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Kill 'Em and Leave: Searching for James Brown and the American Soul

About the Book

Kill 'Em and Leave: Searching for James Brown and the American Soul

National Book Award winner James McBride goes in search of the “real” James Brown --- and his surprising journey illuminates the ways in which our cultural heritage has been shaped by Brown’s legacy.

A product of the complicated history of the American South, James Brown was a cultural shape-shifter who arguably had the greatest influence of any artist on American popular music. Brown was long a figure of fascination for James McBride, a noted professional musician as well as a writer. When he received a tip that promised to uncover the man behind the myth, McBride set off to follow a trail to better understand the personal, musical, and societal influences that created this immensely troubled, misunderstood and complicated soul genius.

KILL ’EM AND LEAVE is more than a book about James Brown. Brown’s rough-and-tumble life, through McBride’s lens, is an unsettling metaphor for American life: the tension between North and South, black and white, rich and poor. McBride’s travels take him to forgotten corners of Brown’s never-before-revealed history: the country town where Brown’s family and thousands of others were displaced by America’s largest nuclear power bomb-making facility; a South Carolina field where a long-forgotten cousin recounts, in the dead of night, a fuller history of Brown’s sharecropping childhood, which until now has been a mystery. McBride seeks out the American expatriate in England who co-created the James Brown sound, visits the trusted right-hand manager who worked with Brown for forty-one years, and interviews Brown’s most influential nonmusical creation, his “adopted son,” the Reverend Al Sharpton. He describes the stirring visit of Michael Jackson to the Augusta, Georgia,funeral home where the King of Pop sat up all night with the body of his musical godfather, spends hours talking with Brown’s first wife, and lays bare the Dickensian legal contest over James Brown’s estate, a fight that has consumed careers; prevented any money from reaching the poor schoolchildren in Georgia and South Carolina, as instructed in his will; cost Brown’s estate millions in legal fees; and left James Brown’s body to lie for more than eight years in a gilded coffin in his daughter’s yard in South Carolina.

James McBride is one of the most distinctive and electric literary voices in America today, and part of the pleasure of his narrative is being in his presence, coming to understand Brown through McBride’s own insights as a black musician with Southern roots. KILL ’EM AND LEAVE is a song unearthing and celebrating James Brown’s great legacy: the cultural landscape of America today.

Kill 'Em and Leave: Searching for James Brown and the American Soul
by James McBride

  • Publication Date: November 1, 2016
  • Genres: Biography, Culture, Music, Nonfiction
  • Paperback: 256 pages
  • Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
  • ISBN-10: 0812983734
  • ISBN-13: 9780812983739