Free One : The Life and Music of James Brown (9781101561102) by R. J. Smith

dealership, S. C. Lawson, was hauling concrete slabs from the campgrounds for a small lake he was building. Lawson and his son, Howell, were talking to a guard who was overseeing the inmates as they loaded Lawson’s truck. The guard gestured in the direction of Brown. “That sure is a good, hard worker,” he said. “Matter of fact, he shouldn’t even be in prison. If your son had done [Brown’s crime], he’d probably have just been given a spanking.” Music Box could be paroled if he had employment promised for two years, the guard said. That got Lawson thinking, and very soon he had offered a job to Brown, washing cars and cleaning up at the dealership.
    Down in Toccoa, Bobby Byrd had told his mother about this sweet-voiced kid who would be released, if only he had a family to vouch for him. Zarah got her church involved, as well as other black churches in town, and presented a petition with some four hundred signatures to the camp superintendent. The parole agreement declared that Brown not set foot in Augusta for longer than a night for the next ten years and that he maintain a job and go to church on Sunday. On June 14, 1952, he walked out of the camp, down the mountain, and six miles to town. He carried a bag with him, and got directions to the Byrds’ house. (Brown later maintained he wrote a dazzling letter that earned the attention of the parole board and thus had secured his own freedom.)
    In a limited sense, Brown was walking into Toccoa; really, he was entering a place the poet Frank X. Walker has labeled “Affrilachia.” This mountain region was untouched by the plantation system that defined race relations further south, and in Toccoa, while fraught, race relations were viewed by some as less violent than in other parts of the South. Mountain places like Toccoa were where whites learned to play the banjo, an African instrument, by listening to blacks. In Affrilachia banjo and fiddle tunes were the music of most parties, white or black, and when the guitar arrived in the 1920s via railroad work crews, and with it the blues, the sound of the frolics and hog-killings and house parties didn’t radically change, it just expanded. Affrilachia was a little different, a place where into the 1920s and ’30s banjos and fiddles coexisted with guitars and harmonicas. It did not sound like Augusta.
    U pon his release, Brown lived with the Byrds, sleeping in the kitchen behind a curtain. Also in the house were three girls; two boys; Zarah; and a grandmother, Adeline Hickman, who was known as Big Mama. Big Mama was not enamored of the new roomer. “My grandmother, she didn’t want that jailbird in the house! She could not stand him,” recalled Sarah Byrd Giglio, Bobby’s sister. “But my mother being my mother, she said ‘Mama, we’re gonna let him stay here for a while.’”
    “My mother loved James Brown,” said Giglio. “She always called him her son.”
    He was easy to like, this wide-open youth who talked like he would be running things soon. Brown quickly made a name for himself, and it wasn’t always a good one. Friends warned Byrd to watch out for this kid, that he was a dirty con from Augusta and would take advantage of him. Some of them stopped talking to Byrd when he didn’t cut Brown loose. But he believed in the guy, and had seen his raw talent, which would sure help any number of groups Byrd was running.
    Toccoa was postcard-pretty, and postcard-small: When Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters came through Toccoa—not to play, just stopping to gas up—word got out and a crowd of black fans filled the gas station before the vocal group loaded their car and drove to the next show.
    On Sunday afternoons at Boyd Field, groups of boys would gather to play football, and the newcomer was quickly a standout. “James was always there. He was especially good at football,” recalls a local. “He could reverse his field about ten or fifteen times, and nobody could ever catch him, he was so