Soul Brother Number One and Sex Machine James Brown was not just a musical genius who changed popular music and gave the world “Funky Drummer,” he was also an innovator in the medium of radio.
During his lifetime, Mr. Brown owned several radio stations.
The story of how Mr. Brown ended buying Augusta station WRDW changed over the years, but according to his daughter Deanna Brown Thomas, the most reliable version goes back to Mr. Brown’s childhood.
When James Brown was a boy, he would sit outside the WRDW building and shine shoes, much to the chagrin of the owner of a nearby pharmacy who employed his own shoeshine man.
“Dad wasn’t in competition with anyone; he was just a little boy with rags shining shoes,” Thomas said.
According to the story, the young Mr. Brown would use his meager earnings to buy a harmonica that cost a nickel and would sit under the WRDW marquee and play the harmonica, further infuriating the pharmacist who managed to persuade the station owners to kick the boy off the property.
Mr. Brown never forgot the slight or the disrespect. He vowed that one day he would own that radio station, and one day people would show him respect by calling him “Mr. Brown.”
One might logically think that when Mr. Brown bought WRDW, he would reformat it into rhythm and blues or soul station, but the ever-innovative Mr. Brown had other ideas.
Thomas, who followed her father into radio as program director of several of his stations, says that by the time Mr. Brown bought WRDW, he had traveled the world and was exposed to how foreign radio stations were programmed.
Mr. Brown, according to Thomas, was particularly fond of the BBC in the United Kingdom, which was known to play Frank Sinatra and Aretha Franklin back-to-back.
“The type of format that Dad would do was nothing like anybody was doing here in the United States,” Thomas said.
In creating a format where there is no format, Mr. Brown basically created what we know today as “college radio” where virtually every genre gets played instead of having only roughly 20 songs on constant rotation.
One aspect of Mr. Brown that tends to get lost under the weight of his musical fame is that fact that he was heavily involved in the Civil Rights Movement. Instead of leading marches, Mr. Brown set the Civil Rights Movement to music.
It was not just equal treatment for Black people that Mr. Brown supported. The song, “This is a Man’s World,” combats misogyny without ever using the word. It comes across as a loving tribute to womanhood, rather than a blatant political diatribe.
The seminal piece, “Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud)” is another musical example of Mr. Brown walking the tightrope of defiance but balanced with hope and optimism. Before long, even White people were singing along with the anthem.
The day that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, Mr. Brown had a planned performance at the Boston Garden the next night. As riots broke out across the country, city leaders in Boston at first wanted to cancel the appearance.
It was decided instead to televise the concert and the Boston riots were quelled as people stayed home to watch the Godfather of Soul dazzle on stage and pay tribute to the slain Dr. King.
Another riot would really hit home for Mr. Brown just two years later.
On May 9, 1970, Charles Oatman, a 16-year-old boy was found beaten to death in the Augusta Jail. Oatman had been charged with murder in what was apparently an accident that had fatally wounded his niece.
The Augusta Black community learned that Oatman had been repeatedly beaten, mutilated with forks and even had cigarette burns all over his body. Rage that had been boiling for some time in the Black community over police brutality finally erupted, and on May 11, the bloody Augusta riots began.
Before the dust was settled, six people would die — many of them shot in the back while running away.
Mr. Brown was out on DJs on tour when he got the news and became incensed when he learned his own employees at WRDW were fanning the flames and even giving out the known locations of the police, according to retired Augusta radio broadcaster Harley Drew.
At first, Mr. Brown demanded the plug get pulled and the station taken off the air. When he was cautioned that the people rioting might think the police took the station off the air causing a further escalation, Mr. Brown instructed that the station only to play music until he could get there.
Regardless of tour agreements, Mr. Brown boarded the first plane to Augusta, and his calm voice over the airwaves helped put an end to the Augusta riots, according to Thomas.
“Out of all his ventures outside of making music, radio was probably the most important to him; it was a way he could communicate to his community and his people,” Thomas said.
Mr. Brown would end up owning several stations in Augusta, Atlanta and Baltimore.
His daughter followed in his footsteps serving as program director for both WAAW the Boss and WERD in Augusta. WAAW was located in what is now the Richmond County Board of Education offices on the corner of James Brown Boulevard and Broad Street in the 1990s and 2000s. In an April 2021 article in The Augusta Press, Deanna Brown recalled her father would often ask her to put him on the air.
People could see into the radio studio from the street. And unlike those who shooed him away when he was a lad, Mr. Brown didn’t respond in the same way. He’d wave at them and sometimes even invite them in.
A few of his stations are still on the air.
While his music was played upon countless radio stations around the globe, Mr. Brown was also one of the first Black radio station owners in the United States.
…And that is something you may not have known.
Scott Hudson is the senior reporter for The Augusta Press. Reach him at scott@theaugustapress.com
