Sister recalls Brown's last gig at Rialto

James Brown performs at the Rialto Square Theatre on Sept.

20. According to his sister, Fannie Brown Burford, it was his last U.S.

performance. Instead of preparing for her trip, Burford spent much of Christmas day fielding phone calls from friends and relatives and waiting for news of her brother's funeral arrangements.
Brown Burford, 51, was up late watching a movie when she got a call early on Christmas morning informing her that her 73-year-old brother had died in an Atlanta hospital.

Brown had suffered from heart trouble and diabetes in recent years, but Burford said his death was unexpected.
"It's always a shock when somebody dies," she said.
Brown performed twice in Joliet, Burford said.

The first time was in the early 1990s during a concert for prisoners at Joliet Correction Center. The second time was on Sept. 20 at the Rialto, a concert Burford had urged her brother to schedule.

"I had been bugging him for almost two years to come," she said.
The last time she saw him was at the airport as he headed home to South Carolina after the Joliet performance, Burford said during a phone interview Monday. Brown performed in London after the Joliet appearance, but as far as Burford knows, her brother's last U.

S. concert was at the Rialto.
That last concert was "lovely," she said.

Age and illness hadn't affected his ability to entertain, she said.
"The only thing he wasn't doing was the splits," she said.
Brown and Burford had different mothers, but they believed they had the same father, she said.

When Burford was about 10 years old and growing up in Chicago, Brown embraced her as his sibling.
"We could finish each other's sentences," she said. "He helped raise me, he helped me go to school.

He helped my children go to school."
Burford said her brother was a self-taught genius.
"He was a man who knew once he had the teachings of God, he could accomplish anything he set out to do," she said.

Burford said she and her brother were a lot of alike.
"He was never quiet. He was very loud and boisterous, like me.

We could read each other's minds."
Burford said she had written a song recently that she planned to give her brother when she saw him in Connecticut.
"I haven't digested it yet," she said of his death.

"But I've accepted it. ..

. James just went on and made his appointment with God. Everybody has to make it.

"

Along with Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan and a handful of others, Brown was one of the major musical influences of the past 50 years. At least one generation idolized him, and sometimes openly copied him. His rapid-footed dancing inspired Mick Jagger and Michael Jackson among others.

Songs such as David Bowie's "Fame," Prince's "Kiss," George Clinton's "Atomic Dog" and Sly and the Family Stone's "Sing a Simple Song" were clearly based on Brown's rhythms and vocal style. If Brown's claim to the invention of soul can be challenged by fans of Ray Charles and Sam Cooke, then his rights to the genres of rap, disco and funk are beyond question. He was to rhythm and dance music what Dylan was to lyrics: the unchallenged popular innovator.

His hit singles include such classics as "Out of Sight," "(Get Up I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine," "I Got You (I Feel Good)" and "Say It Loud -- I'm Black and I'm Proud," a landmark 1968 statement of racial pride.
"I clearly remember we were calling ourselves colored, and after the song, we were calling ourselves black," Brown said in a 2003 Associated Press interview. "The song showed even people to that day that lyrics and music and a song can change society.

"
He won a Grammy award for lifetime achievement in 1992, as well as Grammys in 1965 for "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" (best R B recording) and for "Living In America" in 1987 (best R B vocal performance, male.) He was one of the initial artists inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986, along with Presley, Chuck Berry and other founding fathers.

He triumphed despite an often unhappy personal life.

Brown, who lived in Beech Island near the Georgia line, spent more than two years in a South Carolina prison for aggravated assault and failing to stop for a police officer. After his release on in 1991, Brown said he wanted to "try to straighten out" rock music. From the 1950s, when Brown had his first R B hit, "Please, Please, Please" in 1956, through the mid-1970s, Brown went on a frenzy of cross-country tours, concerts and new songs.

He earned the nickname "The Hardest Working Man in Show Business," and often tried to prove it to his fans, said Jay Ross, his lawyer of 15 years.
Brown would routinely lose two or three pounds each time he performed and kept his furious concert schedule in his later years even as he fought prostate cancer, Ross said.
"He'd always give it his all to give his fans the type of show they expected," he said.

With his tight pants, shimmering feet, eye makeup and outrageous hair, Brown set the stage for younger stars such as Michael Jackson and Prince.
In 1986, he was inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And rap stars of recent years overwhelmingly have borrowed his lyrics with a digital technique called sampling.

Brown's work has been replayed by the Fat Boys, Ice-T, Public Enemy and a host of other rappers. "The music out there is only as good as my last record," Brown joked in a 1989 interview with Rolling Stone magazine.
"Disco is James Brown, hip-hop is James Brown, rap is James Brown; you know what I'm saying?

You hear all the rappers, 90 percent of their music is me," he told the AP in 2003.
Born in poverty in Barnwell, S.C.

, in 1933, he was abandoned as a 4-year-old to the care of relatives and friends and grew up on the streets of Augusta, Ga., in an "ill-repute area," as he once called it. There he learned to wheel and deal.

"I wanted to be somebody," Brown said.
Pete Allman, a radio personality in Las Vegas who had been friends with Brown for 15 years, credited Brown with jump-starting his career and motivating him personally and professionally.
"He was a very positive person.

There was no question he was the hardest working man in show business," Allman said. "I remember Mr. Brown as someone who always motivated me, got me reading the Bible.

"