Brown’s musical career has spanned nearly four decades, beginning in the 1950s and he has continued to produce albums into the 1980s. In recent decades his career has been marred by substance abuse and legal problems.

James Brown was born in 1933 in Barnwell, South Carolina, during the middle of the Great Depression. Throughout his childhood, Brown supported his family by picking cotton and shining shoes for a living. When he wasn’t working he could be found practicing his music or committing crimes. His mischief finally caught up with him when he was convicted of armed robbery at the age of sixteen and was sent to a juvenile detention center.

After being released from the detention center, Brown attempted to hold down a job and clean up his act. He did not turn to music right away, but first tried his hand at boxing and then as a baseball pitcher. Eventually James joined Bobby Byrd’s gospel band, the Avons, in the 1950s. The band evolved into its current name, The Famous Flames, and was eventually signed by King Records.

Success did not happen overnight for the band however. The record company was ready to drop Brown after he produced nine singles that flopped. Finally, on their tenth attempt in 1958, their single "Try Me" became a #1 hit on the R&B charts. After that, the hits kept on coming. Eventually Brown became a solo act with the Famous Flames as his back up band. He felt that he should get all the credit because he wrote almost all of their material and was basically the face of the band.

James Brown found a lot of inspiration in his early recordings from Ray Charles and Little Richard. His recordings I’ll go Crazy and Bewildered paved the way for a new genre to be established, a genre that would come to be known as "funk." These early tracks could be characterized by their improvisational nature and what was to become the James Brown Sound.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, James Brown had a slew of hit singles and albums. By the end of the 1970s however, Brown’s status as a hit-maker began to wane. Even though he predicted the trend of the disco era, the music made little room for him.

In an attempt to gain in popularity Brown made several guest appearances on films and television shows in the 1980s. He made cameo appearances in The Blues Brothers, Doctor Detroit, and Rocky IV. He also attempted to collaborate on a few singles with younger artists in the hip-hop genre which was evident in the single "Unity."

Unfortunately, throughout the 1980s and 1990s Browns career had become more of a legal spectacle beginning with his arrest after a high-speed car chase in 1988. It did not stop there, he has also been sent to prison for threatening passersby with a gun, abusing the drug PCP, and assaulting his wife at the time, Adrienne Rodriegues. He has had a total of four marriages; his current wife is Tommie Raye Hynie.

James Brown died of heart failure on Christmas Day, December 25, 2006.

YUDDY