James McBride

Author, Musician, and former National Council on the Arts member
James McBride Hadshot wearing a hart.
Photo by Chia Messina
Music Credits:  "I Feel Good" written and performed  by James Brown from the documentary, I Got the Feelin': James Brown in the '60s. “Cold Sweat,” written by James Brown and  Alfred "Pee Wee" Ellis; performed by James Brown and the Famous Flames, from the LP, Cold Sweat. James McBride: Well, I mean, as a kid, he was a god. He was a demigod, I suppose. He was so… big in my community. He meant more than music. He really represented social change and educational climbing that was part of my household, and in general, part of my community. I mean, he’s like a noun almost. You know, house, car, water, James Brown, microphone. He was a phenomena. Jo Reed: That’s James McBride, talking about the godfather of soul James Brown. <music> And this is Art Works, the weekly podcast produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. I’m Josephine Reed. James Brown and James McBride. That’s close to a perfect match of subject and author. James McBride might be celebrated for his writing, winning the 2013 National Book Award for fiction for his novel The Good Lord Bird, but he’s also a professional musician-- a saxophonist who’s toured with jazz legend Jimmy Scott and who now fronts his own band. So McBride brings a musical sensibility and knowledge of the entertainment business to his new book Kill ‘Em and Leave: Searching for James Brown and the American Soul. James Brown was one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, who’s often remembered for his non-stop performances and just so hair. What can be forgotten or ignored is what an icon he was for black self-realization and pride. And that’s where James McBride puts his focus.  He closely examines Brown’s roots in the South, looking at where he came from and how that informed who Brown became.  This is no easy task since James Brown was a proper, evasive man who always aimed to present his best face to the world. So McBride weaves his own observations with individual conversations with Brown’s family, close friends, business associates, protégés and fellow musicians in an effort to understand what shaped the complex, troubled, proud and exuberantly talented James Brown-- searching for the man behind the legend and the America that produced him. James McBride: I wanted to see what the man was really like, because I knew that he had a significant social and cultural impact, not only on this county, but worldwide. Why? I mean, you can write a story, say: “Well, he was married to-- he had four wives, he had these kids, and he was funny about money, and he did this recording in this year, and he did that recording in that year.” But you don’t really get to the soul of a man, nor do you get to the soul of a nation, until you look at the causal elements that created that person, and the situations that created them and made them great artists. Jo Reed: It seems as though he did not want to be known, which of course gave you a particular challenge. James McBride: Well, yeah. <laughs> Yeah. How do you write about a guy who’s dead, who didn’t want to be known in the first place? Well, you have to get your old broom out and sweep out the dust from every corner. He didn’t want to be known, because he was a very proud person, and he had a lot of sensitivity and a lot of kindness, and he had a history that wasn’t particularly clean, from his childhood on to his death. In the South, there’s a certain familial quality that people have with one another, because often they grew up in small towns and villages where everybody knew everything about each other. And so the secrets were just kept, so that there was a kind of respect: “I’ll keep my secrets, you keep your secrets. We’ll just pretend it never happened, and keep moving.” And that was something that was just a creed that he lived by. And so it made writing about him and knowing him in a public way difficult. That was compounded by the fact that he was in the entertainment industry. And it’s not like entertainment reporters have a lot of time, to go deep into a character to figure him or her out. He had a Horatio Alger story anyway; you know, rags to riches. You know, he was born in a shack, and then he went to jail as a teenager, and then he got out of jail, and he started this band, and the band became big, and he became a star, and then he got crazy. You could say that about a lot of people. So you have to really be specific. When you start to mine character, both in a fictional sense, and when you discover the mining caverns of a character in a nonfiction realm, you’re looking for the same thing. You’re looking for the conflicts that drive that person, that drive that character to do the things they do to become a great artist, painter, sculptor. You’re looking for the muscle. Jo Reed: It seemed to me, in reading the book, the South was as much a character as anybody else you spoke to in that book. James McBride: Absolutely. I felt James Brown was more of a Southerner than he was a black man. And the reason why I say that is because everything he did falls within the lane of how Southern people are. Now, I’m not a Southerner. I’m from New York, but what I did discover is that there is a certain pride and a certain element of dignity that Southerners just simply live by-- a code of honor, if you will-- where if you shake someone’s hand, you mean it. If you pray to God, you really mean it. And if someone says they’re going to do something, they