![]() He released “America Is My Home,” which many black leaders read as critical of black power and the anti-war movement, only to release “Say It Loud - I’m Black and I’m Proud” soon afterward. He was friendly with the notoriously racist Strom Thurmond, but also performed at civil-rights events. He supported then-vice-president Hubert Humphrey during his presidential campaign, only to turn around and perform at Richard Nixon’s inauguration. The movie largely sidesteps a lot of James Brown’s politics. His racial politics were, um, complicated. ![]() In one of the more egregious instances, he allegedly hit one of them, Tammi Terrell, with a hammer.Ħ. He would often court women who sang with him, and would abuse them until they couldn’t take it anymore. He was physically abusive and a philanderer.īrown learned a lot from watching his own father physically abuse his mother, and repeated the same actions with the women in his life. In the melee, seven people got shot, but the injured parties were given $100 each and told not to create any more trouble. He went after soul singer Joe Tex after Tex did a performance making fun of Brown’s cape act. Often at Club 15 in Macon, Georgia, Brown would get into brawls with other men, often over women. Davis, a saxophonist, confronted Brown about stealing his song “Night Train.” Davis said that Brown said the song would be released under his name, but when he found out that it wasn’t, he drove down to Tampa, where Brown was, and confronted him with a gun. She said, “God don’t like ugly and he sure don’t go along with thieves!” It wouldn’t be the only time Brown would be accused of theft: J.C. ![]() Brown took it, added some words, and put it out under his own name: “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World.” She had to take him to court to get a songwriting credit. He stole “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” from a woman.īetty Jean Newsome, a woman he had met at the Apollo, was traveling with him when he heard her singing a song she had come up with. At a show in Alabama they knew it wasn’t him, and chanted, “We want Richard!” Brown rose to the challenge, doing backflips around the stage until they no longer cared that he was an impostor.ģ. They shared the same agent, so James Brown filled in as Little Richard. When Little Richard had his hit “Tutti Frutti,” he went to Los Angeles, leaving several weeks of commitments open around the South. James Brown pretended to be Little Richard in performances. He became a legend in the neighborhood as the kid that couldn’t be killed.Ģ. In another childhood anecdote, a pre-adolescent Brown was leaning against an air compressor at the gas station where his dad worked when a short circuit sent an electric current through him-singing his hair and melting his shoes to his feet. It made him believe that he was invincible. Part of the James Brown lore is that he was “stillborn” and that his aunt breathed life into him. He was electrocuted for four minutes as a kid. Vulture read RJ Smith’s biography on James Brown, The One , to imagine what other stories could have been told if some premium cable channel suddenly decides to do a raunch-and-drug-filled miniseries.ġ. Throughout his life, he met multiple presidents, courted many women, and performed plenty of illegal activities. Born in the post-Reconstructionist South in 1933, James Brown went on to become the “Godfather of Soul,” first as part of a group (the best known iteration is the Famous Flames), and then as a solo artist. (Read our review of the movie here.) The fact that it’s PG-13 means that the more scandalous parts of the singer’s life go untouched. ![]() So it’s inevitable then that the James Brown biopic Get On Up - even with a running time of 138 minutes - might have to leave some of it out.
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