That would be the man I’m looking at right now.
His name is Daddy Bailey. He’s two successors after Daddy Grace, and he sits behind a pulpit—called the Holy Mountain—in his massive church, waving to thousands who have come to see him from everywhere: Virginia, California, Alabama, South Carolina, Georgia, New York. They’ve come by car, truck, on foot, in yellow school buses, and in fourteen charter buses that cram an empty weeded lot two blocks away.
Daddy Bailey sits on a velvet-lined throne. He’s an impressive, friendly looking man, tall and enormous. He has to weigh in the ballpark of three hundred pounds. He’s impeccably dressed in a gorgeous gray three-piece suit, smiling like a benevolent king. A pretty young girl in a white usher dress fans him with a giant hand fan. Several ushers with stern faces, also dressed in white, patrol the aisles, looking like traffic cops, collecting money and then suddenly bursting out into smiles when they see a friend. Grim black men in white military caps and brown military uniforms, with medals and braided rope decorations on their shoulders, line the walls looking like Idi Amin soldiers on duty, and they, too, frequently burst into chuckles, cracking jokes with other congregants. The House of Prayer is a happy place. A teenage boy strutting down the aisle wearing a pair of butterfly wings for a praise dance he’s about to do gets a warm clap on the back. A woman stands up and hollers that she’s happy and gets a hearty hug and a drink of water from one of the “soldiers” on duty. Adults greet one another with smiles and hugs. You can eat all the food you want downstairs for practically nothing. They treat one another well here. The conversation is warm, genuine—and shouted, by the way, because you can’t hear a thing. Not a word.
The reason? The shout band.
There is nothing in the world like them.
There must be at least thirty of them. They are squeezed between the pulpit and the front-row pews. They are mostly trombones, with a smattering of trumpets and a gigantic sousaphone. They blast with the power of a marching band, with the swing of a jazz or R&B group. They’re backed by a full rhythm section of drums, keys, guitar, and bass. Their soulful blasts are topped by the gorgeous wail of a trombonist whose high notes—he’s playing in the range of a flügelhorn—float above the ensemble. It’s more reminiscent of a vocalist than any horn I’ve heard and gives the entire band a heavenly, supernatural feel that’s eerie and mesmerizing. The band members are dressed in impeccable black suits with white shirts. They play and sway as one, continuously. Even as an assortment of ministers preach and admonish the congregation, the shout band never quite stops, burbling low underneath as someone speaks, then busting loose when the preachers finish talking, the bells of the trumpets and slides of the trombones swaying skyward. The effect of hearing these men blow and sway with such heart and soul, jamming with all their might, is like watching a Broadway show without the Broadway: it’s raw soul. Electrifying. It lifts the room.
Behind them, Daddy Bailey seems in this world and out of it at the same time. As a young minister hollers, congregation members thrust dollar bills in the air. A silent usher dressed in white moves to the edge of the pew. The dollar is passed from one hand to the next until it reaches the usher in the aisle, who takes it, walks it to the front of the church, and hands it to another usher. That usher walks it up to Daddy Bailey. Daddy accepts the dollar—the dollar’s a symbolic gesture, really—and hands it to yet another usher, who carefully places it in a big box. Then he waves to the donor of the dollar. It’s a friendly wiggle—a kind of giggly, chatty, suburban-housewife peekaboo wiggle.
Squeezed between Daddy’s pulpit and the first pew, the shout band, the engine of this whole bit, roars on, charging the room with music, while at the pulpit, a minister hollers out to the congregation: “Thank you, Daddy Bailey! We love Daddy!” And the congregation responds:
“Yes, Daddy!”
“We love Daddy!”
I once went to a funeral in a village in the Ivory Coast of West Africa, and it had this kind of electric drama and excitement: the continuous music, the tears, the celebration, the pounding, the nonstop drums, the continuous preaching, the laughing and dancing. It went on all night. If this event is anything like that one, we might be here till dawn.
I don’t know if I’ll make it that long. I groove in the frolic a while and raise a couple of my own dollar bills in the air for the ushers to collect for Daddy Bailey’s pot—why not? I wanna get in that long line when I die, and I don’t care how I get in or who gets me there. But after a couple of hours, they’re still prayer frolicking and I’m hungry, so I slip downstairs to give my ears and soul a rest. A guy serving food in the cafeteria asks me, “What you doing down here in Augusta?”
Only then do I remember why I am here: this is the very church—on the very same street where James Brown found two of the most important constants in his life. One was music. The other was a man.
