One : The Life and Music of James Brown (9781101561102) (7 page)

Talmadge had been rough on blacks in Georgia, and tough on convicts, too. Critics in Washington called him “His Chain Gang Excellency,” and he had a staunch reputation for ordering shackles and hard labor for blacks, union leaders, and anyone else he did not like. Georgia’s practice of chaining convicts together and sending them to rural work camps, Talmadge explained, “kept men out of doors in God’s open country where they could enjoy the singing of the birds and the beautiful sunrises and sunsets.”

Now the leader was gone, and his son, Herman, wanted the job. He got it, too, taking over for his dad as governor in 1948. But Herman was not a carbon copy of the old man. He was eager to change
his state’s image. The book
I Am a Fugitive From a Georgia Chain Gang
(and the movie, which dropped “Georgia” from its title) had sullied the state’s name in the North, and while Eugene might have been delighted with the portrayal, the son was interested in reforming the system, and thereby gathering federal dollars.

Which was why young Talmadge was standing before a crowd of reporters in Rome, Georgia, stirring up attention for one of his pet projects. Battey State Hospital was a huge medical complex in Rome, with 2,000 beds for tuberculosis patients. Georgia used part of the former army hospital as a facility for nonviolent criminals under the age of eighteen. The Georgia Juvenile Training Institute, it was called, and it mattered a great deal to the governor.

In Rome that day in 1949, the governor, perhaps wearing one of his seersucker suits and letting his Panama hat shield him from the sun, gave a sweeping speech on the grounds of the Institute. He selected this setting to outline his philosophy of crime and punishment, and express his interest in reforming Georgia’s juvenile justice system. Right there was something new, for a statewide juvenile justice system until recently had barely existed in Georgia. The larger counties ran their own youth courts and rehabilitation centers, financed by county funds and private charities. Smaller counties made no provisions at all, and sent offenders to state prison with the adult population. An estimated 20 percent of Georgia’s prison population was under the age of eighteen, and housed with adult, often violent, criminals.

“It is of course known that crime increases or decreases as our economic conditions vary and that the unemployed and the idle furnish us with a majority of the adult prison population,” Talmadge said in Rome. His belief that a lack of work bred criminals had led Talmadge to set up this vocational school where inmates were offered classes and could work on a small farm, producing milk and vegetables for hospital patients. The Juvenile Training Institute was Georgia’s first attempt to segregate youth offenders from adults and give them special attention. “I am proud of the
part that I have had to play in this program,” said the thirty-six-year-old governor.

The backdrop for Talmadge’s speech included Battey’s long, two-story barracks buildings and those imprisoned within. Among these props was a young black inmate, playing ball maybe, or shadowboxing in the distance. James Brown had been sent to Rome in 1949, as one of Georgia’s “honor roll” prisoners housed on the state hospital grounds.

The chain gangs had been outlawed, as had the convicts’ striped uniforms and leg manacles. The governor wanted reform, but money had yet to be allocated, and the public was not necessarily on board. There was chaos in the structure, certainly for the juveniles who composed a category the state had barely acknowledged just a few years before. But there was reform in it, too, and Brown reaped the benefits of the change and the chaos.

If he had been found guilty a few years before, Brown might have been sent to the Richmond County facility for Negro youth, a privately run institution, where an average of thirty boys were confined at night to a room with eleven straw beds, barred windows, and a padlocked door. The wood structure, heated by a flimsy stove, was an obvious firetrap.

Though he avoided that and the chain gangs, Brown’s years as a prisoner of Georgia could not have been easy. The experience was, however, vastly different from the mental image of Southern prisons that many modern readers hold. At Rome the guards were not armed, and inmates were on their honor and had some freedom of movement. Effort was made to segregate youths from adult criminals kept on the grounds. Punishment could be cruel: When knives were found in a room housing eight blacks in Rome, all eight youths were sent to “the hole,” stripped to their underwear, forced to sleep without blankets on a concrete floor, and given nothing but bread and water for ten days. Two were hospitalized for gangrene and had parts of their feet amputated.

