Podcasts about in brown

Today on Countermelody the first of two (for now) episodes celebrating the creators of George Gershwin's legendary (and controversial) opera Porgy and Bess. Today we explore the fascinating life (and scant recorded legacy) of Anne Wiggins Brown, who was born in Baltimore on August 09, 1912, and died in Oslo on March 13, 2009. Like Muriel Smith, who a few years later created the title role of Carmen Jones on Broadway, Brown was still a student at the time she created the role of Bess. In Brown's case, she was enrolled at the Juilliard School, one of the very first Black students admitted to the venerable institution. She was possessed of an admirable musical pedigree on her mother's side; her father was a doctor and the family was raised in relative privilege in Baltimore. This, however, did not mean that all doors were open to the young would-be singer, who found her way by sheer determination and willpower. These same traits led to her being cast in the female lead of Gershwin's Broadway opera, as well as a close working relationship with the composer, who expanded the role from a secondary part to having her name included in the title. Brown sang more than 500 performances of Bess around the world, but in 1948 chose to settle in Norway, where she married Thorleif Schjelderup, an Olympic skier who also became an author an environmentalist. Though she occasionally returned to the United States, Norway remained her home until her death at the age of 96. Brown's career included significant concertizing and operatic appearances throughout the world. Eventually severe asthma led to her sudden retirement from the stage in 1955. She often decried the ugly spectre of racism, which she felt also curtailed and restricted her career. After her retirement, she became a noted voice teacher and stage director, leading several noteworthy productions of Porgy in the 1960s. This episode includes the vast majority of her slim recorded output, which include various excerpts from Porgy (in effect the very first Original Cast Album), as well as a collection of rare Norwegian recordings of spirituals, folk songs, and art songs in which she reveals a strong, true voice and a deeply musical sensibility, showing herself to be yet another artist whose artistic significance matches her historical importance. The episode opens with a heartfelt (and heartbroken) tribute to the great Roberta Flack, who died in the morning hours of February 24th. Countermelody is a podcast devoted to the glory and the power of the human voice raised in song. Singer and vocal aficionado Daniel Gundlach explores great singers of the past and present focusing in particular on those who are less well-remembered today than they should be. Daniel's lifetime in music as a professional countertenor, pianist, vocal coach, voice teacher, and journalist yields an exciting array of anecdotes, impressions, and “inside stories.” At Countermelody's core is the celebration of great singers of all stripes, their instruments, and the connection they make to the words they sing. By clicking on the following link (https://linktr.ee/CountermelodyPodcast) you can find the dedicated Countermelody website which contains additional content including artist photos and episode setlists. The link will also take you to Countermelody's Patreon page, where you can pledge your monthly or yearly support at whatever level you can afford.  

Feed the world. Preserve the environment for everyone's enjoyment. Christine Brown, one of our 2024 IWCA honourees, views her mission in life to be one of stewardship. It's that steadfast belief that helps Brown feel like she's among family when she networks with her fellow manure extension associates, wherever they're from.It didn't take Brown long to know she wanted to be in agriculture. Raised on a small dairy farm, Brown initially envisioned herself as an agricultural journalist – she didn't want to be involved in "widgets," but eventually found a love of conservation, soil and crops which led her to OMAFRA (now OMAFA), where she took on manure as a specialty. Her career has always offered a healthy balance of science and people. "I love the variety of activities that I get to be involved with, and that every day is different," she tells agriculture editor Bree Rody. She was part of the original team that developed the nutrient management software for OMAFA, was part of the local team that hosted the first-ever Ontario Manure Expo (as well as the first virtual Manure Expo). But her career has been defined just as much by the little things as it has been by the big things – like making a point of remembering a farmer's wife's name, or changing a tire in the field.In Brown's interview, she discusses how her lifelong confidence helped her feel secure in a male-dominated field, what her mentors mean to her, the reality of balancing family and career, and why it's important to work in the field with the eyes of a child.

Scientific Sense ® by Gill Eapen: Prof. Martha Minow is Professor of Law at Harvard. She has taught at Harvard Law School since 1981 and served as dean between 2009 & 2017. Her prior books include Saving the News: Why The Constitution Calls for Government Action to Preserve the Freedom of Speech (2021); When Should Law Forgive? (2019); In Brown's Wake: Legacies of America's Constitutional Landmark (2010); Partners, Not Rivals: Privatization and the Public Good (2002; and Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History After Genocide and Mass Violence (1998). Please subscribe to this channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/ScientificSense?sub_confirmation=1 --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scientificsense/support

