One : The Life and Music of James Brown (9781101561102) (8 page)

“Now, I was the best piano player in Toccoa, Georgia,” Byrd recalled, “and when they said there was another man who I think can outplay you, he’s something else…” It became imperative to meet this guy, once and for all. Show him how a piano was played.

Finally they collided. The Institute baseball team was playing the county team, and Brown was on the mound. Byrd got a hit and was running to third when the pitcher tried to tag him out as he ran—the collision knocked both of them down. Brown extended his hand, the two laughed, and Byrd finally found out who Music Box was. They struck up a conversation. Brown told Byrd that he would be able leave this place—that the institute would release him to a local family if they would agree to sponsor him.

Around the same time, the owner of a local Oldsmobile dealership, S. C. Lawson, was hauling concrete slabs from the campgrounds for a small lake he was building. Lawson and his son, Howell, were talking to a guard who was overseeing the inmates as they loaded Lawson’s truck. The guard gestured in the direction of Brown. “That sure is a good, hard worker,” he said. “Matter of fact, he shouldn’t even be in prison. If your son had done [Brown’s crime], he’d probably have just been given a spanking.” Music Box could be paroled if he had employment promised for two years, the guard said. That got Lawson thinking, and very soon he had offered a job to Brown, washing cars and cleaning up at the dealership.

Down in Toccoa, Bobby Byrd had told his mother about this sweet-voiced kid who would be released, if only he had a family to vouch for him. Zarah got her church involved, as well as other black churches in town, and presented a petition with some four hundred signatures to the camp superintendent. The parole agreement declared that Brown not set foot in Augusta for longer than a night for the next ten years and that he maintain a job and go to church on Sunday. On June 14, 1952, he walked out of the camp, down the mountain, and six miles to town. He carried a bag with him, and got directions to the Byrds’ house. (Brown later maintained he wrote a dazzling letter that earned the attention of the parole board and thus had secured his own freedom.)

In a limited sense, Brown was walking into Toccoa; really, he was entering a place the poet Frank X. Walker has labeled “Affrilachia.” This mountain region was untouched by the plantation system that defined race relations further south, and in Toccoa, while fraught, race relations were viewed by some as less violent than in other parts of the South. Mountain places like Toccoa were where whites learned to play the banjo, an African instrument, by listening to blacks. In Affrilachia banjo and fiddle tunes were the music of most parties, white or black, and when the guitar arrived in the 1920s via railroad work crews, and with it the blues, the sound of the frolics and hog-killings and house parties didn’t radically change, it just expanded. Affrilachia was a little different, a place where into the 1920s and ’30s banjos and fiddles coexisted with guitars and harmonicas. It did not sound like Augusta.

U
pon his release, Brown lived with the Byrds, sleeping in the kitchen behind a curtain. Also in the house were three girls; two boys; Zarah; and a grandmother, Adeline Hickman, who was known as Big Mama. Big Mama was not enamored of the new roomer. “My grandmother, she didn’t want that jailbird in the house! She could not stand him,” recalled Sarah Byrd Giglio, Bobby’s sister. “
But my mother being my mother, she said ‘Mama, we’re gonna let him stay here for a while.’”

“My mother loved James Brown,” said Giglio. “She always called him her son.”

He was easy to like, this wide-open youth who talked like he would be running things soon. Brown quickly made a name for himself, and it wasn’t always a good one. Friends warned Byrd to watch out for this kid, that he was a dirty con from Augusta and would take advantage of him. Some of them stopped talking to Byrd when he didn’t cut Brown loose. But he believed in the guy, and had seen his raw talent, which would sure help any number of groups Byrd was running.

Toccoa was postcard-pretty, and postcard-small: When Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters came through Toccoa—not to play, just stopping to gas up—word got out and a crowd of black fans filled the gas station before the vocal group loaded their car and drove to the next show.

On Sunday afternoons at Boyd Field, groups of boys would gather to play football, and the newcomer was quickly a standout. “James was always there. He was especially good at football,” recalls a local. “He could reverse his field about ten or fifteen times, and nobody could ever catch him, he was so fast.”

In his daily life, Brown was plowing right into obstacles and people, clueless about how to make his fierce drive work for him. He got into fights and stepped on toes. He didn’t understand the dynamics of Toccoa: a hamlet where everybody knew everybody, where what you said in confidence was public knowledge by Thursday, where the heart you broke had a brother working beside you, and the guy you socked had a cousin in your band. Maybe this was what many in Toccoa, including Bobby Byrd’s mom, loved about James Brown: He was both clueless and guileless, full of promise and in need of help.

