Kill 'Em and Leave

by James McBride

  And it changed no one more deeply than James Brown himself.

  Teddy’s death came at a time when Brown was at the height of his career. He had assembled one of the greatest groups of R&B musicians of all time, superseding, it can easily be argued, even the majestic Motown machine factory out of Detroit. James Brown and his band kicked out one hit after another: “Soul Power,” “Say It Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud,” “Sex Machine,” “I Feel Good.” He had become a musical force of nature, black America’s biggest and most unique star. His live performances were real revues, loaded with gags, jokes, free giveaways, and warm-up acts who on their own drew big audiences, often backed by his band, a pounding, tight, chink-a-chink soul music outfit that would change the landscape of American music forever. Moreover, his social message of staying in school and standing on your own was like gold to black America during the civil rights era. Everywhere he went, Brown pleaded with young people to stay in school. He showed enormous generosity to children. He gave out free tickets or charged kids ninety-nine cents to attend his concerts. He gave out scholarships and rarely declined an autograph request. Thirty years after he played the Apollo, there are still folks who recall the night he gave out ten-speed bicycles to raffle winners, or how he stopped his show to congratulate a college graduate someone had introduced him to, or the way he stood outside the theater to chat with children who were waiting in line with their parents to see him, a line that inevitably ran around the corner. Brown’s bright love for children burned in his heart for his own two sons more than any others in those years. The loss of Teddy was unfathomable to him.

  He covered the pain, of course, with the true mantra of southern pride that he preached to his remaining son, Terry. Keep it tight, Terry. Keep it proper. You gotta work. Smile. Show your best face. That was his mantra to Rev. Al Sharpton as well: Never let them see you sweat. Come important. Leave important. Too many folks had already seen his suffering and humiliation when he was a boy living in rags, walking around with a snotty nose, shining shoes and dancing for quarters. He would not let them see him cowering or crying as an adult. Letting folks see you hurt was a form of weakness, a form of dying, in a way.

  And Teddy’s death was just that. It was the death of something bigger, the death of a dream, the closeout on a kind of immortality that would forever elude Brown. And after it happened, as much as he tried, for the first and only time in his life, James Brown, father of proper, could not keep up the front.

  James Neal was the director for Teddy Brown’s funeral in Toccoa. “I’m seventy-nine years old and been in the funeral business fifty-five years,” he told me. “I’ve never seen anything like that funeral. Oh, God, the church and streets and everything down to the corner, packed with people. Maybe two thousand people trying to get into Mt. Zion. Every funeral director in my district and some in Atlanta called me, saying, ‘Hey, Neal, we’re going to bring a car. You all might need an extra limo. We’re going to bring it.’ They just wanted to be there.

  “James spent twelve thousand dollars on Teddy’s casket. It was solid bronze. With the clear glass bubble on the top, so no one could touch the body. Well, we could open it if we had wanted to, but once we had turned all of the turns on there, it’s about twenty-five or thirty of them, you don’t want to take it loose no more. But it was beautiful.

  “I will tell you something that you don’t know: we had to go to the Sheraton and pick up that entourage because Mr. Brown brought two buses from Augusta, tons of folks. And we had to lead that motorcade down Prather Bridge Road and make the circle and come back up. God almighty. So many people. So many cars. A doctor from Atlanta called me and said, ‘I’m Mr. Brown’s personal physician and I need to sit close to him.’

  “I said, ‘Doctor, I’d like to put you close to him, but I can’t get another person in that church. It’s full.’

  “He said, ‘Well, can you get a chair and put it there?’

  “I said, ‘I’ll try.’

  “So I found a folding chair and brought it down and put it in the second row and let that doctor sit there. Now that doc was telling me a lie. I knew him when I was in school in Atlanta. He was a brother to a funeral director friend of mine in Washington. He just wanted to be in on it.

