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“The Godfather of Soul” is one of the many names by which the world knows James Joseph Brown, Jr., the revolutionary musical figure who was born on May 3, 1933.
The story that Brown himself often told is that he seemed to have died at birth, he was not breathing for a while and it was an aunt who saved him.
Long before he changed the course of popular music in the 20th century and crowned himself “The Hardest Working Man in the World of show”, little James Brown may well have been the hardest working kid in Augusta, Georgia, where he was sent to live with his Aunt Honey at the age of six.
He had spent the previous years with his father, James, Sr., who became he made a meager living selling pine tar to the local turpentine factory in the woods of Barnwell County, South Carolina, near the Savannah River.
James’s mother had run off with another man when James was only four years old, and although the aunt Honey would play a motherly role to James, the fact that she ran a brothel and sold moonshine for a living did anything but a traditional upbringing.
While other famous musicians of his generation would get their musical training in the traditional context of the church, James Brown got it on the streets
, where while working as a cotton picker, charcoal burner, and shoe shiner, he also danced and sang to attract customers to his aunt’s place of business.
Perfected further his talent in prison, where he was sentenced to serve from 8 to 16 years for stealing from parked cars at the age of 15 years. However, an experience that could have broken another man inspired Brown to pursue music.
He did his first gospel sing while in prison, where he earned the nickname “Music Box” and impressed his mayor enough already the Georgia State Board of Parole with its earnestness of purpose to secure his release after only three years.
Their first album, “Please, Please, Please” (1956), sold three million copies and launched Brown’s extraordinary career.
In addition to placing almost 100 simple and almost 22 charting albums, Brown broke new ground with two of the first successful albums “live and in concert”, their milestone Live at the Apollo (1963), which remained on the charts for 66 weeks, and its continuation of 1964, Pure Dynamite! Live at the Royal, which was in the charts for 34 weeks.
James Brown died on Christmas Day at 2006 in Atlanta , Georgia.
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