Do you remember what you were doing when planes had crashed into the twin skyscraper towers in New York, John F Kennedy was assassinated, John Lennon was killed, Princess Diana had died, when the Pope or Mother Theresa had died, or Appollo 13 had landed man on the moon, when Nelson Mandela was released from prison after 27 years in apartheid South Africa? I will never forget what I was doing when I heard James Brown had died. I was at a Christmas Day family party with large numbers of relatives of many ages milling around and up and down stairs migrating between the kitchen, the TV room, and the basement. I was talking to my twenty year old nephew about his new computer gift in his basement bedroom when my eighteen year old son popped his head through the door and said:
“Dad, did you know James Brown died this morning?” I don’t remember my response. The rest of my Christmas Day was somber. I was six hundred miles away in Michigan from my home in Virginia where I owned recordings of much of his music. I was ten thousand miles away from Zambia in Southern Africa when I had first been introduced to the “God Father of Soul”, and the “Hardest working Man in Show Business”.
I was introduced to James Brown in a most unlikely way. This was not in the Ghettoes of Watts in Los Angeles, Detroit, or in Harlem. This was ten thousand miles away from the United States in the small remote provincial capital of Chipata in the African country of Zambia. I was a seventeen year-old village kid at Chizongwe Boarding High School.
In December 1970, James Brown held two concerts in my native country of Zambia. My high school classmate, Ben Kalinda, was one of the very tiny numbers of students who had been lucky enough to have relatives in the city and had spent his Christmas Holidays on the Copperbelt. On the very first night back from school holidays, all the boys were sitting and lying on their beds in the military style-type barrack that was Aggrey House dormitory.
Ben first described the huge excited crowd at the packed Dag Hammarskjöld Stadium in the City of Ndola. Tension of anticipation built up to a crescendo and when James Brown finally shot on to the stage like a bouncing ping pong ball, the crowd turned hysterical and surged forward. They wanted a piece of him; just to touch him. The police and security beat and pushed the crowd back.
Ben demonstrated how James Brown danced to his hit song: “Like a Sex Machine.” Ben spun around on the dorm floor like an ice skater, then rapidly shuffled his feet with lighting speed, and repeatedly gestured his left hand in a grabbing motion toward his private parts; but never quite touching them. Ben then suddenly dropped to floor in the signature James Brown split. All the boys were hollering, screaming, and laughing and my eyes were probably welling with tears and popping out of my sockets with disbelief at the same time. The energy and excitement was contagious.
None of us had ever seen James Brown on TV which was unknown to most of us, heard about him, or knew who he was. Black and white TV at that time was only available four hundred miles away in the distant city and only in affluent homes. Ben told us James Brown was an Afro-American; a Negro. Ben said to the mesmerized boys that James Brown held a concert in a packed stadium in England among crowds of hundreds of thousands of whites. When James Brown yelled:
“Say it loud!!” The white crowd responded: “I’m Black and Proud!!”
Ben described the end of the concert in slow vivid detail. James Brown was sweating, appeared to be crying, tired, and exhausted as he pleaded and sung: “Please, Please, Please”. The stage hands and the announcer persuaded him to leave the stage, as James Brown slowly limped one slow step at a time, while being led away and draping him with a long colorful robe. Near the back of the stage, just like a sphinx coming back from the ashes, defying his escorts, James Brown suddenly threw away the robe and dashed back to the middle of the stage crying, pleading and wailing “Please, Please, Please”. The crowd had gone bonkers. It was that night thirty-six years ago that I fell in love with the James Brown legend.
One year later, I was a wide eyed eighteen year old high school graduate village kid on his first job in the real world in the small provincial town of Chipata. I was Assistant Manager and Clerk at the Chipata Nutrition Group. Bob Weisell and his wife Joan were a young white middle class couple from Indiana. He worked as an International Aid Volunteer at the office. We became good friends. They invited me to their two bedroom apartment where he told me about American football. Bob had played football in High School. I had no clue what the game was. I told him about how I loved James Brown. Our conversation must have made a big impression on Bob because the following December after he had returned to the United States for Christmas, he brought me one of the biggest presents anyone had given me; the James Brown Double album LP: “Revolution of the Mind: Live at the Apollo Vol. III”.
At the time, I was renting a small room just slightly bigger than an average jail cell. My worldly possessions were a small mattress on the floor in the corner of the one room. A small suitcase, a couple of clothes, and a small briefcase size portable record player. I bought six “D” batteries and put them in my record player. I put on the first James Brown LP record. My mind was just blown away. In the candle light, I began to dance and tried to perfect the James Brown moves I had only tried to dance to on the radio when ever the “Sex Machine” hit had come on.
Later, I moved to the Capital City of Lusaka where I was an undergraduate at the University of Zambia. The city was gripped with the James Brown Mania. Young men wore James Brown hand tailored suites. Young women wore long knee length leather boots with flamboyant huge Afros just like the James Brown woman who performed with the Flames. I couldn’t afford the James Brown suite as it had to be hand tailored. At my uncle’s house, my late little nephews Victor and Calistus (5 and 8 at the time) always asked me to perform James Brown in the guest bedroom when I staid at my uncle’s in Lusaka. The kids were so thrilled and joined me in the spinning and lightening moves of my feet on the waxed bedroom floor. Doing the James Brown split was easy at the time in soft polythene long pants. If ever I danced like James Brown to day and did his split, I would need a cardiac surgeon, an orthopedic surgeon, an ambulance, and perhaps a coffin to be on stand by.
James Brown energized, thrilled, entertained, and inspired the imagination of the small village kid that I was. He will never die. He electrified crowds. The African people of Zambia at the time felt like we were part of millions in the world and sharing the distant American dream. Everyone in life ought to have the experience of having a “James Brown”. It could be a person, could be an activity, it could be a persona. The James Brown for you could be anyone or anything that inspires you, that thrills you, takes you out of and beyond your mundane everyday world; with only one important caveat: it should be someone you admire or something that you experience that does not make you fat or involve ingesting mind altering substances. Now there is your James Brown. Have you ever had or do you have a James Brown in your life?