  “I remember the flowers that Aretha Franklin sent. She sent something that would touch the ceiling of this building in here. A huge set of roses. But they hadn’t come out yet. And when I first saw the bouquet, I said, Those are the ugliest flowers I’ve ever seen in my life. But they bloomed the day of the funeral. That was the prettiest set of flowers I had ever seen. God almighty, every time I see her on television or hear her music I think about that flower set she sent. People sent so many flowers that we stopped carrying them to the church. We started carrying them to the cemetery so we could line them on the cemetery road. They lined clear to the gate. As you go in, there were flowers all the way around.

  “Now, Mr. Bobbit, James’s manager, he called me on the morning of the funeral. He said, ‘Mr. Neal, Mr. Brown wants to be in the first car in the funeral procession.’

  “I said, ‘That’s fine. If he’s in the first car he’s going to be with his first wife, ’cause ain’t nobody going ahead of Velma.’

  “Mr. Bobbit said, ‘Hold the phone.’

  “I didn’t hear what they were saying. But Mr. Bobbit came back on the line and said, ‘Okay. He’ll do the second car.’ ”

  At the church, when Brown’s limousine pulled up, Brown refused to get out of the car. Bobbit had to lift him out. When Brown reached the stairs of Mt. Zion Baptist Church, the church where he’d married, where his two eldest sons were baptized, where he’d started his second life after the Alto Reform School, he collapsed. “Please! Don’t make me go in there,” he pleaded. “Don’t make me go in there.”

  But make him go in there they did.

  James Brown could not stand up to walk into his son’s funeral. It was too much for him. But Velma Brown, Bug Warren’s daughter, needed no assistance in getting out of her car when she arrived. She got out of the car, wiped the tears from her face, walked up the stairs and into the church, and said goodbye to her son as she had lived, as Bug Warren’s daughter would, leaning on the Lord’s everlasting arm, standing tall.

  A blind man sits before me in a tired, empty restaurant in downtown Toccoa. He’s holding a menu in one hand and a photo of himself and several other young men in the other. He holds the photo up higher so I can see it, though he cannot. Here, he seems to be saying, here I am. Look at me.

  I gently take the photo from his hand and look at it. That’s him, all right, standing there with four others.

  These are the Famous Flames, the original guys. The roots. The ones who sipped a little moonshine with James Brown. Who went to church with him. Who played baseball against him when he played on the Alto reformatory baseball team that competed against the local all-black Whitman Street High School in the late 1940s. These were his classmates during his brief stay at Whitman after he got out of the juvenile prison. In those days they were hungry, willing to do anything to get a gig, working for the white man by day, playing dances at night, and hustling occasional moonshine in the wee hours across the Prather Bridge from South Carolina, which was burned down five times in forty years. Something about them South Carolinians made Georgians mad, or was it the other way around? They didn’t care. They had gigs to do. Jobs to make in the morning. James wasn’t a star in those days. He was just like them, a good guy with a dream, trying to make good in a world where the wall to success was as high as the Kelly Barnes Dam up over the mountain, a dam that would one day in 1977 burst open and flood the nearby Toccoa Falls College and drown thirty-nine people in their beds as they slept. God controls everything in the world, including the fate of the Famous Flames. Including the fate of Nafloyd Scott.

  I hold the photo higher up to the light: there’s Sylvester Keels, Nash Knox, Fred Pulliam, James Brown, Bobby Byrd, and Nafloyd’s younger brother Baby Roy Scott. Everyo
ne in that photo is dead—except for Nafloyd. He is the only one in that photo holding an instrument, a guitar.

  Like everything involving James Brown, there are several versions of who shot John, as the old black folks say. In other words, the Famous Flames existed in another form, with another name, before Brown joined, but how they started as the Famous Flames, who said what, wrote what, and who did thus and so to help make James Brown great: everyone has a version. Even their membership is a matter of dispute. If the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame—a place that is a cross between a theme park and a Rolling Stone magazine ad—is any reference, the last living Flame, Bobby Bennett, died in January 2013. Apparently, in his last years, Bennett, like a lot of folks who worked with Brown, let anyone who came near him with a pencil and pad or video camera know that he once played with James Brown, that they were a group. In fact, he would intimate that he was once nearly on par with James Brown, that Brown was, in a sense, the same as he was, that they were all Famous Flames together, like privates in the army, all for one and one for all, as if Brown were just a soldier, without vision, and who knows, but for a twist of fate, the luck of the draw, a flick of the cards, a gust of wind, a kick of the heels, why, another black guy in the Flames could have been Mr. Dynamite….