Some accounts have Brown scheming to get into the Gospel Starlighters; others have Byrd desperate to bring the new guy in.
Either way, Byrd introduced him to his boys: Doyle Oglesby, Fred Pulliam, Sylvester Keels, Nashplende Knox, and guitarist Nafloyd Scott. Byrd’s guys were all steeped in the music-making ways of the mountain region. They started harmonizing together, with Brown, Keels, and Byrd all sharing keyboards, and everybody but Scott taking turns singing lead.

Brown already knew Bobby’s sister Sarah, whom he was dating and singing with by the piano in the Byrds’ living room. She sang with the Zioneers, a group out of Mt. Zion Baptist Church. Brown joined her in the group. Sarah also sang with the Community Choir. Brown joined
that
one, too. Sarah and James had all kinds of chemistry.

“James
never
liked nobody to outdo him, even then,” she recalled. “He always said, ‘Don’t try to outsing me.’ And after we’d do our little part together, it was ‘Sarah, you’re trying to outsing me and I don’t like that.’ In gospel he was like, ‘No one can do it better than James Brown.’” Eventually, Big Mama laid down the law, and Sarah and James went their separate ways.

Brown followed Sarah into the Gospel Starlighters, and Bobby Byrd and Brown began a lifetime of making music together. The truth is, if it hadn’t been for Bobby Byrd, there might not have been a James Brown.

The Gospel Starlighters became the Avons, started singing pop, and were hired to sing downtown at Collier’s Tea Room, a spot for white ladies who lunch. They were black kids flirting from behind a trellis of decorum, now gently folding pop—crooner stuff like “The White Cliffs of Dover” and “Prisoner of Love”—into their spirituals. The ladies loved it, but they didn’t have the last word. Bobby and Sarah’s mom Zarah
did
, and Zarah did not care for the mixing of gospel with pop. She let them have it.

“My mom was not into it! My mom and my grandma they’d be all ‘We don’t want to hear that devil’s music in here.’ They used to embarrass us to death,” laughed Sarah.

Further embarrassment came when Byrd and Brown, both members of Mount Zion Baptist Church, were summoned by church
leaders for some emergency guidance counseling. Directed into the basement, they were told they could either play the blues or gospel music, but never both.
Choose
. Byrd didn’t tip his hand on the spot, but facts were facts—they were getting paid for the pop music and were rising local celebrities. They bowed their heads and, when they escaped the basement, they chose pop.

Now they had to figure out how to fill up a suddenly barren set. A trip to Greenville, South Carolina, stiffened their spines. In the Greenville Textile Center, Byrd, Brown, and cohorts caught a rhythm and blues show featuring the “5” Royales and Hank Ballard and the Midnighters. The “5” Royales were the first great vocal group to take gospel harmonizing into the pop marketplace, and further, they featured the wickedly deft guitar player Lowman “El” Pauling. He sounded great and looked even better, loosening his guitar strap so that his instrument hung at his knees, macking like an outlaw galoot. The rest of the group sang raucous harmonies over hard-edged tunes that were the antithesis of what the gals liked at Collier’s Tea Room. Some of these songs sounded suspiciously like church tunes Byrd might have sung, only they were given a new lurid coat of words. The Midnighters, now they were just plain
filthy
, with songs about baby making and booty shaking, acting out gymnastic routines to each number and ending the night with their slacks at their ankles and their voices to the rafters. They, too, sort of sounded like the church, though they pushed thoughts of church far out of mind.

After Greenville, Toccoa remained the town it always was, but Byrd, Sarah, Brown, and gang experienced a cataclysmic pole shift. “We were so, so excited after that show was over, I don’t think we sung gospel no more after that,” said Bobby. “We wanted to become rhythm and blues singers, and we stayed up and talked about it all night long.”

They threw themselves into songs learned from the radio: the Spaniels’ “Goodnight Sweetheart, Goodnight,” the “5” Royales’ “Baby Don’t Do It,” and the Clovers’ “One Mint Julep” was their finale. Each had a star they imitated in their act: For Brown it was
Roy Brown and Wynonie Harris. They passed the lead vocals over from one to the next, and while formally it was Byrd’s band, practically speaking, this was a collective in which everybody sang and did some entertaining of their own.