do it. And if you betray our trust, your journey with us is over. And so James Brown embodied all of those things. He lived by that creed, and in some ways you could say he died by it as well, because he did a lot of wrong in his life, and at the end of his life, he tried to correct the wrong that he did by giving everything he had to poor people; you know, leaving all of his money, his music, everything, to poor children, white and black, in South Carolina, and he was very specific about that. And 10 years after his death, not a dime of that money, as far as I know, has reached any child, because it’s all tied up in court with lawyers who are suing on behalf of certain family members, and-- and the South Carolina State Court system, which is run like a kind of a fiefdom. And so, in that regard, that’s part of his story as well. You know, when you’re a writer, you have to decide what part of the story to tell, and in James Brown’s case, there were many stories to tell. So I just shaped the book around the many stories that made the man, as opposed to saying, “Well, he did this, then he did that.” Give you a linear account. Doesn’t tell you what you really need to know, like-- why were they afraid of something, and how did that manifest itself during the course of their lives, when they were 45 or 50? Jo Reed: Well, his manager said that would be the word that he’d use to describe... James McBride: Well, he had a lot of fear about white America, and about American society and the government. Jo Reed: James Brown? James McBride: Yeah. In part, because-- he was born in Barnwell, but he was also raised in part of South Carolina called Ellenton, which is a small city that was one of six towns that was displaced when the government and General Electric and the DuPont Company combined forces to create the Savannah River site, which is basically a place that processes uranium for the making of nuclear bombs. At the time, in 1951, it was the biggest nuclear bomb-making facility in the world: 360-odd square miles. And he was displaced. His whole family was displaced by the-- thousands of black sharecroppers. Most of the people who were displaced were black sharecroppers, along with many white, working-class farmers, who were all moved: churches, farms, railroads, graveyards, cemeteries...everything. They were all moved away and there was not a word of protest. They just-- there was a meeting near Christmas, in 1951, and they were told, “You have to leave, because it’s the Cold War, and America must be safe.” And those people never forgot it. And they always remembered this business, and James Brown certainly did. They remembered the business of-- the government wants something from you, they don’t have to ask you. They can simply walk into your house and put their hat on the rack, and tell you, “you gotta go.” And he brought that mentality with him all the way until he died. Also, he was clinging to the walls by the IRS twice. Although he died without owing the IRS a penny, he was always very afraid that he would lose his fortune and his luck and his goodwill. So fear was a big part of what propelled him. Jo Reed:  Do you mind reading a little bit from the book? James McBride:  Sure. This is from chapter three, it’s entitled, “American Jive.” Here’s how music history in America works: a trumpet player blows a solo in a Philly nightclub in 1945. Somebody slaps it on a record and, 50 years later that same solo is a final in a college jazz department. And your kid pays $60,000 a year to take the final while the guy who blew the solo out of his guts in the first place is deader than yesterday’s rice and beans. His family is suffering from the same social illness that created his great solo and nobody gave two hoots about the guy when he died and nobody gives two hoots about his family now. They call that capitalism, the way of the world, showbiz. You gotta suck it up. An upcoming movie about diversity and my favorite term, cultural history. I call it fear, and it has lived in the heart of every black American musician for the last hundred years. Jo Reed: That’s James McBride, reading from his book Kill ‘Em and Leave: Searching for James Brown and the American Soul. You also talked to some musicians who played with Brown, including Nafloyd Scott, who’s the last living Famous Flame, which is Brown’s original group. What were his memories of James Brown? James McBride: You know, everybody I talked to who knew James Brown referred to him as Mr. Brown, except for Nafloyd. Nafloyd called him James, because he knew James Brown when James Brown was a-- was young, when they were young together. Leon Austin-- Nafloyd had very good memories of James Brown. He felt James Brown was very generous to him in the later years. Nafloyd felt that whatever wrong was done to him wasn’t by-- hadn’t come from James Brown. He confessed that whiskey was his big problem...and they were young, and they didn’t realize what they were doing. The travel was hard. They were small-town boys. They got tired of going from one town to the other. Even though the money was good, it was just so hard on them. Traveling-- doing those one-night stands is-- it’s unconsciously hard. I’ve done those one-night stands. You forget how big the world is until you start driving it. You know, it’s not easy. You know-- limited as to where they could stay. Jo Reed: I was going to say, yeah. James McBride: Dealing with promoters, the money, the fatigue. Jo Reed: You also went to England and talked to the wonderful Pee Wee Ellis. James McBride: Well, Pee