It's likely that everyone reading this has used, or at the very least heard of Adobe's ubiquitous piece of software called Photoshop. But are you familiar with the very first—and perhaps the most eccentric—of the evangelists working behind that magic curtain?   Well, you're about to meet him today, in our latest podcast featuring pioneers of photography and imaging. As Adobe employee number 38, graphic designer Russell Preston Brown was in the room when brothers Thomas and John Knoll showed up to demonstrate a new piece of software, in 1988. Suitably impressed with what he saw, Russell made a beeline to Adobe co-founder John Warnock and uttered the imperative “Buy it! Now!”   Thirty-five years later, Brown has not lost an ounce of passion for concocting magic with digital imaging tools, and for sharing his knowledge with other users during his outlandish workshops and events.   Join us for a rollicking chat with this shapeshifting impresario in cowboy attire. From Brown's earliest training in darkroom photography to his current digital workflow syncing a mobile phone with Profoto lighting gear, we cover a lot of ground.   Throughout our discussion, we reflect on the revolutionary effects of technological advances, plus Brown's uncanny luck to be there in the middle of the zeitgeist, which led him to a telling analogy:   “Yes, I was in the right place at the right time. I made my fair share of contributions, but it all comes back to—what if the Knoll brothers had not decided to make Photoshop? I want to see that Jimmy Stewart episode of “A Wonderful Life,” where Photoshop didn't appear. Would we be using Letrasets?...”   Guest: Russell Preston Brown For more information on our guests and the gear they use, see: https://blogd7.bhphotovideo.com/explora/podcasts/photography/adobes-first-evangelist-russell-preston-brown Above photograph © Russell Preston Brown Episode Timeline: 2:47: A peak behind the scenes of Brown's early experiences at Adobe and what constituted working as a graphic designer back in 1985.  10:24: Brown's early training in darkroom photography, the type of photos he made and the tech transitions to the mobile phones that he works with today.  15:55: Thomas Knoll calls the iPhone a hallucination of what you are seeing in terms of colors, dynamic range, and quality of light. It gives us what we want to remember from that moment. 19:45: Brown's workflow for shooting with an iPhone synched to Profoto strobes and other lighting modifiers, and his ability to carry everything around in one bag.  24:12: Comparing image captures from different brands of mobile phones: iPhone, Google Pixel 7 and Samsung 23. Plus, make sure to use a solar filter over the lens when photographing the eclipse. 31:27: Brown's experiences working directly with programmers in the development of Photoshop, plus working one-on-one with a programmer to develop actions, scripts, and panels for his own Photoshop tools.  36:06: Episode Break 36:39: Brown reflects on his rapport with photographic purists during early presentations about Photoshop—from a photojournalism conference in Perpignan, France, to an early discussion about digital with Greg Gorman.  42:39: Adobe's earliest dreams and goals about prepress and processing images to create CMYK output for print publication, and the subsequent ability to access Raw data. 47:15: Differentiating between generations of Adobe users and how they employ the software, plus distinguishing between Lightroom Classic and Lightroom Desktop. 51:46: Applications that have kept all the original tool sets, offering many routes to similar results, to serve the full range and successive generations of its user base.  54:00: The question of AI and differences between typing text and using AI prompts, or taking one's original photographs and supplementing them with AI through Photoshop's Generative Fill. 1:03:39: The dangers of using creative tools incorrectly, and Brown's predictions about creative trends to come.  Guest Bio: Russell Preston Brown is the Senior Creative Director at Adobe Systems Incorporated, as well as an Emmy Award-winning instructor. His ability to bring together the world of design and software development is a perfect match for Adobe products. In Brown 's 38 years of creative experience at Adobe, he has contributed to the evolution of Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator with feature enhancements, and advanced scripts. Most recently he has started to travel the world with a mobile phone camera to capture his adventures from a whole new creative perspective. This new age of mobile photography has sparked his creativity and has inspired a variety of new imaging directions.  Brown also specializes in inspirational hands-on training at Adobe MAX, where he shows users how to work and play with Adobe software. He shares his delight in testing the creative limits of his tools as a prolific creator of an entertaining collection of Photoshop tips and tricks. His in-depth design knowledge and zany presentation style have won him a regular following among beginning, intermediate, and advanced Photoshop users alike. A live performance of the Russell Brown Show is not to be missed.  Stay Connected: Russell Preston Brown Website: https://russellbrown.com/ Russell Preston Brown on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dr_brown/ Russell Preston Brown on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/russellprestonbrown/ Russell Preston Brown on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/therussellbrownshow/videos Russell Preston Brown on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/user6594224 Russell Preston Brown at the Photoshop Hall of Fame:https://www.photoshophalloffame.com/russell-brown Adobe Max: https://www.adobe.com/max.html

Falls City athletes competed at the Division 2A Region IV Cross Country meet held at Texas A&M Corpus Christi Dugan track and soccer stadium on Oct. 24. The girls' course is 2 miles long and the boys' course is a 5K. Kash Brown entered individually and finished fifth with a time of 17:31. The top 10 individuals advance to State, and this will be his fourth trip to State Cross Country competition. In Brown's prior State appearances he finished 38th with a time of 17:47 as a freshman, 34th with 17:49 as a sophomore, and 16th with 17:56 as a...Article Link

Martha Minow has taught at Harvard Law School since 1981, where her courses include civil procedure, constitutional law, fairness and privacy, family law, international criminal justice, jurisprudence, law and education, nonprofit organizations, and the public law workshop. An expert in human rights and advocacy for members of racial and religious minorities and for women, children, and persons with disabilities, she also writes and teaches about digital communications, democracy, privatization, military justice, and ethnic and religious conflict.She has written: “Saving the News: Why The Constitution Calls for Government Action to Preserve the Freedom of Speech,” “When Should Law Forgive?,” The First Global Prosecutor: Promise and Constraints,” “In Brown's Wake: Legacies of America's Constitutional Landmark,” and “Government by Contract.”Martha sits down with Greg to discuss bankruptcy laws & forgiveness in the US and restorative justice.Episode Quotes:A need for jurisprudence of forgiveness14:38: One of the contrasts between forgiveness and ordinary law is that law tries to be regular, predictable, have general rules announced in advance, and apply equally across people regardless of their circumstances. Forgiveness is the opposite of all of that, which is not to say that it's necessarily subject to abuse or inconsistency. So President Obama developed a set of rules and rubrics for when to give a pardon. It's very possible to develop something that looks more law-like when we talk about the exercise of forgiveness. And we need that. If you will, we need to develop a jurisprudence of forgiveness.Forgiveness does not call for forgetting25:11: It is striking that there are not just different words but different social practices associated with forgiveness and forgetting. To forgive is a process that has rituals, religious or otherwise. And it does not call for forgetting. It may be precisely to remember that forgiveness is possible.Letting go of justified resentment11:40: I don't think it's by accident that we use the word forgiveness in the context of debt, just as we do in the context of crime, as we do in the context of somebody bumping into someone else saying: Forgive me. These all fall under the general category of letting go of justified resentment. It's not forgiveness, if there isn't a justified resentment. There is a real violation. These are real. Forgiveness can, however, be built into not only human decency but also systems.Show Links:Recommended Resources:The Sweet Hereafter by Russell BanksGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Harvard Law SchoolProfessional Profile at Boston University Center for Antiracist ResearchProfessional Profile at CarnegieMartha Minow at TEDHer Work:Saving the News: Why the Constitution Calls for Government Action to Preserve Freedom of Speech (Inalienable Rights) When Should Law Forgive?Making All the Difference: Inclusion, Exclusion, and American Law Breaking the Cycles of Hatred: Memory, Law, and RepairBetween Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence

In Brown and Gay in LA, author Anthony Christian Ocampo interviews more than 60 gay sons of immigrant families about the fears that come with living as gay men. He discusses with A Martinez the complex relationships they have with their parents — the respect they have for their parents as immigrants, but also the pain they carry from coming out to them.

