Tony Cummings ponders on the life of soul and funk star James Brown

James Brown

I've recently finished reading the biography James Brown by Jeff Brown (Omnibus Press) and I would recommend it to anyone interested in one of popular music's most seminal figures.

The self-styled Godfather of Soul literally invented a new form of music, funk, and without "the hardest working man in showbusiness", there probably wouldn't be today's contemporary dance scene.

As a Christian, the book highlighted for me the bewildering nature of spiritual schizophrenia that often seems to affect the icons of African American culture. Like other R&B/pop giants such as Little Richard, Marvin Gaye and Prince, James Brown is a deeply religious man whose music form emanates in part from a gospel singing background and whose interviews down the years have been littered with references to God, yet who has been light years away from a Christian lifestyle.

In Brown's case, we learn of tax evasion, sexual immorality and frequent bouts of violence and drug abuse, even as he seeks to be a spokesperson for his people denouncing drugs and violence.

Over and over in popular music history we have seen artists with gospel backgrounds finding success and sliding into all manner of sin. Often, like Marvin Gaye, they are haunted by guilt. Sometimes, like Prince, they even try to synthesise a new spirituality, mixing talk of God with images of lust.

Back before I was a Christian, I used to write regularly about R&B artists and criticised the narrow-minded Pharisees in the black churches who denounced so vigorously "their" singers for quitting gospel for R&B. It now seems they had a point.

When one watches American TV and sees ex-gospel singer Dionne Warwick presenting a weekly show promoting mediums and spiritualists, or reads of the sheer nastiness of some of James Brown's character traits, it puts into perspective the naïve bleatings of "post-evangelicals" and some Greenbelt speakers who view gospel/contemporary Christian music as stifling religious sloganeering and the showbiz mainstream as where the "real" action is.

This article was first published in the New Christian Herald on 18th May 1996.