McBride kills 'em with new book on singer James Brown

“Kill ’em and leave” was singer James Brown’s maxim as a front man. In Kill 'Em and Leave: Searching for James Brown and the American Soul (Spiegel & Grau, 232 pp., *** out of four stars), James McBride holds a mirror up to Brown-the-front man and captures him, but in a reverse reflection.

JB is the backdrop, while former members of his backup band and entourage emerge in full focus. It’s an unexpected take on the “hardest working man in show business,” who, in performance, made everyone around him disappear. What it adds to our sense of the man himself is difficult even for McBride to quantify. Much mystery remains. But a more humanized James Brown does come into view.

Kill 'Em and Leave is a feat of intrepid journalistic fortitude, if hardly a full biographic portrait. McBride, a National Book Award winner for his novel, The Good Lord Bird, and a best-selling memoirist for The Color of Water, is also an accomplished jazz musician and composer. All of these attainments add to McBride’s insight, but it is as an African-American that McBride scrutinizes Brown most decisively, through the wounds and the outrage at the heart of their shared racial identity.

McBride acknowledges straightaway that he is unlike earlier “Brown historians, most of whom are commercial music writers and not stupid enough, like me, to attempt to explain the amorphous blend of politics, culture and music that helped shape the man.” To formulate such an explanation, McBride undertakes an extraordinary hegira into the Deep South and into James Brown’s deep past, digging up and interviewing former bandmates, including the last surviving original member of Brown’s first band, The Famous Flames; forgotten family relations still living in the nexus of the South Carolina and Georgia towns that birthed Brown; Brown’s first wife; Brown’s lifelong best friend and, finally heading north, the Rev. Al Sharpton, Brown’s “adopted” son.

Their recollections are riveting, and McBride is at his best patiently eliciting these memories and giving them voice. For all of their anecdotal range and emotional resonance, they basically return to the same stark fact about James Brown, as stated by his personal manager of 41 years, Charles Bobbit:

“‘He didn’t want you to know him.’

“Why?

“‘…Fear.’

“Of what?

“‘…The white man.’”

McBride does not lecture but he does preach. As a result his writing rings out with righteous passion. It also disintegrates at times, especially early on, into thickets of personal digression wrapped in conflicted mixed metaphors that underline his own initial ambivalence about taking money to write James Brown’s story in the first place.

He does rediscover his resolve, though, and his writing revives. Reaching the end of Brown’s life story, McBride unravels the shameful, ongoing dismemberment of the James Brown estate — an estimated $100 million fortune that Brown left almost entirely to a fund for the education of poor, young children. Nearly 10 years after Brown's death, those children, as McBride writes, “have yet to see a dime,” due to the mendacious litigiousness of Brown’s ex-wives and children, and the greed of white Southern lawyers, judges and politicians.

It is a horrific finish that only amplifies McBride’s achievement in Kill 'Em and Leave. Readers will be grateful for everything he has exposed here — the good and the bad, much of it hitherto unknown. Somewhere, even James Brown is probably saying thanks.