Still, Georgia was moving away from its medieval past. The
juvenile institute in Rome was a showcase, but it didn’t stay one for long. Having established an ability to separate juvenile offenders from adults and give them special attention, the state began arresting juveniles in ever-larger numbers. A bigger facility was needed. In November 1951, James Brown and the approximately 140 teenagers from the Rome institute were moved to a camp near the town of Toccoa, on the northern border with South Carolina. Called the Boys Industrial Training Institute, the site offered more space and no contact with hardened criminals.

A boy from Augusta who suddenly found himself in Toccoa would think, just from standing outdoors in the middle of the camp, that this place was
very far away
. You could see Currahee Mountain and the foothills that formed the tailbone of the Appalachians; you could smell a chill, fresh air unlike the baked humidity down south. There was green here, and space, and silence. The facility inhabited the remains of a 270-acre former army paratrooper base. Only a fraction of that, an area in the center of the camp, lodged prisoners, and surrounding them were abandoned military barracks, shooting ranges, and storehouses. In Rome, you were squeezed in on all sides; here there was a breeze.

The Industrial Training Institute occupied a group of whitewashed concrete buildings bordered by a ghost town. The camp cafe was rotting away, the post office a shambles. The roads on the perimeter of the base, at neat right angles, were rutted and eerily empty. In buildings farthest from the center, a number of local families tried to homestead. There was less infrastructure than in Rome, no teachers or schoolbooks when the prisoners arrived, and not a lot for them to do. Inmates invented games and wandered around excavating the army ordnance that scattered the grounds. Brown and other boys dug old bullets out of the dirt, stuffed them in lead pipes, and crafted zip guns with them. The Georgia prison system was moving from a malicious negligence, the kind that dressed adolescents in stripes and shackles and sent them to break rocks, toward mere negligence, the kind that let them wear denim
and explore a falling down military camp that cost the state nothing to obtain and next to nothing to operate.

The superintendent of both the Rome and Toccoa institutes, Walter Matthews, made an effort to fulfill the training mission of the institution, fighting without much success to get teachers and books. Certainly, Matthews provided the most order Brown had experienced in his life. Brown loved the superintendent; “Really, he’s the person that raised me,” he said. Matthews only struck Brown once, Brown said by way of explanation, and then with an open hand.

There were no armed guards here, either. Kids from the town of Toccoa, which was six miles away, sometimes visited with church or school groups, or just to explore the empty buildings. “When I first met James…we used to go up there and play,” said Bobby Byrd, a native of Toccoa. “But there wasn’t no fence, it was an imaginary line. Everybody knew just how far they supposed to go.” It was an honor system, and what kept prisoners from escaping was the extra time they’d get when they got caught. Of course some
did
escape, and when that happened a group of trustees, Brown among them, would accompany guards on tramps through the woods in search of the runaways. Brown spent more than one night out in the woods, poking around and enjoying his freedom.

A kid from Atlanta named Johnny Terry became Brown’s best friend. When Terry was sent a cake or a pie, he shared it with Brown, and Brown never forgot it. He dropped Terry’s radio, shattering it into pieces, and his buddy instantly forgave him. According to Bobby Roach, later a member of Brown’s band, “Johnny killed a guy, that’s what he was in for, killed a guy in the Peacock Ballroom in Atlanta. The guy kept teasing and teasing Johnny. Johnny couldn’t fight, but with a knife? Oh man was he fast with it—he even kept a switchblade with a match in it, he could flick it and light the match. They say he hit that boy at the top of the stairs and by the time he hit the bottom, he was gone.”

Terry was down-to-earth, relaxed, but he chose his words
carefully; Brown bullied you with words, he used them to overwhelm and disarm you. They made a good team. Meeting in Rome and forming a gospel quartet, they continued singing in Toccoa, building a little reputation for their group that spread beyond the perimeter.