In this episode of the SATW podcast, I open up talking about some of my favorite games in Week One of the College Football season, including Notre Dame at Ohio State and Oregon vs. Georgia. Here, I lay down key factors for each team while discussing the significance of the conferences. Next, Nebraska is in my crosshairs once again, and why it's not all on head coach Scott Frost. Shifting gears, I lay out my predictions for WWE's Clash of the Castle premium live event. On top of predictions for each match, I share my thoughts on how certain title pictures will (or should) look moving forward. In Brown's Big Picture, I defend Tom Brady (yes, this Atlanta Falcons fan is defending the Tampa Bay Buccaneers QB) and his ranking on the Top 100 players list. What's more, I explain that who voted on the list mattered and why they were justified in doing so. Where to find me Twitter: @ladarius_brown Instagram: @ladarius__brown TikTok: @ladarius_brown Check out all of my work here: LaDarius Brown Like the podcast page on Facebook --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/sportstheworld/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/sportstheworld/support

We discuss "A Matter of Trust: Online Proctored Exams and the Integration of Technologies of Assessment in Medical Education" by Tim Fawns and Sven Schaepkens. You can download the open access article here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10401334.2022.2048832  This is the 9th installment of the series on philosophy in medical education of Mario Veen and Anna Cianciolo, which appears in Teaching and Learning in Medicine: An International Journal -- it will also appear as a book chapter in our upcoming book Helping a Field See Itself: Envisioning a Philosophy of Medical Education (Springer, forthcoming 2022). *at around 20 minutes into the podcast, we refer to Nguyen's work on trust, and he uses the example of the climbing rope: https://philpapers.org/rec/NGUTAA  Tim Fawns (@timbocob) is a Senior Lecturer in Clinical Education at the University of Edinburgh. He is Deputy Programme Director of the online MSc Clinical Education, Director of the international Edinburgh Summer School in Clinical Education and also run a course in “Postdigital Society” for the Edinburgh Futures Institute. His main academic interests are in teaching, learning and assessment (mostly in healthcare and professional education but often with a strong focus on technology and online and blended modalities). He also researches autobiographical memory in relation to technology and media (mostly photography). Before his current role, he was a learning technologist, and a graphic and web designer before that. He's an Australian who went travelling one day and forgot to go back, married an Edinburgher and now has three kids who think they're Scottish. Selected papers include: - Fawns, T. (2022).  An Entangled Pedagogy: Looking Beyond the Pedagogy—Technology Dichotomy. Postdigital Science and Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-022-00302-7. - Fawns, T., Aitken, G., Jones, D. (Eds.) (2021). Online Postgraduate Education in a Postdigital World.: Beyond Technology. Cham: Springer. - Fawns, T. (2019). Postdigital education in design and practice.  Postdigital Science and Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-018-0021-8.   Sven Schaepkens (@SvenSchaepkens) is a PhD candidate at the Erasmus University Medical Centre in the Netherlands. He studies ‘reflection in practice' in the Dutch GP specialty training since 2019, and holds a double Master's degree in philosophy and media studies, and has an MA in Education of Philosophy. Before he started his PhD work, he was a teaching fellow at the University of Maastricht, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Selected papers include: - Schaepkens SPC, Veen M, de la Croix A. Is reflection like soap? a critical narrative umbrella review of approaches to reflection in medical education research. Adv Health Sci Educ Theory Pract. 2022 May;27(2):537-551. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10459-021-10082-7  - Schaepkens, S.P.C., Coccia, C.Q.H. (2022). In Pursuit of Time: An Inquiry into Kairos and Reflection in Medical Practice and Health Professions Education. In: Brown, M.E.L., Veen, M., Finn, G.M. (eds) Applied Philosophy for Health Professions Education. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1512-3_21    Dr.Komal Atta (@DrKomalA) is currently serving as Director Medical Education , University Medical and Dental College, The University of Faisalabad , Pakistan. Her academic interests include Social Media in medical education, Technology Enhanced Learning, Curriculum Developement , Professional identity formation and faculty deveopment. She has won multiple grants and awards in the field and likes to explore Medical Education as an intersection between philosphy, medicine, art and comics.  Selected publications include: - Is it better to “Zoom out” than to fade away? Combating burnout created by online teaching https://harvardmacy.org/index.php/hmi/is-it-better-to-zoom - Ahmed SA, Hegazy NN, Kumar AP, Abouzeid E, Wasfy NF, Atta K, Wael D, Hamdy H. A guide to best practice in faculty development for health professions schools: a qualitative analysis. BMC medical education. 2022 Dec;22(1):1-6. https://bmcmededuc.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12909-022-03208-x - Atta K, Passby L, Edwards S, Baker KA, El-Sbahi H, Kathrecha N, Mitchell B, Najim Z, Orr E, Phillips A, Soltan MA. Developing channel-based online teaching. The clinical teacher. 2022. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/tct.13509    Mario Veen (@MarioVeen) is Assistant Professor Educational Research at the Erasmus Medical Center Rotterdam in The Netherlands. Mario is action editor for the Philosophy in Medical Education series of the journal Teaching & Learning in Medicine and co-editor of the first two books about philosophy and medical education: Applied Philosophy for Health Professions Education: A Journey Towards Mutual Understanding (Springer, 2022) and Helping a Field See Itself: Envisioning a Philosophy of Medical Education (Taylor & Francis, forthcoming 2022). He hosts the podcasts Let Me Ask You Something, and Life From Plato's Cave. If you have any questions about this episode, let me know! https://twitter.com/MarioVeen and https://marioveen.com/  Mario