Besides his job at Lawson Motors, Brown was a janitor at the white Toccoa High School. He cleaned the auditorium, and when no one was around, Brown would lay his mop down, get on the stage, and play the piano. Toccoa High had a weekly institution called Friday chapel, where students offered a little entertainment. One Friday the principal told those gathered in the auditorium that he had a special surprise for them this week, and when he pulled the curtain open, there on the stage was Byrd’s group, with Toccoa High School’s janitor singing lead. “They did seven or eight songs and just had everybody in awe,” said M. Tabor, a student at Toccoa High. The group returned to the school, playing Friday chapel for many weeks thereafter.

They were picking up and throwing down shtick as fast as audiences responded. Instrumentation was expanding: Brown built a washtub bass that he thumped in practice, played a little harmonica, and even messed around with a washboard, rubbed with metal to make a rackety percussive sound. It was the wide-open, Affrilachian party way. They moved stuff in and out of their performances, but some staples from the gospel world remained constants—handclapping and foot stomping to assert the beat; Byrd singing the bass parts in the style of gospel quartets; Byrd and Brown vocalizing horn parts, and scatting in the manner of hip gospel groups such as the Golden Gate Quartet.

They had a new name, one that trumped all the earlier ones and that they finally stuck with: the Flames. Some say the inspiration was the West Coast group the Four Blazes, or maybe the crew called the Hollywood Flames. Others suggest it was inspired by gospel’s Torches. Guitarist Nafloyd Scott called it like he saw it. When asked why they named themselves the Flames, he said, “Because I thought we were hot!” They were.

A local men’s
shop let them buy fly outfits on installment. The guys ordered brightly colored zoot suits with pegged pants and baggy-shouldered coats. They were making an unmistakable impression on the locals.

Brown left Lawson Motors, taking a job at another car dealership. He needed the work because Brown was working on a family. He had met Velma Warren, a classmate of Bobby Byrd, at Zion Baptist, and after a six-month courtship they married, on June 27, 1953. She was the daughter of a carpenter from Birmingham, Alabama, and was employed as a maid for a white family. “I could see where he wanted something. He was very ambitious. He wasn’t going back to poverty, and he knew with me he wasn’t going back to poverty,” said Velma. Soon Brown got a job at a thread mill and rented a house on Summer Hill for him and his wife. But there were distractions, and between jobs and shows he was gone a lot of the time. Velma realized it behooved her to come to the Flames’ shows not just to see her husband, but to
keep
him. “I was there to keep down a lot of stuff,” she said. “He was just like that.” Their three sons (Teddy, Terry, and Larry) were born over the next five years.

From a brief stint at a plastics factory, Brown fabricated a cymbal for the Flames; somebody snagged an old marching band bass drum out of Whitman High, and, voila, the Flames had a drum set. Brown was their main drummer, so much so that early on, many thought he was a drummer, not a singer. Their act, meanwhile, was getting more interesting. They’d kill the jukebox and then this stomping herd took the stage. All the singers revolving for their turn at the front, which they
had
to take turns for, seeing as they only had one microphone and one three-tube amp that the mic and guitar were plugged into. Everyone was in constant motion—moving from drums to keyboards, dancing and egging the crowd on. November 13, 1952, the group’s name appeared in print for the first time. They were playing intermission at the Ritz movie theater.
The Toccoa Record
announced
House of Dracula
was the featured picture, accompanied by:

“Extra added attraction—Late Show Only.

“The Flames—Local Colored Band—On Our Stage.”

They were regulars at the Ritz, where whites sat downstairs and blacks in the balcony. The white kids, remembered Nafloyd Scott, would throw coins at the group. “Had to dodge them dollar and fifty cent [pieces],” he recalled. Brown quickly deduced the advantage of busting out a flamboyant stage-front split at such moments: He’d be there on the ground, picking up loose change without interrupting the act.

Another place they could count on regular gigs was Berry’s Recreation Center, a two-story pool hall and cafe run by Berry Trimier. He was an undertaker, ran a taxi company, and at night presided over the venue. Trimier could count on Byrd’s group filling his place, and now with Brown stepping up, they were really packing the Rec Center. Trimier began managing the Flames in 1954, booking them into surrounding black “chitlin circuit” clubs in Lavonia and Cornelia, along with white college shows in Athens and Clemson.