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ALBUMJames Brown: Say It Loud - A&E Documentary PlaylistJames Brown, James Brown & The Famous Flames & The J.B.'s
Albums by James Brown
ALBUMI'm BackJames Brown
ALBUMCan't Get Any HarderJames Brown
ALBUMUniversal JamesJames Brown
ALBUMLove Over-DueJames Brown
ALBUMI'm Real (Expanded)James Brown
ALBUMMotherlodeJames Brown
ALBUMGravity (Expanded Edition)James Brown
ALBUMIn the Jungle GrooveJames Brown
ALBUMNonstop!James Brown
ALBUMSoul SyndromeJames Brown
James Brown's Popular Music Videos
It's A Man's Man's Man's World
Luciano Pavarotti & James Brown
Night Train (Live)
James Brown
Out of Sight (Live)
James Brown
Try Me
James Brown
I Got You (I Feel Good) [Live]
James Brown
Living in America
James Brown
It's a Man's Man's Man's World
James Brown
Papa's Got a Brand New Bag (Live)
James Brown
Super Bad (feat. The Original J.B.s) [Parts 1, 2 & 3]
James Brown
Get On the Good Foot (Live)
James Brown
Artist Playlists
James Brown Essentials
Get on the good foot with five decades of funk and soul from Mr. Dynamite.
James Brown: Deep Cuts
Live cuts and left turns from the Godfather of Soul.
James Brown: Live
Brown's soul superpowers were never more apparent than when he was onstage.
James Brown: Sampled
Their original tunes have been the source material for some of modern music’s biggest hits.
Inspired by James Brown
The musical children raised by The Godfather of Soul.
James Brown: The Songwriters
Artist Biography
In the history of music, it’s likely that no other performer has been as inexhaustible as the Godfather of Soul. Before he was The Hardest Working Man in Show Business, James Brown was a poor boy from South Carolina, born in 1933 in a wooden shack. Convicted of robbery at 16, Brown started a gospel quartet behind bars, and singer Bobby Byrd’s family helped him get out early. Released under the name James Brown & The Famous Flames, 1956’s gospel-inflected “Please, Please, Please” gave Brown his first taste of chart success, but it took nearly a decade of relentless touring to make good on it. With 1963’s blazing Live at the Apollo, listeners got a proper taste of Brown’s explosive talents, and from the mid-‘60s to the mid-’70s, he burned up the R&B charts. It’s this era that defined Brown’s musical legend, and during those years he evolved from upbeat soul (1965’s “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag, Pt. 1”) to funk marathons (1970’s “Get Up I Feel Like Being a Sex Machine,” which features his all-star band, The J.B.’s), and amplified a message of Black empowerment with 1968’s “Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud), Pts. 1 & 2.” In the ‘80s, artists who sampled his music, like Afrika Bambaataa, with whom Brown collaborated on 1984’s hopeful “Unity, Pt. 1: The Third Coming,” placed him at the vanguard of rap. The relationship was fruitful; Brown’s music lives on in a wider sense than he might have dreamed—as the most sampled artist of all time.
Hometown
Barnwell, SC, United States
Genre
R&B/Soul