Wee Ellis is really an American treasure, and it’s really a shame that he hasn’t gotten the credit in this country he deserves, because he’s truly one of the great originators of soul music, as we know it. Soul music-- true soul music-- has the same kind of counterpoint cacophony that you hear in classical music. It’s a different language. It may not have the same sort of absolute precision that Mozart has, but his ability to shape these Southern musicians-- some of whom could read music and were very fine players, and others who could barely play their parts, but were hired because they were better dancers-- was extraordinary. And his-- the songs that he wrote for James Brown were among James Brown’s greatest. I mean, he wrote “Chicken,” which is-- considered a jazz classic that Jaco Pastorius made famous. People don’t even know Pee Wee wrote that. And he really wrote “Say it Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud.” And if you listen to “Say it Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud,” as a technical piece of music, you hear the sharp IX chords. You hear how he moved the harmony from the I chord to the IV chord, and what he did, and he attacked the blues part of that in a very unique and unorthodox way. Pee Wee Ellis was brilliant. He’s also a very fine tenor saxophone player, as well. He went on to have a very fine career in the world of jazz. Jo Reed: Which is how I knew him. I honestly didn’t realize that he had played with James Brown and was responsible for his music. I knew him as a jazz guy. James McBride: Well, it’s interesting, because he never talks about his James Brown years. They were not fun years for him. Jo Reed: He didn’t want to talk to you about his James Brown years. And he seemed like a guy who was very forthcoming, but he just would prefer not to. James McBride: Well, he’s a quiet man by nature, but he is forthcoming. He’s very funny, and he’s a very gentle person. He’s a shy person, and a shy, gentle person in the world of soul music in the 1960s-- who was a jazz musician before he went into the world of soul music, and a jazz musician after-- he just doesn’t see that as a high point in his life. He doesn’t realize the great creative elements that he used to help create this music. For example, “Cold Sweat” sounds just like Miles Davis’ “So What,” if you just change the beat. It’s written in the key of D, and it has the same lick. Miles’ is... <sings> and “Cold Sweat” is... <sings> <music> Jo Reed: Brown was an artist. He was a great musician. Why, then, do you think he was capable of such extraordinary cruelty to his fellow musicians? Not just relentlessness and perfection, but you make clear, downright cruel. James McBride: Well, there are a lot of musicians who are extraordinarily cruel to their sidemen. The way that band leaders treat sidemen in the world of jazz is not nice; not always nice. There’re a lot of talented guys, but there are not a lot of jobs for those talented guys, particularly guys and gals-- men and women-- who don’t write, but who can really play. So you hire people who can go on the road because they’re great showmen and they can play on the road, but they’re not quite what you need for the studio. And so you hire studio musicians because you want the precision, maybe, but you don’t get the edge of the-- when you run a band-- I mean, Quincy Jones said he almost went crazy when he ran his big band in Europe, because he had-- because you got a guy who can play the part, he’s great, but he drinks all the time. Then you got a guy who’s-- he’s a really nice guy, but he can’t quite cut the part. It’s a personnel issue. So the band’s not-- the band doesn’t deal with the promoters, they don’t deal with the DJs, they don’t deal with the record company. They just play the gig and go home. So I think some of those stories about the way he treated his men, they’re not exaggerated. They’re true. But I don’t think James Brown was the only one who was that way. That said, show business is a cruel business. It’s a business where crime pays. And in that regard, James Brown is no different than anyone else. I mean, he wasn’t a crook, but there are many people who have made millions in show business, who couldn’t write a lick of music and there are many people who got credit for songs they never wrote, and their children and grandchildren are collecting royalties and living well for things that their great-grandfather never did. So... I’m not absolving him of the cruelty that he exhibited toward the men, and especially the women, in his group. But that, too, is a reflection of what exists in the American entertainment machine, which takes the dreams of these young musicians and chews them up... <laughs> and spits them out, like so many spitballs. I mean, that’s—that’s what they don’t teach you in music school. Jo Reed:  Three people who remember him, who all seem of a piece to me. Velma, his first wife, Leon Austin, and Leon’s wife, Miss Emma. Their experiences with Brown, obviously, were very different. One, Velma was married to him, but there was something in the way they all remembered him that just struck a similar cord in me when I read it. James McBride:  Well, I think why they loved him, and I think the reason why he loved them back, was because they accepted him for who he was really. You’re talking about really strong, kind and very strong people, who were very sure of themselves, who had no identity issues about where they belonged in the world. I mean, Miss Emma, who is still alive, is-- she’s very religious, very