The pompadoured dynamo whose classic singles include "Papa's Got A Brand New Bag" and "I Got You (I Feel Good)" died of heart failure, said his agent, Frank Copsidas of Intrigue Music. "People already know his history, but I would like for them to know he was a man who preached love from the stage," said friend Charles Bobbit, who was with Brown at the hospital. "His thing was 'I never saw a person that I didn't love.
' He was a true humanitarian who loved his country." Three days before his death, he had participated in his annual toy giveaway in Augusta, Ga., and he was looking forward to his New Year's Eve show, Copsidas said.
"Last night (Sunday), he said, 'I'm going to be there. I'm the hardest-working man in show business,'" Copsidas said Monday. The entertainer with the rough-edged voice and flashy footwork also had diabetes and prostate cancer that was in remission, Bobbit said.
One of the major musical influences of the past 50 years, Brown was to rhythm and dance music what Bob Dylan was to lyrics. From Mick Jagger to Michael Jackson, David Bowie to Public Enemy, his rapid-footed dancing, hard-charging beats and heartfelt yet often unintelligible vocals changed the musical landscape. He was one of the first artists inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, along with Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry.
"He was an innovator, he was an emancipator, he was an originator. Rap music, all that stuff came from James Brown," entertainer Little Richard, a longtime friend of Brown's, said. "James Brown changed music," said the Rev.
Al Sharpton, who toured with Brown in the 1970s and imitates his hairstyle to this day. "He made soul music a world music," Sharpton said. "What James Brown was to music in terms of soul and hip-hop, rap, all of that, is what Bach was to classical music.
This is a guy who literally changed the music industry. He put everybody on a different beat, a different style of music. He pioneered it.
" Sharpton will officiate at Brown's funeral service, details of which were still incomplete. Brown won a Grammy 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 even had a brief but memorable role on the big screen as a manic preacher in "The Blues Brothers.
" 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's stage act was as memorable, and as imitated as his records, with his twirls and spins and flowing cape, his repeated faints to the floor at the end.
"He was dramatic to the end -- dying on Christmas Day," said the Rev. Jesse Jackson, a friend of Brown's since 1955. "Almost a dramatic, poetic moment.
He'll be all over the news all over the world today. He would have it no other way." "To this day, there has been no one near as funky.
No one's coming even close," rapper Chuck D of Public Enemy once told the AP. Brown routinely lost 2 or 3 pounds each time he performed and kept his furious concert schedule in his later years even as he fought prostate cancer, Ross said. Brown's stage moves -- the spins, the quick shuffles, the knee-drops, the splits -- were imitated by performers who tried to match his stamina, from Mick Jagger to Michael Jackson, and were admired by the many more who could not.
Brown was also a political force; his 1968 song, "Say It Loud -- I'm Black and I'm Proud," changed America's racial vocabulary. Born in poverty in Barnwell, S.C.
, in 1933, Brown was abandoned as a 4-year-old to the care of relatives and friends. He grew up on the streets of Augusta, in an "ill-repute area," as he once called it, learning how to hustle to survive. By the eighth grade in 1949, Brown had served 31/2 years in reform school for breaking into cars.
While there, he met Bobby Byrd, whose family took Brown into their home. Byrd also took Brown into his group, the Gospel Starlighters. Soon they changed their name to the Famous Flames and their style to hard R B.
In January 1956, King Records of Cincinnati signed the group, and four months later "Please, Please, Please" was in the R B Top Ten. Brown, who eventually lived in Beech Island, S.C.
, near the Georgia line, had a turbulent personal life that included charges of abusing drugs and alcohol. After a drug-fueled confrontation with police in 1988 that ended in an interstate car chase, Brown spent 15 months in a South Carolina prison and 10 months on work release.
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