Camillo is a medical doctor from South Africa. Currently he works as a senior house officer at Letterkenny University Hospital department of Hematology. He has a special interests in existentialist philosophy, German idealism and phenomenology. We published a paper together called "Because We Care: a philosophical investigation into the spirit of medical education". We discuss that paper at length in another podcast, [link will appear here when it is out]. Camillo also published a book chapter with Sven Schaepkens, called "In Pursuit of Time: An Inquiry into kairos and reflection in medical practice and health professions education"   This is an independent educational podcast and I appreciate any support you can give me me on Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/lifefromplatoscave) or in other ways. Sources: Camillo Coccia & Mario Veen (2022) Because We Care: A Philosophical Investigation into the Spirit of Medical Education, Teaching and Learning in Medicine, DOI: 10.1080/10401334.2022.2056744 Schaepkens, S.P.C., Coccia, C.Q.H. (2022). In Pursuit of Time: An Inquiry into Kairos and Reflection in Medical Practice and Health Professions Education. In: Brown, M.E.L., Veen, M., Finn, G.M. (eds) Applied Philosophy for Health Professions Education. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1512-3_21  Veen, M., Skelton, J. & de la Croix, A. Knowledge, skills and beetles: respecting the privacy of private experiences in medical education. Perspect Med Educ 9, 111–116 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40037-020-00565-5  Hannah Arendt (2021) film: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Arendt_(film) I hope you enjoy the episode! Mario http://lifefromplatoscave.com/    I'd love to hear your questions or comments: Leave me a voicemail: https://www.speakpipe.com/LifeFromPlatosCave   Twitter: https://twitter.com/lifeplatoscave  Insta: https://www.instagram.com/lifefromplatoscave/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lifefromplatoscave  Illustration © by Julien Penning, Light One Art: https://www.instagram.com/light_one_art/

In her 2021 book Saving the News: Why the Constitution Calls for Government Action to Preserve Freedom of Speech, our guest Martha Minow “outlines an array of reforms, including a new fairness doctrine, regulating digital platforms as public utilities, using antitrust authority to regulate the media, policing fraud, and more robust funding of public media. As she stresses, such reforms are not merely plausible ideas; they are the kinds of initiatives needed if the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of the press continues to hold meaning in the twenty-first century.” Martha Minow has taught at Harvard Law School, where she also served as Dean, since 1981. In addition to Saving the News, she is author of When Should Law Forgive? (2019), In Brown's Wake: Legacies of America's Constitutional Landmark (2010), among many other books and articles. She is an expert in human rights and advocacy for members of racial and religious minorities and for women, children, and persons with disabilities, she also writes and teaches about digital communications, democracy, privatization, military justice, and ethnic and religious conflict. Heather Hendershot is Professor of Comparative Media Studies at MIT and studies TV news, conservative media, political movements, and American film and television history. She is author of the forthcoming book When the News Broke: Chicago 1968 and the Polarizing of America, which follows her 2016 title Open to Debate: How William F. Buckley Put Liberal America on the Firing Line. She has held fellowships at Vassar College, New York University, Princeton, Harvard, Radcliffe, and Stanford, and she has also been a Guggenheim fellow. Her courses emphasize the interplay between creative, political, and regulatory concerns and how those concerns affect what we see on the screen.

In "Brown v. Board of Education", the Supreme Court ruled that "separate is not equal", thus ending school segregation. But the ruling did nothing to close the gap between African American and white students in terms of educational access, equity and participation. The coronavirus global pandemic widened the gap further as schools pivoted to virtual learning, leaving behind those without access to internet services and computers. We discuss the educational divide between Black and white students and what must be done to create equity and fairness for all. Our guests include Dr. James Fedderman, President, Virginia Education Association; Jimmeka Anderson, Ph.D candidate who specializes in urban education; and former Juvenile and Domestic Relations judge for the city of Chesapeake, Judge Eileen Olds.

James Yarcho and Chris Russell join forces this week to preview the Buccaneers and the Washington Football Team ahead of their week ten matchup on this Crossover Thursday episode!Both the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Washington Football Team are coming out of their bye week and preparing for a rematch of the 2020 NFC Wild Card game where the Bucs emerged victorious on their way to winning Super Bowl LV. This time around, things tend to be pointing towards the Buccaneers as well.The Washington Football Team has struggled on the defensive side of the ball, ranking dead last in the NFL against the pass while giving up almost 29 points per game, which ranks 29th. For the Bucs, it's all about the injuries. Even though Sean Murphy-Bunting and Scotty Miller have returned to practice, that doesn't mean that they'll play this week. All the while Antonio Brown and Rob Gronkowski seem unlikely to see any action this week. In Brown's case, it could be a while longer before he sets foot on the field, sparking the return of wide receiver Breshad Perriman to the Tampa Bay practice squad.The Bucs are heavy favorites in this one, coming into week ten at -10 according to BetOnline while the Over/Under sits at 51.5. The oddsmakers are expecting a lot of scoring in this - and who could blame them? However, can the Bucs continue to overcome injuries and penalty problems or did a week off after the loss to the New Orleans Saints cause more harm than good?Follow & Subscribe to the Locked On Bucs Podcast on these platforms…Apple: https://apple.co/3iOePFkSpotify: https://spoti.fi/3BwlScYAudacy: https://bit.ly/3FAcIhVGoogle: https://bit.ly/2X0IEdSMegaphone: https://bit.ly/3uZOcSoFollow Locked On Podcast Network on Twitter: https://twitter.com/LockedOnNetworkCheck out all of our NFL Coverage: linktr.ee/lockedonnflFollow James on Twitter: https://twitter.com/JYarcho_BUCSFollow David on Twitter: https://twitter.com/DHarrison82Support Us By Supporting Our Sponsors!Built BarBuilt Bar is a protein bar that tastes like a candy bar. Go to builtbar.com and use promo code “LOCKED15,” and you'll get 15% off your next order.BetOnline AGThere is only 1 place that has you covered and 1 place we trust. Betonline.ag! Sign up today for a free account at betonline.ag and use that promocode: LOCKEDON for your 50% welcome bonus.GetupsideJust download the FREE GetUpside App and use promo code TOUCHDOWN to get up to 50¢/gallon cash back on your first tank. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