—
One brisk afternoon in 1941, Leon Austin, a tall, light-skinned eight-year-old boy who lived down the street from Daddy Grace’s—he was at 1207, Daddy Grace’s was 1269—and whose gift for playing piano was so great that he was occasionally corralled into playing for Daddy Grace’s church even though he was the pianist for a different church, walked into his classroom at the all-colored Silas X. Floyd Elementary School and noticed a new kid sitting in the back. The boy was a dark-skinned and poorly clad country boy from South Carolina, just across the state line. He’d just moved to Augusta, to the poor side of town called the Terry. Little James Brown.
None of the other kids wanted to bother with little James. But Leon had a kind heart, and when he discovered that James loved music, Leon said, “C’mon home with me. I’ll show you some music.” James readily agreed.
Leon grew up playing for Macedonia Baptist, and like musicians the world over, he knew where the real special music could be found. In Augusta, the good stuff was just three doors away from his house. He dragged James to Daddy Grace’s House of Prayer. It was there that James Brown saw his future: the blasting trombones, the pounding drums, the nonstop groove, the swaying, high-stepping musicians of the United House of Prayer’s legendary shout band. He was awed.
“I’ve got to do that,” James announced. Leon took James back to the piano at his house and showed him chords, the movement of the left hand, the boogie-woogie that was so popular back then.
That friendship, bound from those first days around the high-swinging shout band of Daddy Grace’s House of Prayer, would last the rest of their lives. They became best friends. Leon had older brothers, but he’d been a sickly baby—his parents didn’t think he’d survive when he was born—so he wasn’t allowed to play and roughhouse like they were. He was a precocious child, tender and kindhearted, a loner who loved music, and James, whose parents had broken up and whose father had slipped off and left him with his aunt Honey, was equally lonely and, Leon later told his wife, “sensitive about things.” They were inseparable, like brothers, so instead of calling each other by name, they called each other Bro, pronounced Bra in their southern twang.
“What you doin’, Bra?”
“Waiting for you, Bra.”
“You got any money, Bra?”
“Wouldn’t know a nickel if I saw one, Bra.”
Broke and having a ball. Broke and being a kid. Bra and Bra. They were an odd pair. James was a short, dark-skinned poor kid, an outsider at school; Leon was taller, light-skinned, middle-class, and good-looking. Leon taught James two-handed boogie-woogie piano. James, a good boxer, taught Leon how to defend himself with his fists. They sang church songs together. They performed at the local Show Palace Theatre talent shows and at school. Leon enjoyed sneaking over to Aunt Honey’s so-called whorehouse, which wasn’t exactly a whorehouse but a place where poor folks struggled to live off nickels and dimes. There were a lot of people in that house—eighteen at one point—and while some of Aunt Honey’s roomers turned tricks for the soldiers from nearby Fort Gordon, some of them also did what poor folks all over the South did
in those days to survive: they sold moonshine and scrap metal; they sewed clothing, knitted blankets, and did odd carpentry and plumbing jobs; some washed white folks’ laundry and cleaned their houses; a few made money playing skin, a card game; some went to church all day Sunday and ran numbers all day Monday. It was a busy house in a wild section of town, which made it perfect for two wild boys. James introduced Leon to his cousin Willie Glen—nicknamed Big Junior—and to his humorous, stuttering, cigar-smoking father, who appeared long enough to call James “Little Junior” but never seemed to call on Little Junior enough. James and Leon organized baseball games with neighborhood kids, playing on an empty lot, using a baseball and bat that James bought with money he’d earned shining shoes downtown—a ball and bat that James would collect up and head home with if the bigger boys tried to bully them. The two boys shined shoes on the same block of Broad Street at the same time. James, out on the street, was protective of his turf and would fight someone if they tried to take it, while Leon wisely shined shoes inside the barbershop. Years later, after James bought the radio station WRDW, located on the very same corner where he had shined shoes, he would tell visitors, “I used to shine shoes right here in front of this radio station.” It always made Leon chuckle, remembering how James would fight someone if they tried to take his corner.
The two were inseparable—except when they went to the Bell Auditorium for the suicide box-offs. Five black boys were blindfolded and placed in a ring with a boxing glove on one hand and their other hand tied behind their backs. They would bash each other over the head until one of them was left standing. Leon refused to do it. His mother would see the bruises on his face and ask questions. But James? James had to make a dollar however he could, even after he’d gotten his face bashed in a few times.
“You ought to quit that, Bra,” Leon would mumble afterward.
“Gotta eat, Bra,” James would say. Leon understood. He needed money too. But he had a job.
