While recording the track in Los Angeles, Brown found a group of schoolchildren hanging around outside the recording studio, and decided to use their voices in the chorus. Brown starts the call with "say it loud," and a large chorus of children responds with "I'm black and I'm proud." Oddly enough, however, the actual kids shouting out "I'm black and I'm proud" on the track were… white and Asian. I am a black American man." Together, the "Black Power" speech and Brown's song created an important shift in black consciousness in America.īrown utilizes a call-and-response format here that is rooted in the black spiritual and gospel tradition, something he would have been familiar with having grown up in the 1930s Jim Crow South. He wants to build, he wants to make his race mean something. A N**** is one that makes it in the system, and he wants to be white. Brown noted the critical difference between these terms, explaining that "a colored is a very frightened-to-death Afro-American. The song showed even people to that day that lyrics and music and a song can change society." The use of the word "black" rather than "N****" or "colored" represented a change in consciousness. As Brown explained in 2003, "I clearly remember we were calling ourselves colored, and after the song, we were calling ourselves black. Brown and Carmichael seek to define black culture and society on their own terms "without white people giving their sanction to it." In Carmichael's words, "it is the word 'black' that bothers people in this country, and that's their problem, not mine." Brown's song embraced this same idea, fighting white bigotry with soul power. Brown's song and Carmichael's speech largely revolve around defining what it means to identify oneself as black. Some of the very same ideas are there, only Brown's message is more concise, less intellectualized and, well, easier to dance to. In some respects, James Brown's "Say It Loud (I'm Black and I'm Proud)" is a musical version of Stokely Carmichael's "Black Power" speech of October 1966. As many African-American leaders exhorted at the time, "Black is beautiful." Being black in America, which had for centuries defined many as second-class citizens, was now something to embrace and take pride in. But I would cut it off for the Movement." The afro represented a growing pride among blacks in the late sixties, an embrace of their African heritage and rejection of white norms of physical beauty. According to Brown, giving up his famed 'do "was like giving something up for Lent. During this period in his career, Brown began rocking a big afro instead of his more famous chemically straightened hairdo. This is not a message to be whispered, but to be proclaimed with confidence, even a bit of swagger. James Brown tells the children to "say it loud" and with feeling that they are proud of being black. This one powerful line conveys the central message of the song, pushing the music forward. Today, the line "Say it loud: I'm black and I'm proud" may seem like a relatively straightforward message, but together these eight words conveyed a new self-confidence and assertiveness among the black community in 1968 America.
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It's the kind that America can be proud of."
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According to Brown himself, "My story is a Horatio Alger story.
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Incarcerated by the age of sixteen, Brown overcame great adversity to gain fame and fortune. Brown had a tough childhood, growing up in utter poverty in Georgia, where his aunt, a brothel owner, raised him. As he came back to life, James let out a loud shriek reminiscent to the scream that he would later make famous as a soul icon. Dynamite." And still others referred to him affectionately as "that crazy man jumping around and screaming on stage." According to family legend, James Brown "was born dead," or a stillborn, only to be resuscitated by his aunt. James Brown had many nicknames, and he earned each and every one of them: "Soul Brother Number One," "The Hardest Working Man in Show Business," "The Godfather of Soul," "Minister of Super Heavy Funk," and "Mr.