Before one of the most generic names in America became synonymous with soul, people called him “Music Box.”
He was in a prison gospel quartet back then, and upon his release, he made a promise to the court that he’d go on to “sing for the Lord.”
Though he didn’t stick to gospel, everything in James Brown’s discography is praise music. Whether in anguish or in joy, the man lifted his voice to Heaven, and has almost certainly moved all of us at one time or another to join in.
And I’d venture that some of us have never joined in with as much urgency, fervency, and pride as we have in his historic “Say It Loud—I’m Black & I’m Proud.”
Recorded after the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the song became a rallying cry for a disheartened people, and a lyrical opposition to American culture that had institutionalized “Black” as something to be ashamed of. “Say It Loud” crystallized the demand for freedom literally in James’s words, and symbolically too. Its lyrics “We have been ‘buked and we have been scorned / We’ve been treated bad, talked about as sure as you’re born” are inspired by the old spiritual “I’ve Been ‘Buked,” which was sung live by Mahalia Jackson at the 1963 Civil Rights March on Washington.
There’s so much passion and history in the song it might surprise you that James originally had mixed feelings about it. His crossover fame had led to more than just musical television appearances, he was given singing and acting roles in full length films like… “Ski Party.” And he knew those kinds of roles didn’t exactly align with “I’m Black and I’m Proud.”
By the time he wrote his 1986 autobiography though, James had come around. “The song is obsolete now, but it was necessary to teach pride then, and I think the song did a lot of good for a lot of people,… so children who heard it could grow up feeling pride,” he wrote.
Like so few voices of the Civil Rights Era, he lived to see that pride in action, later saying, “My son don’t have to say it loud, I’m Black and I’m proud. He don’t have to be called those crazy names.”
History actually agreed with him there, but James was wrong on one key point: of all the ways to describe “Say It Loud,” obsolete will almost certainly never be one of them.