The boys had a nickname for Brown, pegged to the way he glued himself to his radio and made singing the center of his life: Music Box. Toccoa station WLET aired a black gospel program featuring The MelloTones, the top-ranking quartet in the area. Nashville’s WLAC was a powerful station with a clear channel signal that carried way beyond the South; it was one of the first to play rhythm and blues. Brown loved the way radio took him out of himself. Being an analytical person, he would have pondered the experience, and understood how radio brought new songs, new voices, new feelings to listeners hundreds of miles away. Radio could inspire you.

When Brown talked about the gospel he sang in prison, he focused on the way performing made him feel. There was something important he learned when his quartet sang “Our Father” to a group of tuberculosis patients in Rome, something electrifying that he couldn’t get out of his head. As he performed, he noticed that those around him were moved, crying, and then he surprised himself by breaking into tears, too. You beat an opponent in the ring and people cheered, but
this
was a greater power. Gospel taught him important lessons about songcraft, like how to tell a whole story with his vocal delivery, and how the parts of a song worked. He was a prisoner, and music both secular and sacred came to him the same way—through tunes inmates brought with them, through what came out of his music box. So it was natural to start thinking about what Louis Jordan’s “Caledonia” and “Our Father” had in common, to think about them both as influences to be explored, broken down, and absorbed. “Singing gospel’s a good way to learn about music in general,” he explained. “There’s a format for gospel; you learn the different parts, and then you start putting them together…”

B
obby Byrd lived in Toccoa with his mom, grandmother, and five siblings. The Byrds were a prominent black family in town, whose stature didn’t have to do with how much they had—they were getting along okay, even after Bobby’s dad, who worked for Southern Railroad, was killed on the tracks in Duluth. The accident left his wife, Zarah, in charge, and she took the reins with a drive and optimism that folks all over town admired. She was a motivator who touched those around her. Zarah cleaned for a prominent doctor, was active in the church, and pushed her kids to get a college education. She sang gospel in the shape-note style and took her daughters to singing sessions with her. She passed on a love of music to all her children.

Her son Bobby had graduated valedictorian from the black Whitman Street High School. He was a good athlete and active at Mt. Zion Baptist Church. In fact he was such a joiner that Bobby was the only male member of the New Homemakers Association in all of Georgia. His mother had taught him how to play the piano, and Byrd reckoned he was pretty good at that. He played and sang in a variety of gospel and pop groups he assembled with little plan or organization, with overlapping membership.

Byrd had a group of buddies he played with regularly, singing a never-overlapping repertoire of pop and sacred music, in groups with names including the Avons, the Impalas, the Trimiers, and others—so many groups that locals sometimes just called the lot of them “The Toccoa Band,” or “The Bobby Byrd Band.” Of all the groups he sang with, the most important, however, and the biggest in Toccoa, was the Gospel Starlighters. They sang at schools and churches and opened for major gospel acts coming through town. The Starlighters were influenced by the Swanee Quintet, who by now were showcasing the raw sugar voice of Ruben Willingham, and by the Five Blind Boys of Alabama.

Groups from Toccoa regularly visited the youth camp, and one day in 1952, the Gospel Starlighters sang for the inmates. After they had finished, somebody there told the Starlighters’ leader that
he sang nice, but
they
had somebody who sang nice, too. A fella named Music Box. Unfortunately, Music Box must have been in detention and could not come out to meet Byrd. The name, though, stuck in Byrd’s head.

That name came up again not long after. Byrd was returning home from a trip to Atlanta with his school glee club, an excursion that had caused him to miss a basketball game in town against inmates of the Institute. But he heard all about the game, oh yes: Not only had one kid stood out on the court with his play, but afterward the guy got up on the piano at the Toccoa rec center and proceeded to entertain the two teams.
Music Box
.