James Yarcho and Chris Russell join forces this week to preview the Buccaneers and the Washington Football Team ahead of their week ten matchup on this Crossover Thursday episode! Both the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Washington Football Team are coming out of their bye week and preparing for a rematch of the 2020 NFC Wild Card game where the Bucs emerged victorious on their way to winning Super Bowl LV. This time around, things tend to be pointing towards the Buccaneers as well. The Washington Football Team has struggled on the defensive side of the ball, ranking dead last in the NFL against the pass while giving up almost 29 points per game, which ranks 29th. For the Bucs, it's all about the injuries. Even though Sean Murphy-Bunting and Scotty Miller have returned to practice, that doesn't mean that they'll play this week. All the while Antonio Brown and Rob Gronkowski seem unlikely to see any action this week. In Brown's case, it could be a while longer before he sets foot on the field, sparking the return of wide receiver Breshad Perriman to the Tampa Bay practice squad. The Bucs are heavy favorites in this one, coming into week ten at -10 according to BetOnline while the Over/Under sits at 51.5. The oddsmakers are expecting a lot of scoring in this - and who could blame them? However, can the Bucs continue to overcome injuries and penalty problems or did a week off after the loss to the New Orleans Saints cause more harm than good? Follow & Subscribe to the Locked On Bucs Podcast on these platforms… Apple: https://apple.co/3iOePFk Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3BwlScY Audacy: https://bit.ly/3FAcIhV Google: https://bit.ly/2X0IEdS Megaphone: https://bit.ly/3uZOcSo Follow Locked On Podcast Network on Twitter: https://twitter.com/LockedOnNetwork Check out all of our NFL Coverage: linktr.ee/lockedonnfl Follow James on Twitter: https://twitter.com/JYarcho_BUCS Follow David on Twitter: https://twitter.com/DHarrison82 Support Us By Supporting Our Sponsors! Built Bar Built Bar is a protein bar that tastes like a candy bar. Go to builtbar.com and use promo code “LOCKED15,” and you'll get 15% off your next order. BetOnline AG There is only 1 place that has you covered and 1 place we trust. Betonline.ag! Sign up today for a free account at betonline.ag and use that promocode: LOCKEDON for your 50% welcome bonus. Getupside Just download the FREE GetUpside App and use promo code TOUCHDOWN to get up to 50¢/gallon cash back on your first tank. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Dr. Aparajita Datta leads The Nature Conservation Foundation's Eastern Himalaya programme, under which research and community-based conservation with hornbills as a flagship have been carried out for over two decades. She completed her PhD on hornbill biology and their role in seed dispersal in 2000. Since then, she along with her team have worked all over the North East on a variety of hornbill-related projects. She has received several awards including the National Geographic Emerging Explorer award (2010) and the Whitley Fund for Nature award (2013), and the Women in Discovery award. Her interests include plant–animal interactions in rainforests, understanding human impacts on wildlife, and engaging with tribal communities for conservation. She is also currently the Co-Chair (Asia) for the IUCN SSC Hornbill Specialist Group. In this episode, Aparajita talks about hornbills and their ecosystem. She writes and speaks regularly about conservation and her take on nature. Dr. Datta's work has encompassed long-term research on hornbill biology in north-east India (breeding biology, roosting, diet), hornbill movement and seed dispersal using telemetry, long-term monitoring of tree phenology, hunting & logging impacts, biological exploration in Arunachal Pradesh & new mammal species discoveries, seed dispersal & seed predation; established community-based conservation interventions with tribal communities (health, education, rural energy), conservation education, a citizen science initiative for hornbills.  A Hornbill Nest Adoption Program set up in 2011 protects hornbill nests in forests outside a Protected Area, while providing income to people. We have contributed to this programme.  You can too by donating here. Questions and Timeline 1:30 She lays out the contours of your work with hornbills.  Nesting biology of hornbills.  Their breeding is very unique. They are secondary cavity nesters.  Females imprison themselves inside the cavity for up to 4 months.  They seal the nest with their own droppings. The male is the sole provider. 6:30 Varities of hornbills.  She talks about the majesty of hornbills. 62 species in the world.  Africa- 30, Asia- 32, India-9.  The casque atop their bills. Rhinoceros hornbills. Casque is hollow.  Fused neck vertebrae. Epitome of monogamous birds. 10:30 The connection between plants and animals explained through hornbills. The specialist seed dispersals of hornbills. Terrestrial forest rodents.  Scatter disperser.  Generalist plants and trees and specialized seed dispersal by frugivores.  Complex connections between species in a tropical forest.  Talks about the laurel trees, Phoebe cooperiana-- called Sanchar in Nyishi.  They love the fruits. 14:00 Have you seen all the nine hornbill species found in India? Can you talk about them for those who are not as lucky as you? How are they similar and how are they different? Larger tend to be frugivorous in their diet. Smaller ones eat animal matter. Great hornbill: Northeast India.  Disjunct population-- in Uttarakhand, UP.  Also  Wreathed hornbill: Northeast India Rufuous necked hornbill-- Northeast, higher elevation,   Brown hornbill-- Northeast, cooperative breeding system.  In the others, you have the male feeding the female inside the cave.  In Brown hornbill, the adult male is helped by juvenile males from the previous years in both nest feeding and defense. Oriental pied hornbill-- wider distribution, Northern, Eastern and Central India Malabar pied hornbill-- western ghats, central India,  Malabar gray hornbill-- endemic, Western ghats, smallest of all hornbills, in the Malabar area,   Narcondam hornbill-- restricted to a six square kilometre Narcondam island in the Andaman-Nicobar islands. Gray hornbill. 21:00 Talks about her research on the functional role that forest hornbills play as seed dispersers. How hornbills are great seed dispersers.  All seeds except the ficus (which are defecated) are regurgitated.  How to measure the quality of seed dispersal. 27:00 What is recruitment? Rohit Naniwadekar's work in Namdapha.  Scatter dispersing seeds. 30: 00 You have worked with the local Nishi tribes in the area of hornbill conservation. Tell us about the complexity of this. What is roost monitoring and how do you do it? She talks about partnerships that they have crea 38:00 Talks about nesting trees.  Tetramelis nudiflora.  Altingia  42:00 What are your favourite species of birds? Indian pitta, Blythe's reed warbler, Paradis flycatcher, yellow-wattled lapwing.  Talks about her neighbourhood birds. 44:00 Her favourite is the rufous necked hornbill.  Final thoughts?