classy, would never, ever let you know if she was in pain, physical, financial or otherwise. She’s just a Southern gentlewoman. Miss Velma is the same way. Little different, Miss Velma is the-- kind of a more stern person and she worked for 30 years in a factory after she divorced James Brown. She said to him, “I have these two boys. I need to raise them.” He bought a piece of land. He built her a house. He handed her the deed and she never asked him for a dime after that. And they were friends until he died. He called her from the hospital and she was upset, even when she talked about it, because she said, “He never even told me he was in the hospital and then he died.” She was a good friend to him. He would go to all her relatives’ funerals. He would come off the road to do that. He was very good that way, she said. Because they saw him when he was a nobody really. When he came outta jail-- he went to jail for stealing car parts when he was 16. When he came outta jail and he met Miss Velma, he was—maybe 19. They called him convict. No one wanted to have anything to do with him and then, over the years, she watched the fable of how he supposedly lived in Bobby Byrd’s basement and started this band. And she was very hurt by that because she knew the truth was, he came outta jail and he was married for four years and he was with her when he had his first hits. And he was working as a janitor in Toccoa, Georgia for at least a good part of that time, and he was living in a house with a wife, with two children. And then, you know, it wasn’t like he just left and he started a band and-- that’s the show business version of his life. Jo Reed:  The death of his oldest child seems to-- naturally, of course-- seems to be a real turning point somehow for him and it’s certainly for her. James McBride: Yeah, that’s a good point. I think it took a lot out of him. I think he was deeply hurt, in part because his oldest son Teddy was the guy to carry the flame. I mean, Teddy was a very talented singer and dancer and I think James Brown wanted to be the father to Teddy that maybe his father hadn’t been to him. But he was at the height of his success. You know, he was really flying high and then his son was killed in an automobile accident, his oldest son, his first born. His other son, Terry, he was accepted at Morehouse and he had a scholarship and he skidded off into some wandering around for a while. And those two had a very tumultuous relationship that evened out only when Brown got older. It was a painful thing for him to experience, because he was feeling so much power at the time and experiencing so much success. You know, we often don’t think about the lives of these great people that we know in our world, what they experience at home when the lights are off and they’re sitting there at home, at the kitchen table, eating a tuna fish sandwich. He’s not the first person in the world who’s lost a son who was famous but, I think for him, for a man who was not used to showing pain and sharing pain, Teddy’s funeral was the-- was one of the few moments in his life where James Brown truly lost it. He couldn’t get out the car to walk into the church to say goodbye to his son. They had to pick him up. They had to carry him up the stairs ‘cause he was broken down. Jo Reed: Are there James Brown songs that you play as a musician now? James McBride:  <laughs> I think I can safely say that, like many musicians, I play at many James Brown songs but there are none that I can play with the kind of effectiveness that, say, Fred Wesley and Pee Wee, and Maceo Parker do. I’m a big fan of “Cold Sweat” because it’s got a nice sound to it. And I like other songs like “There Was a Time.” I tried that a few years ago. I never tried some of the really early stuff because that stuff is really hard to recreate like “Hot Pants,” “Try Me,” “Please, Please.” Those songs, you-- you just ought not to try ‘em because unless you have James Brown and the Famous Flames around, you’re not gonna recreate…That’s old school music and it has that old school touch. And then that’s what makes it special. Jo Reed: A reviewer, not me, but I kinda get it, I think, said he thought Kill ‘Em and Leave and The Good Lord Bird were ‘kissing cousins’. James McBride:  Well, <laughs> to be honest, I haven’t read a review of my work in many, many years, 20 years, so... Jo Reed:  I’m just giving you that part. James McBride:  Yeah, well, different people… The Good Lord Bird was not me talking really. That was me channeling someone else. I wish I could be the person in Good Lord Bird. He was so funny. Jo Reed:  He was so funny. James McBride:  He was a wonderful character to know and I miss him, Little Onion Shackleford. I miss him and I can’t wait to get back to fiction after this experience. Jo Reed:  I was gonna ask you about that. James McBride:  Oh, yeah, I mean, non-fiction is just too hard. Non-fiction is too hard. Too much traveling, too much interviewing, too much waiting for people to show up and everyone has an agenda. You can’t control the story. I mean, with fiction, you can’t control it either, but the joy in the journey is wonderful. The joy in the journey with non-fiction, especially in a story like this-- it’s not that wonderful because you’re dealing with the underbelly of America. You’re seeing America from the intestines out. It’s not…pleasant because you’re trying to explain to people, in a nice way, that we have a lotta work to do. And you end up talking about race in ways that I’m not really comfortable with. Jo Reed:  