“Sports and the church,” he would tell his wife years later, “helped save me.” Leon was a track star in school, setting high school records that would hold for decades. And in the early years, he had his piano or organ. He always played Sunday services at Macedonia Baptist, and when their choir traveled to visit other churches, Leon traveled with them. He played events and funerals, a rehearsal here, a practice there. His mom organized the children of the town in a choir. She would parade them in a row from church to church, and he played for that too. Playing the piano and organ helped keep him off the streets during his teen years, whereas James…well, James did not have enough money to buy church clothes even if he’d wanted to go to church. His aunt Honey wanted him to go, but she was in over her head. She had that big house with all those roomers and relatives. She couldn’t force him to go. Plus, Leon told his wife in later years, “She was Willie Glen’s mother, not Bro’s. Bro didn’t know where his mother was.”
Bro got hung up trying to make dough by lifting cars to sell their parts, and when James got busted in 1949 for four counts of breaking and entering and sent away for an eight-to-sixteen-year stretch at the boys’ reformatory near Toccoa, Georgia, there was nothing Leon could do to help.
But Leon never judged, and they stayed friends. In 1955, when James showed up at Leon’s doorstep in Augusta with four country boys from Toccoa who called themselves the Famous Flames, saying, “Bro, me and my band need a place to stay for a few days,” Leon said, “Bring ’em all in here, Bra! Bring ’em all!”
For the next two decades, James Brown would park anyone he needed—band members; friends; even his children, sons Teddy and Terry, and later his “adopted” son, a young minister from New York City named Al Sharpton—at Austin’s house, then later at the McBowman’s Motor Inn, which Leon ran with his lovely wife, Emma, and then later at Austin’s house on Martin Luther King Drive. Leon’s home was safe territory, where Brown’s problems found a resting place, where band members and Brown’s sons were treated as family, housed and fed by Leon and Emma for days, weeks, sometimes months.
The friendship that was born during the grimy poor 1940s evolved into the soup days of the fifties, and then into the laughing wonder and gravy days of the sixties and seventies, when James Brown was at his height. The two Bros watched the civil rights movement unfold in awe. They analyzed Brown’s role in it, talking into the wee hours at times like two college students in a dorm room, considering the problems of the world. They traveled together, Leon riding along, sometimes reluctantly, only because Brown insisted. He needed help. He needed an honest man in his entourage. He needed his brother. Both were awestruck at the influence Brown had suddenly developed in the world. The February 1969 Look magazine cover featuring Brown with the headline IS HE THE MOST IMPORTANT BLACK MAN IN AMERICA? made them laugh. Bra once confessed to Leon, in a fit of candor that would occasionally slip past the know-it-all bluster that crept into his manner during those years, that he didn’t know any more about solving the black man’s problem than the Man in the Moon. He wasn’t a politician. He was an entertainer. A musician. He had some ideas. The black man needed jobs. But everybody knew that, right? Did the white man ask Fred Astaire or Elvis Presley to speak for their people when they became stars? “It’s all about money, Bra,” James said. “The black man needs money.” Leon agreed, but allowed that the black man needed education more than money. Brown agreed and confessed he wished he’d at least finished high school.
From 1945 to 1975, the two watched the segregated black community of Augusta, a thriving metropolitan area before World War II, decline into helplessness. Almost every single major black business they had known vanished. What was once their favorite downtown area, the main drag, “the Golden Blocks” of Augusta, located near Ninth and Gwinnett, descended into urban blight before their eyes: businesses, restaurants, hotels, a movie theater disappeared as manufacturing eased away, cotton died, drugs poured in, ambitious blacks fled for the North, and white residents scattered for the suburbs. The once glorious Palmetto Pond in nearby North Augusta, a swimming hole and popular stop on the chitlin circuit where Ella Fitzgerald, Tiny Bradshaw, Cab Calloway, and Jimmie Lunceford once came to perform; the mighty Paramount Motor Motel with more than eighty rooms, owned by Charlie Reid, Sr., a local black enterprising genius; the Penny Savings Bank; the Lenox Theater; the Georgia Colored Funeral Directors and Embalmers Association; the Four Sisters Beauty Shop; the once mighty Pilgrim Health and Life Insurance Company; the Red Star Hotel—where folks waited for hours for Mom and Pop Bryant’s magical fried chicken; Crims Service Station; Geffert’s Ice Cream Company; McBowman’s Motor Inn, owned by Austin’s mother-in-law—all gone. Employers like the Silby Mill, the Enterprise Mill, the Plaza Hotel, the Del Mar Casino were also gone. The only big deal that remained in Augusta from their childhood years was the Augusta Nationals, a white man’s golf tournament that began in 1933 over on the city’s west side and had no relevance to their lives.
