(born 1928) Singer, songwriter, producer, musician, “Soul Brother No. 1” and “Mr Dynamite,” James Brown emerged as a distinctive force in popular music in 1956 with “Please, Please, Please” backed by his Famous Flames. Born in South Carolina, Brown rose from rural poverty a childhood as a shoeshine boy and convicted juvenile delinquent to fashion a unique form of gritty gospel-influenced R&B. The James Brown Show Live at the Apollo (1963) is one of the great popular music albums of all time. Brown pioneered funk music and crossed over to white audiences with the hit “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” (1965). Brown combined his grainy deep throated shrieking and shouting with pulsing polyrhythms, staccato horns and guitars, and an exhilarating stage show to earn the title of “the hardest working man in show business.” In the late 1960s, in the midst of the cultural and political turmoil in America, Brown became an ambiguous political figure, singing militant lyrics like “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud” (1968) and touring Africa while entertaining American troops in Korea and Vietnam and encouraging black capitalism instead of ghetto rioting. Working with a new young band the JBs in the early 1970s, Brown recorded influential hit records—Sex Machine (1970), Super Bad (1970) and Soul Power (1971). Brown’s influence on all black popular music from the 1950s through the 1990s was so powerful that he could rightly claim to be “the original disco man” and the original rapper.