu of home, Brown ran wild in the Terry. The finger of the Augusta canal system that flowed behind the house was a landmark, a drain and a sewer out of which he ate fish. He’d jump
into the water and hide from cops, and he shot dice under a canal bridge.

On the streets of the Terry, Brown learned all kinds of stuff, like how to fight with knives in the traditional Carolina manner. “People were real bad there,” he recalled. “They used to walk up and lock hands with a man and cut it out. He have a knife and you have a knife and y’all lock hands and cut each other. Till one fall.” Jeffrey Lockett, who lived nearby on Ninth Street, summed up the mentality of the Terry’s streets: “If you want to be a man, you got to fight to get respect. Now people know me, and they know I don’t take no shit from nobody. But if anyone bothers me, I’d shoot them in a heartbeat. Just like that,
bam
. Better them dead than me.”

Brown learned further from watching his daddy, who presented a brazen face in the Terry. Joe would team up with a cousin and steal guns, using a bluntly effective pitch: They’d walk up to a stranger, request that he either hand over his gun or shoot them, and if the guy didn’t shoot, they stripped him of his weapon. The approach had gotten them this far.

Brown joined a gang and was called Little Junior on the streets; his cousin Willie Glenn, who lived with him, was Junior. Soon only fools or blood relations raised a hand to Brown. In the face of violence and insult, he got stronger. He became known around the way. “Stay away from him, people said, because he was always in trouble,” said childhood friend Allyn Lee.

He considered himself a thug, and copied the thug style: baseball cap, jeans with pockets on the sides, and a handkerchief tied down one pocket, sneakers turned down real tight. He and his gang wrote words onto their clothes with Clorox bleach.

One day, an aunt saw him behind the house, with a fifteen-cent sack of chicken feed she could use. “Boy you better hand over that feed,” she said, “unless you want an ass-whipping.” He wanted a quarter for it. She did not give him a quarter, and repeated her threat. Then the boy turned around and poured the whole bag into the levee. She did whip him, too, and he never cried. And when it was
over he told her he was ready to take another beating. James Brown was not afraid.

He was pint-size, lacking a formidable build, but Brown compensated with a way of moving that gave off waves of energy. Even as a teenager, he was able to command attention just by skimming along; he communicated he was not to be trifled with, not to be delayed. Here was someone worth measuring.

The brand-new Silas X. Floyd Elementary was a segregated school of 1,600 students and seven grades, a red-brick, Georgian-style building with white pillars out front. Floyd was named after a celebrated local black minister, educator, and poet, who once wrote: “Augusta is a good place to live and Augusta is a good place to die. Living or dying, give me Augusta.”

White Augusta did not reciprocate Floyd’s enthusiasm. Floyd School, as it was called, had been built against white Augusta’s wishes; the city only agreed to erect the much needed facility when New Dealers in Washington gave Augusta money for a Negro school through the National Recovery Act. Augusta spent twenty times on white schools what it did for its black schools, so while the building was substantial, the black community had to raise money to keep it going. Floyd was the largest public school in Richmond County, but it had only thirty teachers and one truant officer. The first-grade class contained 400 students, though few stayed on until seventh grade; they were just too important to families who needed the income that work provided. The average graduating class had fewer than one hundred students.

He quickly made an impression. A student named Henry Stallings first noticed Brown when he caught him stealing his lunch. Stallings’s parents sent him to school with lunch packed in a lard bucket, so embarrassing to him that he hid it under a vent. Brown was watching him, though, and took the food. They had a fight over it, but eventually became pals.

Among a poor student body coping with the Depression, Brown stood out. The first day of school, students took off his overalls and threw them in a tree. Another day, he was sent home for “
insufficient clothes.” “Oh man, he was pitiful,” said Stallings. “For me to really tell you what he looked like in the wintertime—the soles coming off his shoes, snot coming out of his nose, I didn’t see no jacket on him
ever
. He was always cold.

“He saw me coming to school with those shoes all shined, my parents used to make sure I came there correct. He liked the way they sent us to school all smart, spic and span, pressed clothes. Overalls is what he would wear.”

Laura Garvin was a committed Floyd School teacher who took a special interest in Brown. Along with principal Yewston Myers, she kept a sympathetic eye on him. “Neither of us called him James or Brown. It was always James Brown. It just seemed to go like that,” Garvin said. She cared about him, giving him the kind of attention he did not get at home. “I knew him as a poor waif on the streets of Augusta and as one who did things which he never should have done, also,” she recalled later. But he was not a scary kid; he was respectful, funny—Garvin most of all saw a boy who even then had charisma and affecting openness, so straightforwardly
himself
that it was hard not to smile. “Nothing could make you dislike him,” she recalled. She also quickly noticed how much the boy enjoyed singing, and sought to bring that out in him.