How so? James McBride: I just like to talk about solutions. I’m not interested in the problems. I’m 58 years old. If you’re my age and you don’t know what the problem is, there’s really nothing I can do to help you. I just wanna talk about solutions to help poor people. You’re helping poor people, you’re helping everybody I care about. And, in that regard, I have a lot in common with James Brown. That’s our share aorta. He cared about poor people and he cared about working class people and, in that regard, I have a lot in common with him and that’s really where all my work lives. You know, my work lives in the highway that that is dotted with signs that say we are all pretty much the same. Jo Reed:  Have you noticed how few working people you find in literature or you-- unless you’re reading crime fiction. Crime fiction-- it seems to be the only place where people actually have to go out and get a job or money is an issue. James McBride:  Well, I think part of that is because writers now talk to other writers. Very rarely do I associate with or talk to other writers. And it’s not because I don’t like people. It’s that my job is to go out and listen to people. I think there’s a lot to be said in jobs-- in jobs making its way into fiction and making its way into non-fiction. Studs Terkel was brilliant at letting people show us what their jobs are. I’ve often thought, if I did another non-fiction book, it would involve something involving work and musicians and-- I’ve started a volume of sideman stories but I haven’t finished them. You know, we have sidemen talking about their lives. I’ve often thought about putting together some kind of imprint where I would just go out and send an army of people to every city and just get-- before these guys die out. ‘Cause there’s so much history that is in the hearts and minds of some of these older musicians-- Jo Reed:  Absolutely. James McBride: --and when they’re gone, it’s over. You know. I mean, Jimmy Scott used to talk about the past. I never interviewed Jimmy because he didn’t know I was a writer. I didn’t wanna lose my job <laughs> so I never said anything to him. <laughs> He found out later. He was very proud of me when he found out, when I became a successful writer and so forth, but I liked to hear him talk about the past, talk about Paul Robeson. He used to love Paul Robeson. He thought Paul Robeson was his greatest influence. Jo Reed:  You teach music. James McBride:  Yeah, well, I don’t talk about it much but I teach music in my family’s church in Brooklyn. Basically I just teach spiritual music. I have a class of six piano students. Then I have a class of eight drum students and the drum students who stick, after a year or two, I move them into piano. And I teach them the basic technical points of music. The two of the better ones are moving to spiritual music now. I’m trying to show them the tenets of African-American music, the gospel scale and how it’s used. But, in order to know that stuff, you have to know basic music. You have to know quote/unquote “classical” music. So that’s what I teach them when they’re young. Jo Reed:  I have to assume that with the cuts to arts education in schools, there’s probably not much of a chance of them having any music education there. James McBride:  Oh, yeah, the cuts to the music programs in American schools-- when you cut music and art, you’re cutting the ingenuity of American engineers, architects, doctors, lawyers, professors, in the future years. Because, otherwise, you’re gonna have a generation of people who grow up twittering and tweeting on the same computers, playing the same kinda music, because none of ‘em knows what a drum is. None of ‘em know who Aaron Copeland or Virgil Thomson are. They don’t understand the difference between a pentatonic scale and a tonic water. Because they have no musical training. If we really wanna rearm ourselves as a nation of thinkers and creators, we must put music back into the schools. Music helps with every subject. If I ran a Fortune 500 company, and I wanna hire someone, I want someone-- and I want someone who knows about teamwork, who can work by themselves, who can be a little king of kings when I need them to do it, who can shape things differently… I want someone who has studied music. And, until we do that, we are not going to be able to compete in a creative way in the next generation. We’re seeing it now. We’re seeing the Europeans have taken American music, American jazz, and absorbed it and made-- created all kinds of new creative musical art forms that we just can’t seem to recreate here. The great young musicians here have nowhere to play, they have no support, and the new urbanity of America is missing the guts and soul of what made this country the creative force that it once was. And a lotta that has to do with the fact that we’re losing the arts in America. We’re losing music and art in schools and we’re raising a legion of dental technicians who wanna know whether Penn State beat Oklahoma State last week. That’s not greatness. That’s football. There it is. <overlapping music> Jo Reed: That is National Book Award winner James McBride. We’re talking about his latest book, Kill ‘Em and Leave: Searching for James Brown and the American Soul. You’ve been listening to Art Works produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. I’m Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening. <music>

McBride’s latest book looks to understand what shaped James Brown-- one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century.