Free The Rejected Stone: Al Sharpton and the Path to American Leadership by Al Sharpton Page A

Augusta chapter of Daddy Grace’s church. Daddy Grace was a charismatic black evangelist and one of the first black religious leaders to put a band in his church.
    “You hear that band?” James said to me, pointing up at the church, which was lit up like a Christmas tree and pulsing with the sound of a jamming band.
    I nodded.
    Smiling, James told me that he learned the beat he later made famous, the half-beat, from listening to the drummer in Daddy Grace’s band.
    When James said, “I’m on the one!” that’s what he was talking about. James took that half-beat out of the church and changed the course of music history.
    People would later ask me how I could reconcile growing up in the church with going out on the road with a huge secular music star like James, but it really didn’t feel like such a big leap. There was not much difference between James Brown on the road and Mahalia Jackson on the road, other than thegenre of the music they were singing. A lot of the rhythms, the bands, and the lifestyles were the same. James would take me out with him on the weekends; Mahalia would take me out on the weekends. It was still hotel, gig, airport, hotel, gig, airport. Same thing. And the people were the same: talented musicians, little formal education, living by their wits. The members of the JBs were the same people as the members of Rev. C. L. Franklin’s choir.
    Being in the studio with James was like suspending time. I was there when he recorded “It’s Too Funky in Here.” I was with him in New York when he did “Papa Don’t Take No Mess.” When James recorded, he would actually dance as if he was onstage. He’d be dripping wet. He was famous for his Live at the Apollo recordings, but every recording with him was like a live recording, because he would actually do the spins and all the moves there in the studio. He said he wanted to feel the song while he recorded it. And he’d do it over and over and over again. He had become famous for his demanding, taskmaster ways, and I saw them up close. The more exhausted the band got, the more James said, “We’re gonna do it again.” You were almost ready to jump out the window of the studio. Over the years, I got to where I just knew that if I got a call at night from James, “Rev, you’re going with us to the studio,” I was not going to see daylight until about ten the next morning. It was nothing to him to do nine or ten hours in a row. It seemed as if he just enjoyed having me there with him.
    When he finished a song, he’d always want to know,“What do you think? How did you like it? You think it’s gonna be a hit?”
    To James, every song he did was the best song he’d ever recorded. No matter how many hits he already had, he’d say, “This one is gonna be bigger than anything I ever did. This is the hit. This is the one.”
    It fascinated me how he would always cut more songs than they were scheduled to do; he’d cut three or four songs that just disappeared into the ether. Maybe four years later, he’d pull one out and say, “Time to put this on the album now.” He’d have a sense when he made the recording that it wasn’t the right time for the public, but he heard the music, and he heard the words, and he wanted to record it.
    One day in 1979, several years after I left him the first time, I got a memorable phone call from James.
    “Rev, I think I want to do a gospel-rap record,” he said.
    “Gospel-rap?” I said, not understanding how those two things could possibly go together.
    “Yep. I want you to preach. I’m going to sing. I’ve never done a gospel song.”
    But I was still confused. “Me preach and you sing? How’s that going to go?”
    “Rev, I got this,” he said.
    So after I flew down to Augusta, we got into his van, and he drove us to a studio in Greenville, South Carolina, driving about ninety miles an hour the whole way. The JBs were already there when we arrived. James liked the James Cleveland song “God Has