  It doesn’t help matters that black history being what it is, the various versions of the Flames’ origins have been fumbled about like a hot potato and dumped into the usual bin of lost black history. The various background groups were known as the Flames, the Famous Flames, the James Brown Revue, and the J.B.’s. The dancers that hooted behind him in the late eighties and nineties were a mishmash of spectacular singers from the sixties to the eighties and cheerleader-like dancers in the nineties, especially in the late nineties. Some of the members ended up leaving after a few weeks. Some stayed for years. Some, like the gifted female soul stylists Vicki Anderson, Marva Whitney, Beatrice Ford, Lyn Collins, Tammi Terrell, and Martha High—all of whom sang with Brown for long stretches or did records under him—are among the greatest soul singers America has ever seen and will ever see.

  All were important, but none as important, or as crucial to James Brown’s stardom, as the guys in this photo that Nafloyd Scott is holding. They were crucial to Nafloyd Scott as well.

  He sits here dressed in khakis and a short jacket and sunglasses, with a black stocking cap covering his head and a handkerchief wrapped around the stocking cap. Glaucoma took his right eye eight years ago. A guy with a brick took the other.

  He began with the Flames roughly in 1953 and lasted until 1957. “There’s a lot that I forgot about those times,” Nafloyd says. “But one thing is we craved music. We loved music. And we always gave ’em a show. No matter where we went, we always did that.”

  —

  The picture sits on the table now, tucked between the ketchup, mustard, and napkin holder as Scott sits pondering the past. He’s a soft-spoken, tall, rangy-looking man. His face is as smooth looking as a baby’s skin. His hands are long, his fingers supple looking. Whiskey ruined his health—it ruined a lot of fellas’ health in those years, he’s the first to confess it. And were it not for his daughter and her husband, there’s no telling where he’d be. But Nafloyd Scott always had deep talent. He could play that guitar. “My daddy always had a guitar. I’d use his guitar when I was coming up.”

  If one looks at Scott’s early work, one could argue that he was one of the most underrated guitarists that north Georgia has ever produced. He was the original guitarist on “Please, Please, Please,” the composer of the blues song “Chonnie-On-Chon,” and he was the only pure instrumentalist to stay on with Brown after the group fell apart, touring with Brown as his de facto music director, teaching the songs to pickup musicians up until 1957. Even today, Scott’s work on the early Flames records sounds refreshing and unique. “I was happy to do it,” he says of his early recordings. “But a lot of guys wondered how I could play stuff after hearing it just one go-through. I always picked up songs fast.”

  If the world were just and fair, Nafloyd wouldn’t be sitting in this worn-down joint eating lunch care of me and my publisher. He wouldn’t have to. I wouldn’t even have access to him. I’d be negotiating with his publicist, because he’d be a star. That’s the raw truth of it. But that’s not in his cards. Guitar is an odd instrument in the R&B genre. It’s crucial to the creation of the music, but it doesn’t necessarily create stars. I can think of half a dozen guitarists whose signature licks and plucks created the hooks and choruses of major pop hits that will last forever, but the players themselves are relatively unknown. Jef Lee Johnson of Philly comes to mind, the greatest guitarist I ever personally worked with. David Williams, who created the unmistakable signature groove licks in Michael Jackson’s megahits “Beat It” and “Billie Jean,” certainly deserves acclaim, as does Hiram Bullock. All died too young. Johnson was fifty-four, Williams was fifty-eight, and Bullock was fifty-two. And any list of great R&B guitarists will certainly include Brown’s great guitar men, the ones that came after Nafloyd: Hearlon “Cheese” Martin, Alphonso “Country” Kellum, and the incomparable legend Jimmy Nolen, who basically created the category of guitar “chicken-scratch” picking. A lot of guitarists who did stints with Brown and are frequently quoted as “James Brown’s guitar player” were playing Jimmy Nolen’s music. They were good players. But Nolen was a master creator who cut turf.

