Nelson George

The James Brown Reader: 50 Years of Writing About the Godfather of Soul
By Nelson | april 21, 2008 | Post a comment

Next week a labor of love I’ve worked on over the last year is being published. ‘The James Brown Reader: 50 Years of Writing About the Godfather of Soul’ (Plume) was sparked by an email from the veteran music scribe Vernon Gibbs, who noted that he made an profile about James Brown in wrote while at Columbia that he’d love to see the light of day. I reached out to Alan Leeds, who aside from being a legendary road manager (James Brown, Prince, D’Angelo, Chris Rock), is one of the leading collectors of JB memorabilia. In the basement of his Minneapolis home is a wealth of records, posters and articles about the Godfather of Soul. Using Alan’s collection as the backbone, augmented by lots of library and on line research, we complied articles that date back to the ’50s all the way up to his death two years ago. We gathered articles from the black press like the Chicago Defender, from defunct publications like Crawdaddy and Black Music, from Rolling Stone and the New York Times, as well as from magazines in the United Kingdom and Africa. Combined with a Time Line that Alan put together, ‘The James Brown Reader’ is the first essential literary retrospective of his life and times. There will be bios in a few years (Greg Tate is one of the many working on one), but this collection will be the base line that all others work from. I edited all the pieces so that they have a “you are there” feeling. This is JB as he was viewed in the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, etc. So it has an immediacy and vitality that will, I hope, make it an enduring text. Give it a look when you can. peace

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