James Brown didn't play music. He didn't make music. He invented it.
Brown, the pioneering rock-soul-funkmeister who has rung every note out of every one of his classic hits, from "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" to "I Got You (I Feel Good)," died Christmas Day at a hospital in Atlanta.
He was 73, although somehow it seemed as if the man and his music had been around forever. (See our James Brown photo retrospective.)
Rapper Chuck D of Public Enemy called Brown's death "a seismic passing." Rolling Stones' Mick Jagger called it a "huge loss to music."
The act of saying goodbye to Brown will befit a performer who never did anything halfway. Per arrangements announced Tuesday, Brown's body will lie in state Thursday at New York's Apollo Theater, site of the singer's breakthrough live album, and Saturday in Augusta, Georgia. A private funeral service has been set for Friday, with a public funeral service, to be officiated by the Reverend Al Sharpton, scheduled for Saturday in Augusta at the 8,500-seat James Brown Arena.
The beginning of the end for Brown came last weekend when he was hospitalized with pneumonia.
"He was having pain, but then the pain went away, and he told me, 'I'm going away tonight,' " manager Charles Bobbit said at a Monday press conference.
Shortly after that pronouncement, Bobbit said, Brown died.
A bout with prostate cancer in 2004 aside, Brown had been in good health, or at least in good enough health to keep squeezing into his trademark tight pants and working up a sweat onstage. Forever earning his nickname "The Hardest Working Man in Show Business," Brown was scheduled to perform this coming weekend in New Jersey and New York.
The New York show was to be a New Year's Eve engagement at guitarist B.B. King's Manhattan blues club.
"Throughout the last six years [Brown] performed many magical, soulful shows on our stage," the club said on its Website. "We will miss him dearly. Thank you for the dynamite music, and may your funky soul live on forever!"
In a post on Public Enemy's Website, Chuck D linked Brown with Muhammad Ali and Richard Pryor, the trio being "our snap, crackle and pop from the transcendent, previously silenced black male in 60s-70s Amerikkka. It ain't never left me. Never will."
Jagger thanked Brown for his early support of the blues-influenced Stones. "He was a whirlwind of energy and precision," the rocker said in a statement.
Usher also fondly saluted a man he considered a mentor. "Having personally taught me how to get on the 'good foot' I'll never forget our performances together...He was the best! He was a real man, one who fought so desperately to change the minds of a crippled world," Usher said in a statement.
"I guess God just couldn't take seeing the Soul Brotha Number One from the nosebleed seats anymore."
In life, Brown was more commonly known as the Godfather of Soul, another of his nicknames. And another that was well-earned.
"Music is usually on the two and four, but I changed it to the one and three," Brown told E! Online in 2000. "I invented that beat."
Brown put his signature beat to use in "Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine," "It's a Man's Man's Man's World" and "The Payback," to reel off three more of his 100-plus hits on the R&B charts, most of which made Billboard's overall singles chart, too.
In the 1960s, Brown put his signature voice to the civil-rights movement, speaking out against rioting but declaring "Say It Loud (I'm Black and I'm Proud") in another hit song. After the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Look magazine asked if the iconic performer was the "most important black man in America?"
With legend status came the spoils: the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, presented in 1992; the Rhythm & Blues Foundation's Lifetime Achievement Award, presented in 1993; and the Kennedy Center Honor, presented in 2003, the same year as his 70th birthday.
To say Brown is in the Rock and Roll of Hall of Fame, too, doesn't cut it. He was in the original class of the Hall of Fame, circa 1986. Among his peerless peers: Chuck Berry, Ray Charles and Elvis Presley.
One of Brown's biggest honors comes without a plaque or trophy—only with the respect of rappers, who regarded the performer as a forefather of their genre.
"James Brown was the first solo singer that I loved as a kid," Ice Cube said on MTV.com. "He was not only the godfather of soul, but the godfather of funk and rap."
Born into a hard-knock life on May 3, 1933, in South Carolina, Brown was raised in Georgia, where he scrapped and scraped by and landed in reform school. That first brush with the law, for stealing, was not his last.
As it turned out, reform school was Brown's lucky break. It was there, the legend goes, the youngster met the even younger Bobby Byrd, a professional gospel singer who performed at the institution.
Byrd invited the released Brown to join his vocal group, soon to be known as the Flames or the Famous Flames. In 1956, King Records signed the singers. Within the year, the Flames—and Brown—had their first hit on the R&B charts, "Please Please Please."
From the start, it was clear Brown was the star. The name on the single said it all: James Brown and the Famous Flames.
Brown's big breakthrough to the pop charts came in 1963, with the top-selling Live at the Apollo, Vol. 1 collection.
The hits that would become standards on many a radio playlist began in the mid-1960s with "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag," for which he won the first of his two competitive Grammys, and continued with nary an interruption until the mid-1970s. No, not even the Godfather of Soul emerged from the disco era unscathed.
Brown was too busy making records and donning capes in concert to do much else but music. Still, he made his big-screen mark as the Reverend Cleophus James in 1980's The Blues Brothers, and the smash-up comedy's 1998 sequel, The Blues Brothers 2000.
In a way, Brown made it back into movie theaters on Christmas, the day he died, with the wide-release opening of Dreamgirls. In the movie musical, Eddie Murphy, who lampooned Brown on Saturday Night Live, plays a performer who's one part Brown, one part Little Richard.
In 1985, the real James Brown stormed back up the charts with a cut written for and performed in Rocky IV, "Living in America." The song brought Brown his second competitive Grammy.
An unstoppable force onstage, Brown was merely human offstage. He married and divorced three times. A fourth marriage, to backup singer Tomi Rae Hynie, was voided by annulment—it turned out she was married to another man at the time she married Brown in 2001.
While Brown announced his intention to remarry Hynie, he never did. In 2004, he pleaded no contest to charges of domestic violence involving his onetime bride. On Monday, after Brown's death, Hynie, who has a 5-year-old son by Brown, found herself locked out of the singer's South Carolina home. A lawyer for Brown said Hynie never lived at the home; Hynie said she had nowhere else to go; the lawyer said she did. And the melody of Brown's oft-troubled personal life played on.
In 1988, Brown got into his biggest scrape when he was arrested on drugs and weapons charges after an interstate police chase. A six-year prison sentence ensued—as did calls to "Free James Brown."
"I was blown away," Brown told E! Online about the support he received. "It let me know the people really loved me."
Brown eventually was freed after serving about a year behind bars.
In 2005, Brown was sued by a Chicago woman who claimed the singer raped her in 1988. The suit, which sought to blame Brown for triggering a stress-induced autoimmune disorder in the woman, was dismissed.
In the end, Brown's personal problems were the sideshow, not the main draw in a long and loud career that was almost as long and loud as the introductions at a James Brown show.
Explaining those self-written introductions—"Mr. Dynamite...! The amazing Mr. 'Please Please Please' himself...! The star of the show...!"—once on NPR's Fresh Air in 2005, Brown said he believed in fanfare.
"Show business should really be a buildup," Brown said, "and then once you go into it, you live it."
For better and worse, from beginning to end, Brown lived it.
Originally published 12/25/2006 at 10:52 a.m. PT.