James Brown, the late Godfather of Soul, famously spent many of his formative years living in his aunt's brothel in Augusta, Georgia. His first memories, however, were made in Barnwell County, South Carolina, where he was born in 1933. Though his mother deserted his father (and James) for another man in 1935, the single father and his son would continue to live in the Barnwell/Elko area until 1940. In his 1986 autobiography,
Godfather of Soul, Brown describes this experience and the effect it had in shaping him:
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| "It gave me my own mind." The young James Brown. |
We lived in a series of shacks all around the Barnwell and
Elko areas…The shacks were unpainted, didn't have windows except for shutters
that you could pull together; and there was no electricity or indoor plumbing…
Being alone in the woods like that, spending nights in a
cabin with nobody else there, not having anybody to talk to, worked a change in
me that stayed with me from then on: It gave me my own mind. No matter what
came my way after that—prison, personal problems, government harassment—I had
the ability to fall back on myself.
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