School officials had Brown sing the national anthem before classes began. Garvin staged regular performances in her room, charging a dime to see Brown sing. When word spread and crowds filled the room, she moved the shows to the library, which had a piano. Brown would dance and sing “blues things—I was singing the blues kinda heavy at that time.” Some students scorned him for his dark skin, and many for his shabby clothes. But Garvin provided him a means for winning respect. Brown called these performances the happiest times of his childhood.

A
ugusta in the 1940s was famous for its great voices. There was the imperial Swanee Quintet, born in the late 1930s as the
Hallelujah Gospel Quartet. By the time they changed their name in the mid 1940s, they were filling local churches and arenas and even had their own radio program, six nights a week on WGAC. The Swanees took a rural, hard-country quartet sound and wore it proudly in an age when a more urbane group style, featuring tight, jazzy harmonies and intricate rhythms, was in vogue. They proudly stood for old values, with a stubborn resoluteness that Southerners understood.

They were stars in the Terry, running their own laundry business on Steed Street (decades later, Steed would be renamed Swanee Quintet Boulevard). In the late 1940s, singer and cofounder James “Big Red” Anderson befriended a teen shining shoes outside radio station WGAC, on Broad Street downtown. This began what would be a lifelong friendship between James Brown and the Swanees. The group would go on the road with Brown in 1966, and he produced several of their records.

Augusta’s most famous voice of the era, Arthur Lee Simpkins, got his start as a gospel singer; a 1934 write-up in the
Augusta Chronicle
called him “a lad with a voice mellowed in watermelons, taters and cotton bolls.” Simpkins’s voice was courtly, disarming white listeners, swooping up an octave in a single syllable in his warm tenor. Augusta was also frequented by street preachers and shouters Brown would have heard. Itinerant blues singer Blind Willie McTell traveled through and recorded here. The female sanctified blues singers the Two Gospel Keys lived in Augusta; where the Swanees
chose
a rugged simplicity, the Two Gospel Keys simply
were
raw, and wonderfully so. By the late 1940s, the influential gospel radio show
Parade of Quartets
began broadcasting. (It’s still around as a weekly TV program on the ABC affiliate.)

A sound that started in the pews was thriving on the streets of Augusta and elsewhere, a fusion of the church with the barbershop (safe havens where black men could gather), a new vocal style that melded the sacred and the profane, carrying a spiritual dimension that didn’t quite define it. This new sound was apparent
in national harmony groups like the Ink Spots and the Mills Brothers, in the so-called human orchestras and the very first doo-wop groups. Black gospel music was being programmed on radio in cities all around the country, and this was one unintended consequence—once you heard the music during leisure time, gospel became a social sound, not purely of the pulpit. In any case, gospel was already social, for the black church was a part of the lives of even those who were not churchgoers. This vocal style was a music of the street—of people for whom church was an understood part of life, rather than life itself. A music made by folks standing on corners, congregating in barber shops, hovering at shoeshine stands. Storefront churches wedged between commercial enterprises underscored the way the music pushed into daily life, and so did the gospel singers standing on a box at a busy intersection. Brown was circulating in these same streets of 1940s Augusta, listening and learning. He was also going to church and studying preachers, whom he then imitated, not because he was particularly religious—as a boy, he was not—but because he admired their command.

He was singing pop songs, and also learning the rudiments of instrumental music. While employed at a furniture store, Joe was given a damaged organ with broken wood legs. On a lunch break, he took it home to the boy, propping it up with a cheese box. The organ was the instrument Brown best mastered; neighborhood friend Leon Austin taught him the basics of the keyboard and another friend, Robert Graham, also gave him lessons. Tampa Red, the itinerant blues musician, was dating one of Aunt Honey’s girls. He befriended Brown and taught him the chord changes to Red’s classic “It’s Tight Like That” on the guitar. Brown was picking up how to make music by ear, willy-nilly, but already he had skills and was bragging about them. He believed in himself, good-naturedly telling his buddies that they were going to know his name. “He always said, ‘You might beat me singing, but when I start dropping records on you, you won’t even be around,’” said Leon Austin.