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued a moratorium on evictions nationwide on September 4, 2020 and coupled the moratorium with federal criminal penalties for those landlords who seek relief from state courts. In the first case filed against the moratorium, the New Civil Liberties Alliance took on the representation of several housing providers, including Rick Brown, and the National Apartment Association. In Brown v. Becerra, NCLA challenged the CDC’s moratorium on both statutory and U.S. Constitutional grounds in the Northern District of Georgia. A preliminary injunction in the case is now on appeal to the Eleventh Circuit with oral argument scheduled for May 14, 2021. Joining us to discuss the Brown v. Becerra argument and the status of the case to date is NCLA attorney Caleb Kruckenberg.Featuring: Caleb Kruckenberg, Litigation Counsel, New Civil Liberties Alliance Moderator: Mark Chenoweth, Executive Director and General Counsel, New Civil Liberties Alliance Dial 888-752-3232 to access the call.

In Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), the Supreme Court ruled that “separate but equal” was not legal. This has been settled law for the past 65 years! But now, Columbia University, in New York City, has now decided to hold segregated graduation ceremonies. Our American Mamas, Teri Netterville and Denise Arthur, discuss what is going on with the “woke” extremists, including the big corporate media.

White House Press Secretary, Jen Psaki, is having problems knowing the correct definitions of the words “Challenge” and “Crisis”. Louis Avallone and Stephen Parr explain the difference, with examples!In Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), the Supreme Court ruled that “separate but equal” was not legal. This has been settled law for the past 65 years! But now, Columbia University, in New York City, has now decided to hold segregated graduation ceremonies. Our American Mamas, Teri Netterville and Denise Arthur, discuss what is going on with the “woke” extremists, including the big corporate media.Using Pelosi’s own words and actions, Stephen Parr and Louis Avallone prove two points: 1.) Democrats do not want to respect the outcome of elections they do not win, and 2.) Democrats do not support Women. Currently, Pelosi is doing everything she can to power grab against two duly elected Republican Women in the US House. The reality is Pelosi is personally trying to overturn State elections, in spite of the The Members of the US House having no authority over the outcome of any State election results for the US House.Fake News Friday

In Brown communities, the stigma around mental health problems can discourage people from talking about their mental health .The amazing and award winning, Nazia Khatun (Fitness Reborn UK) joins us to understand and talk about mental health in different way and why fitness is such an important way to get your mental gear into action. Support the showTell us your thoughts on instagram @boldbrownandbritish or Visit our Linktree

What is the role of the United States Supreme Court? What is "settled law"? And how does the Supreme Court attempt to rectify its wrongs? These questions and more were at stake when the Supreme Court issued its unanimous opinion in Brown v. Board of Education on May 17, 1954. In Brown, the Supreme Court finally acknowledged the moral evil and legal fiction that was state-sanctioned segregation of the races. To get to that critical decision, the Supreme Court had to reverse itself on a prior ruling that had guided the nation for more than 50 years, Plessy v. Ferguson. The Court's courage in reversing its precedent and in charting a new course offers a heartening beacon of light, illuminating the path that could reverse erroneous Court precedent set in Roe v. Wade. Steve Aden, Chief Legal Officer & General Counsel at Americans United for Life joins Clarke Forsythe, Senior Counsel, and Noah Brandt on "Life, Liberty, and Law".

Christopher Brown of Aristides Capital joins the podcast to discuss his investment strategy, which has produced positive returns every calendar year since 2008. In Brown's view, healthcare and information technology stocks should not be treated as defensive investments that will protect portfolios in times of stress -- especially after their recent run-up. There are reasons many companies in this sector are overvalued and could see their shares drop as the economy begins to see further difficulties from coronavirus. Aristides Capital has an active short book, which framed most of the second half of the conversation.   Content Segments:  (Spotify users can link to the segment directly by clicking on the timestamp) Why investors' thinking about defensive stocks may be misguided (4:49) Growth stocks' recent performance is reminiscent of the late-1990s tech bubble (7:05) The concerns with healthcare stocks (11:45) Background on the guest (15:07) Some of the red flags short sellers look for and why the "big picture" is often more pertinent (20:22) Inovio Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: INO) discussion (22:52) CytoDyn Inc. (OTC: CYDY) discussion (25:44) Vuzix Corp. (NASDAQ: VUZI) discussion (28:37) Accelerate Diagnostics (NASDAQ: AXDX) discussion (30:59) Insider purchases are not always a bullish indicator (35:02) Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ: TSLA) discussion, at the guest's suggestion (host didn't want to go there originally) and why it could be an indicator for future market direction (36:17) Reasons to be bearish on markets and the economy (39:17) How to protect your portfolio against inflation (42:13) For more information on the guest: Website: AristidesCapital.com Twitter: @MidwestHedgie Not intended as investment advice.

When you start a business, you should always be thinking about what your end goal is, says Adam Brown, founder of luxury swimwear brand Orlebar Brown, on the latest episode of the Innovators podcast. In Brown’s case, it was the eventual acquisition by none other than Chanel. During this episode, Brown tells us just why the acquisition is a match made in heaven, how he is bringing sustainability into the brand in a creative way, and how brands can get the luxury consumer to forget about the price tag.