“If we don’t help ourselves, we ain’t gonna make it, Bro,” James would say. In the good years, Brown tried everything he could to help. A radio station. Two of them. Three, if you included the one in Baltimore, which was the hometown of his second wife, Deidre. A green-stamps idea, where his face was issued on green stamps used as money-saving coupons; a restaurant; a nightclub. But Brown was not a businessman. They all went bust.
In the early years, the 1950s and ’60s, the big dream for young men like those two was to get to the North, where the white man’s foot was off your neck. Brown had a ticket out. He was a star. He moved to New York City in 1960. He told Leon, “Come with me, Bra.”
Leon refused. He’d married Emma McBowman right out of Fisk University—he’d been chasing after her since she’d graduated from high school. “What would I do in New York?” Austin said. “Emma’s here. My home’s here.” After ten years of floundering in New York—traveling the world and coming home to a city with its own set of racial problems, working with northern white record-company folks whom he never complet
ely trusted, who he felt smiled in his face even as they stabbed him in the back—Brown gave up on the North. He hated New York. “Down home, I know who I’m dealing with,” he said tersely. He returned to Augusta.
He came home to Leon. Steady and familiar Leon was the same guy, living in the same house with the same wife, same car. He even played the same piano at the same church, Macedonia Baptist Church, that they both knew as children. He had opened a barbershop by then, and his kindness, his ready ear, his laughter made him popular in town. It was Leon, in fact, who first gave Brown his trademark hairstyle when they were both young. In thirty years of friendship they rarely argued. But when they did, it was bad. And their biggest argument was around the thing that had first united them: music.
As a child playing piano at Macedonia, where his dad and mom were deacon and deaconess, Leon was considered a boy wonder. He could play by ear anything he heard. He was a sought-after musician in Augusta circles because he knew all the great gospel hymns by heart. Brown constantly warned him, “Bra, if you play too many funerals, the next one you play might be your own,” but Leon enjoyed giving comfort to the families, some of whom he’d known all his life. He felt he could sing and lay in groove on piano as well as some of Brown’s musicians—in fact, better than some. He decided he wanted to leave his barbershop, go on the road, and make a chunk of big money so he could settle back with his wife and not work so hard. He could make a record or two—the record business seemed easy. Big money. Big thrills. Not a lot of work.
He hinted this to James for years and Brown ignored him. Finally, one afternoon when Brown was complaining about one of his musicians, Leon said, “Put me in your band. I play good enough. I gave you your first music lessons.”
Brown was flummoxed. He could not easily explain to his friend the headache of running a band. This one wants more money, that one gets drunk, this one can’t tie his shoes by himself, the other one forgot his uniform, this one wants an advance, that one wants songwriting credit and hasn’t played a note, while this one doesn’t want songwriting credit and he played all the notes—but if you hit him up with credit, you’d have to pay two guys behind him whom you didn’t pay before. And the girls! Not the women he slept with, but the kids he was responsible for. Like little Geneva Kinard, of Cincinnati, who along with her sister Denise Kinard and Roberta DuBois sang background on a lot of his early hits, recorded in Cincinnati at King Records headquarters. These were young talents—but they were literally kids. Geneva was in high school. He was like a father to her. He’d heard her sing in El-Bethel Baptist Church in Cincinnati and had to promise her mom and dad that no one in the band would touch her, and that after gigs he’d send her home by taxi or limo in time for school. And he did! She went on to graduate in 1972 from the University of Cincinnati College–Conservatory of Music as a piano major—one of only five blacks in her class—and later served as pianist with the Cincinnati Ballet and the Middletown, Ohio, orchestra, one of the few blacks in that field. But few of his musicians knew that. Onstage, the musicians were his friends, but offstage they went in different directions. They wanted more, deserved more, and nobody appreciated nothing. They moaned about the fines and the extra rehearsals he imposed; they saw him grab a box of pay money after each show and depart, but none of them knew of the headaches that came with that box of money: dealing with the slick promoters, the record labels, the radio stations, the managers; bribing the DJs—which was illegal even though everyone did it, but if a black guy did it and got busted he was going straight to jail without passing GO; pleasing the promoters, pleasing the fans; dodging the mobsters in various towns who tried to shake you down every time you came to their city—sometimes the same mobster would offer the same threat every time he came, take my loan or else….The music itself was a small cog in the mighty machine of entertainment. Leon did not understand that. He just wanted to play. So Brown simply said, “Bra, you got the talent. But you ain’t cut out for show business.”
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