What The Godfather Meant
January 10, 2007
Tribute
What the Godfather of Soul Meant to Me
Aretha Franklin, Ice Cube, Reverend Run, and other peers and disciples remember James Brown
SOUL POWER Brown in 1964
All About
James Brown
By Leah Greenblatt
Say it loud! Following the Dec. 25 passing of James Brown, a.k.a. the Godfather of Soul, the Hardest Working Man In Show Business, Soul Brother Number One, among many other monikers — most of which he coined himself — EW’s music team gathered a rich and varied collection of never-before-published quotes from his admirers. Be they contemporaries, musical descendents, or merely bystanders, all were touched in some way by his supreme funkiness. Here we offer an extended recollection of the memories and moments that made the man The Man, from some of his biggest bold-faced fans.
Aretha Franklin, the Queen of Soul
”His performance, you just can’t get away from that. Whatever else you might think of, you cannot get away from that. He was one-of-a-kind, an original, [like] a Rembrandt or a Picasso. The first time I heard him, I was traveling with my father as a teenager, and [Brown] had just joined the Famous Flames, I believe. We were driving in Florida and I heard this record, ”It Was You,” on the radio, and I just loved it instantly.
”And then I must have been about 19 or 20 when I first met him in person. We never actually performed much together, though I remember a show [we did] here in Detroit around ‘86 or ‘87 [with] me and Wilson Pickett. Oh my Lord.
”He was a showman extraordinaire, a social activist, and he was certainly concerned with the human condition. When I first heard about [the passing of] Gerald Ford, I thought oh, wow, that’s very sad, but I also thought that James might be overshadowed by that, but I don’t think he was at all. I think that the media and the people at large absolutely gave him his respect.”