    Episode thirty-nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Please Please Please” by James Brown, and at the early rock and roll career of the Godfather of Soul. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Come Go With Me” by the Del Vikings. —-more—-  Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.  I relied mostly on two books for this episode. James Brown: The Godfather of Soul, by James Brown with Bruce Tucker, is a celebrity autobiography with all that that entails, but a more interesting read than many.  Kill ‘Em and Leave: Searching for the Real James Brown, by James McBride is a more discursive, gonzo journalism piece, and well worth a read. And this two-CD compilation has all Brown’s singles from 1956 through 61.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Just as the other week we talked about a country musician who had a massive impact on rock and roll, one who was originally marketed as a rock and roller, so today we’re going to talk about a funk and soul musician who got his first hits playing to the rock and roll audience.   There is a type of musician we will come across a lot as our story progresses. He is almost always a man, and he is usually regarded as a musical genius. He will be focused only on two things — his music and his money — and will have basically no friends, except maybe one from his childhood. He has employees, not friends. And he only hires the best — his employees do staggering work while being treated appallingly by him, and he takes all the credit while they do most of the work. Yet at the same time, the work those employees do ends up sounding like that genius, and when they go on to do their own stuff without him, it never sounds quite as good. That one percent he’s adding does make the difference. He’s never really liked as a person by his employees, but he’s grudgingly respected, and he’s loved by his audience.   There are people like that in every creative field — one thinks of Stan Lee in comics, or Walt Disney in film — but there are a *lot* of them in music, and they are responsible for an outsized portion of the most influential music ever made. And James Brown is almost the archetypal example of this kind of musician.   James Brown had a hard, hard childhood. His mother left his father when James was four — stories say that Brown’s father pulled a gun on her, so her wanting to get away seems entirely reasonable, but she left her son with him, and James felt abandoned and betrayed for much of his life. A few years later his father realised that he didn’t have the ability to look after a child by himself, and dumped James on a relative he always called an aunt, though she was some form of cousin, to raise. His aunt ran a brothel, and it’s safe to say that that was not the best possible environment in which to raise a young child. He later said that he was in his teens before he had any underwear that was bought from a shop rather than made out of old sacks. In later life, when other people would talk about having come from broken homes and having been abandoned by their fathers, he would say “How do you think I feel? My father *and my mother* left me!”   But he had ambition. Young James had entered — and won — talent shows from a very young age — his first one was in 1944, when he was eleven, and he performed “So Long”, the song that would a few years later become Ruth Brown’s first big hit, but was then best known in a version by the Charioteers:   [Excerpt: The Charioteers, “So Long”]   He loved music, especially jazz and gospel, and he was eager to learn anything he could about it. The one form of music he could never get into was the blues — his father played a little blues, but it wasn’t young James’ musical interest at all — but even there, when Tampa Red started dating one of the sex workers who worked at his aunt’s house, young James Brown learned what he could from the blues legend.   He learned to sing from the holiness churches, and his music would always have a gospel flavour to it. But the music he liked more than anything was that style of jazz and swing music that was blending into what was becoming R&B. He loved Count Basie, and used to try to teach himself to play “One O’Clock Jump”, Count Basie’s biggest hit, on the piano:   [Excerpt: Count Basie, “One O’Clock Jump”]   That style of music wouldn’t show up in his earlier records, which were mostly fairly standard vocal group R&B, but if you listen to his much later funk recordings, they owe a *lot* to Basie and Lionel Hampton. The music that Brown became most famous for is the logical conclusion to the style that those musicians developed — though we’ll talk more about the invention of funk, and how funk is a form of jazz, in a future episode. But his real favourite, the one he tried to emulate more than any other, was Louis Jordan. Brown didn’t get to see Jordan live as a child, but he would listen to his records on the radio and see him in film shorts, and he decided that more than anything else he wanted to be like Jordan. As soon as he started performing with small groups around town, he started singing Jordan’s songs, especially “Caldonia”, which years later he would record as a tribute to his idol:   [Excerpt: James Brown, “Caldonia”]   But as you might imagine, life for young James Brown wasn’t the easiest, and he eventually fell into robbery. This started when he was disciplined at school for not being dressed appropriately — so he went out and stole himself some better clothes. He started to do the same for his friends, and then moved on to more serious types of theft, including cars, and he ended up getting caught breaking into one.   At the age of sixteen, Brown was sent to a juvenile detention centre, on a sentence of eight to sixteen years, and this inadvertently led to the biggest piece of luck in his life, when he met the man who would be his mentor and principal creative partner for the next twenty years. There was a baseball game between inmates of the detention centre and a team of outsiders, one of whom was named Bobby Byrd, and Byrd got talking to Brown and discovered that he could sing. In fact Brown had put together a little band in the detention centre, using improvised instruments, and would often play the piano in the gym. He’d got enough of a reputation for being able to play that he’d acquired the nickname “Music Box” — and Byrd had heard about him even outside the prison.   At the time, Byrd was leading a gospel vocal group, and needed a new singer, and he was impressed enough with Brown that he put in a word for him at a parole hearing and helped him get released early. James Brown was going to devote his life to singing for the Lord, and he wasn’t going to sin any more. He got out of the detention centre after serving only three years of his sentence, though you can imagine that to a teen there was not much “only” about spending three years of your life locked up, especially in Georgia in the 1940s, a time and place when the white guards were free to be racially abusive to an even greater extent than they are today. And for the next ten years, throughout his early musical career, Brown would be on parole and in danger of being recalled to prison at any time.   Brown ended up joining Byrd’s *sister’s* gospel group, at least for a while, before moving over to Byrd’s own group, which had originally been a gospel group called the Gospel Starlighters, but by now was an R&B group called the Avons. They soon renamed themselves again, to the Flames, and later to the *Famous* Flames, the name they would stick with from then on (and a name which would cause a lot of confusion, as we’ve already talked about the Hollywood Flames, who featured a different Bobby Byrd). Brown’s friend Johnny Terry, who he had performed with in the detention centre, also joined the group. There would be many lineups of the Famous Flames, but Brown, Byrd, and Terry would be the nucleus of most of them.   Brown was massively influenced by Little Richard, to the extent that he was essentially a Little Richard tribute act early on. Brown felt an immediate kinship with Richard’s music because both of them were from Georgia, both were massively influenced by Louis Jordan, and both were inspired by church music. Brown would later go off in his own direction, of course, but in those early years he sounded more like Little Richard than like anyone else.   