  As did Nafloyd. In the late fifties, rhythm guitar was still evolving into its own sound. Nafloyd Scott’s playing is one of those key cogs that are the bridge from straight blues and country to R&B. Clean, precise, unique, and highly rhythmic.

  I ask Scott about it, but like many musicians, he can’t tell you what he did. “I played what I heard,” he said. “I was women-crazy in those days.”

  He turns his head to hear the waitress’s footsteps as she approaches. There’s nobody inside this restaurant but our tiny table. Scott tilts his head the other way as her shoes click, as if hearing the distant clattering of history’s bones.

  “What you having?” he asks.

  I want to say, The truth will do. Tell me how you’ve been screwed. Tell me how you created this great music and how the business has wrung you dry and taken every bit of your soul. Tell me it’s somebody else’s fault. But instead I say, “Just tea. What about you?”

  “Roast beef sandwich. And a Coke.”

  He holds his hand out for his picture after the waitress departs with the order, his hand reaching for air. I place it back in his hand. He smiles, a shy smile. He seems happy. Someone has come to see him, a voice from the dark with a New York accent, who picked him up at his house and asks him to blab about the evils of the past. I try again, and now I speak it. “Tell me about the past,” I say. “Tell me how you’ve been screwed.”

  But Nafloyd Scott has no more interest in pissing on the past than he has in the roast beef sandwich that eventually lands in front of him. He barely touches it. His mind is far from this diner, back in a Toccoa that was much different when he was young, a world of dirt roads and farms. We were high school kids, he says. We just loved to play. We lived for music, rehearsed, stayed up late to listen to Randy Records. The show played R&B out of a Nashville radio station. They only played R&B after eleven P.M.—that was a great thing, he says. He recalled when big black acts made rare stops in Toccoa: Rosetta Tharpe, Cab Calloway, Jimmie Lunceford, Louis Jordan. They loved the country singers, too, Tennessee Ernie Ford and Roy Acuff—just about any music, we liked, he says. “Most of the bands we heard on the radio, we never saw them play. To see them would have been a dream.” To be them…well, that was beyond dreaming. That was the moon and the stars.

  He remembers the jukes and the waitresses, the other musicians. “Cal Green played guitar for Midnighters. He liked the way I played. I liked the way he played.” He nods, recalling the shouts of joy, the long rides in the ’57 Ford, the fights, the crowds, the women, the whiskey. He smiles shyly.

  …The whiskey.

  “I’m do
ing fine,” he says. “I feel pretty good. I’m a diabetic, but I can get my teeth pulled for free. I can go tomorrow and do that because my insurance will pay for it.”

  I ask him to tell me about the whiskey.

  He thinks a moment, then tells a story. “I met a girl in one of those towns, when we were touring. Me and her, we went to a hotel. The next morning I got up and left out with the band. Left early in the morning while she was still asleep. Stuck her with the hotel bill. Never saw her again.

  “I shouldn’t a done that.”

  He doesn’t say more, but I get it. More than fifty years later, he still remembers that sin. That’s what the whiskey’ll do to you.

  —

  “How we got started was in school, really from the chapel. Whitman Street school,” Nafloyd says. “We played for chapel programs on Fridays.” Whitman Street was the all-black school in Toccoa’s segregated school system.

  “James Brown went there?” I ask.

  “Just for a short period. Maybe two or three months. See, James would never tell his real age, and I don’t think he ever showed anybody his birth certificate. James always told me he was born in ’thirty-four. I was born in ’thirty-five. He always said he wasn’t but a year older than me. He was born May the seventh, but it wasn’t in ’thirty-four. It was about ’thirty or ’thirty-one, because James really was four years older than me. He wanted to pretend he wasn’t but one year older than me. He never did tell the truth about how old he was. He always wanted to be the youngest out there and doing the most.”

  “Did he do the most?”

  “He sure did. He did do the most.”

  The waitress returns with drinks. His hand places the picture down and he carefully reaches over to grope for his Coca-Cola with his long, slender fingers. Guitar fingers.