Get On Up!

Mr. Dynamite, The Hardest Working Man in Show Business, Soul Brother No. 1 and The Godfather of Soul is coming soon to a theater near you. On Friday August 1, Get On Up!, a new biopic about the life of James Brown, opens nationwide. The making of the film ran into difficulty after Brown’s death in 2006; that it finally got made is due in no small part to the intervention of one Mick Jagger.

Concurrently two major daily newspapers recently featured excellent takes on Brown’s funky celluloid past and present. Last Wednesday, The New York Times ran "His Own Godfather," an excellent piece by Nelson George analyzing both the man, the myth and the movie. It is a most satisfying lead-in to the film. George has written several books about music and African-American culture, including “The Death of Rhythm and Blues” and, more recently “The Hippest Trip in America: Soul Train and the Evolution of Culture & Style.” He also edited a comprehensive collection of writings about Brown in “The James Brown Reader: Fifty Years of Writing about the Godfather of Soul.”

On Sunday, The Boston Globe chipped in with “James Brown on the Screen was Something to See,” an altogether different take from James Sullivan. Sullivan penned the book, “The Hardest Working Man in Show Business: How James Brown Saved The Soul of America,” which deals with Brown’s historic Boston Garden concert of 1968 immediately following Martin Luther King’s assassination. Brown’s concert, which was to be cancelled due to the events in Memphis, is widely believed to have help keep the peace in racially-charged Boston. Sullivan's araticle offered up “a playlist of some of the late soul dynamo’s best, most spectacular performances.” The article offers up links to Brown on The TAMI Show, in Kinshasa, Zaire in 1974 and to some incredible footage from the aforementioned Boston Garden show. You also get “Dancing Lessons from James Brown” which is as essential viewing as you think it sounds. To that end, be sure to watch the video link from the Times story of James Brown’s jaw-dropping turn in Frankie Avalon’s 1965 “Ski Party,” if only for JB’s killer après-ski wear.

Good God, indeed…