June is Black Music Month and to celebrate the contributions of black musicians, composers and songwriters, Reel Urban News will post weekly excepts from the new book 200 Greatest Soul Songs: The Stories Behind Soul and R&B Music’s Biggest Hits by music journalist Frank Mastropolo.
We begin with a song by the Hardest Working Man in Show Business, James Brown, that became an anthem in the turbulent 1960s.
“Say It Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud” was written by James Brown and his bandleader, Alfred “Pee Wee” Ellis. Released as a two-part single in August 1968, four months after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the black pride anthem reached No. 1 on the R&B chart and was a No. 10 hit on the Billboard Hot 100.
The song was inspired by the infighting Brown witnessed among African Americans. The song featured call-and-response between Brown and a group of Los Angeles-area kids brought to the recording studio.
“I was trying to do two things,” Brown explained in Guitar World. “One, give the power structure—which in America means the white power structure—a way to understand how we felt and know that we had people who could do things and just wanted a fair shake.
“Two, I wanted young black kids to wake up and realize that they should be proud of who they were, get an education, and try to make something of themselves. Proud and bad are two different things. I never wanted to separate.
“My thing was to let the pride be there and to let people get into the skin of a black man and realize that he only wants to be recognized for the contributions that he has made.
“I was just telling it like it is. Would you rather have someone tell you how they’re feeling to your face, or wait till you turn around and whisper their anger behind your back? You got to swing for the fences every time you’re at bat; you owe it to your children and grandchildren.
“That’s what I was doing, and I’ve always been about building, not destroying. I was there when Dr. King was assassinated, telling everyone to cool out, trying to remind everyone that you don’t want to destroy your country. You want to build it.”
“It was necessary to teach pride then, and I think the song did a lot of good for a lot of people,” Brown wrote in his autobiography The Godfather of Soul.
“People called ‘Black and Proud’ militant and angry—maybe because of the line about dying on your feet instead of living on your knees. But really, if you listen to it, it sounds like a children’s song. That’s why I had children in it, so children who heard it could grow up feeling pride.
”The song cost me a lot of my crossover audience. The racial makeup at my concerts was mostly black after that. I don’t regret it, though, even if it was misunderstood.”