In fact, around this time, Little Richard’s career was doing so well that he could suddenly be booked into much bigger halls than he had been playing. He still had a few months’ worth of contracts in those old halls, though, and so his agent had a brainwave. No-one knew what Richard looked like, so the agent got Brown and the Flames to pretend to be Little Richard and the Upsetters and tour playing the gigs that Richard had been booked into. Every night Brown would go out on stage to the introduction, “Please welcome the hardest working man in showbusiness today, Little Richard!”, and when he finished ghosting for Little Richard, he liked the introduction enough that he would keep it for himself, changing it only to his own name rather than Richard’s. Brown would perform a mixture of Richard’s material, his own originals, and the R&B songs that the Flames had been performing around Georgia. They’d already been cutting some records for tiny labels, at least according to Brown’s autobiography, mostly cover versions of R&B hits. I haven’t been able to track down any of these, but one that Brown mentions in his autobiography is “So Long”, which he later rerecorded in 1961, and that version might give you some idea of what Brown sounded like at the period when he was trying to be Little Richard:   [Excerpt: James Brown, “So Long”]   Brown’s imitation of Richard went down well enough that Richard’s agent, Clint Brantley, decided to get the group to record a demo of themselves doing their own material.   They chose to do a song called “Please, Please, Please”, written by Brown and Johnny Terry. The song was based on something that Little Richard had scribbled on a napkin, which Brown decided would make a good title for a song. The song fits neatly into a particular genre of R&B ballad, typified by for example, Richard’s “Directly From My Heart to You”:   [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Directly From My Heart to You”]   Though both “Directly From My Heart” and “Please Please Please” owe more than a little to “Shake A Hand” by Faye Adams, the song that inspired almost all slow-burn blues ballads in this period:   [Excerpt: Faye Adams, “Shake a Hand”]   However, the real key to the song came when Brown heard the Orioles’ version of Big Joe Williams’ “Baby Please Don’t Go”, and used their backing vocal arrangement:   [Excerpt: The Orioles, “Baby Please Don’t Go”]   The Famous Flames were patterning themselves more and more on two groups — Billy Ward and the Dominoes, whose records with Clyde McPhatter as lead singer had paved the way for vocal group R&B as a genre, and Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, whose “Work With Me Annie” had had, for the time, a blatant sexuality that was unusual in successful records. They were going for energy, and for pure expression of visceral emotion, rather than the smooth sophisticated sounds of the Platters or Penguins.   They were signed to Federal Records, a subsidiary of King, by Ralph Bass, the visionary A&R man we’ve dealt with in many other episodes. Bass was absolutely convinced that “Please Please Please” would be a hit, and championed the Flames in the face of opposition from his boss, Syd Nathan. Nathan thought that the song just consisted of Brown screaming one word over and over again, and that there was no way on earth that it could be a hit. In Brown’s autobiography (not the most reliable of sources) he even claims that Bass was sacked for putting out the record against Nathan’s will, but then rehired when the record became a hit. I’m not sure if that’s literally true, but it’s a story that shows the emotional truth of the period — Bass was the only person at the record company with any faith in the Famous Flames.   But the song became hugely popular. The emotion in Brown’s singing was particularly effective on a particular type of woman, who would feel intensely sorry for Brown, and who would want to make that poor man feel better. Some woman had obviously hurt him terribly, and he needed the right woman to fix his hurt. It was a powerful, heartbreaking, song, and an even more powerful performance:   [Excerpt: James Brown and the Famous Flames, “Please Please Please”]   The song would eventually become one of the staples in the group’s live repertoire, and they would develop an elaborate routine about it. Brown would drop to his knees, sobbing, and the other band members would drape him in a cape — something that was inspired by a caped wrestler, Gorgeous George — and try to lead him off stage, concerned for him. Brown would pull away from them, feigning distress, and try to continue singing the song while his bandmates tried to get him off the stage.   Sometimes it would go even further — Brown talks in his autobiography about one show, supporting Little Richard, where he climbed into the rafters of the ceiling, hung from the ceiling while singing, and dropped into the waiting arms of the band members at the climax of the show.   But there was trouble in store. The record reached number six on the R&B chart and supposedly sold between one and three million copies, though record companies routinely inflated sales by orders of magnitude at this point. But it was credited to James Brown and the Famous Flames, not just to the Famous Flames as a group. When they started to be billed that way on stage shows, too, the rest of the band decided that enough was enough, and quit en masse.   Bobby Byrd and Johnny Terry would rejoin fairly shortly afterwards, and both would stay with Brown for many more years, but the rest of the group never came back, and Brown had to put together a new set of Famous Flames, starting out almost from scratch. He had that one hit, which was enough to get his new group gigs, but everything after that flopped, for three long years.   Records like “Chonnie On Chon” tried to jump on various bandwagons — you can hear that there was still a belief among R&B singers that if they namechecked “Annie” from “Work With Me Annie” by the Midnighters, they would have a hit — but despite him singing about having a rock and roll party, the record tanked:   [Excerpt: James Brown, “Chonnie On Chon”]    Brown and his new group of Flames had to build up an audience more or less from nothing. And it’s at this point — when Brown was the undisputed leader of the band — that he started his tactic of insisting on absolute discipline in his bands. Brown took on the title “the hardest working man in showbusiness”, but his band members had to work equally hard, if not harder. Any band member whose shoes weren’t shined, or who missed a dance step, or hit a wrong note on stage, would be fined. Brown took to issuing these fines on stage — he’d point at a band member and then flash five fingers in time to the music. Each time he made his hand flash, that was another five dollar fine for that musician. Audiences would assume it was part of the dance routine, but the musician would know that he was losing that money.   But while Brown’s perfectionism verged on the tyrannical (and indeed sometimes surpassed the tyrannical), it had results.   Brown knew, from a very early age, that he would have to make his success on pure hard work and determination. He didn’t have an especially good voice (though he would always defend himself as a singer — when someone said to him “all you do is grunt”, he’d respond, “Yes, but I grunt *in tune*”). And he wasn’t the physical type that was in fashion with black audiences at the time. While I am *absolutely* not the person to talk about colourism in the black community, there is a general consensus that in that time and place, black people were more likely to admire a black man if he was light-skinned, had features that didn’t fit the stereotype of black people, and was tall and thin. Brown was *very* dark, had extremely African features, and was short and stocky.   So he and his group just had to work harder than everyone else. They spent three years putting out unsuccessful singles and touring the chitlin’ circuit. We’ve mentioned the chitlin’ circuit in passing before, but now is probably the time to explain this in more detail.   The chitlin’ circuit was an informal network of clubs and theatres that stretched across the USA, catering almost exclusively to black audiences. Any black act — with the exception of a handful of acts who were aiming at white audiences, like Harry Belafonte or Nat “King” Cole — would play the chitlin’ circuit, and those audiences would be hard to impress. As with poor audiences everywhere, the audiences wanted value for their entertainment dollar, and were not prepared to tolerate anything less than the best.   The worst of these audiences was at the amateur nights at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem. The audiences there would come prepared with baskets full of rotten fruit and eggs to throw at the stage. But all of the audiences would be quick to show their disapproval.   But at the same time, that kind of audience will also, if you give them anything *more* than their money’s worth, be loyal to you forever. And Brown made sure that the Famous Flames would inspire that kind of loyalty, by making sure they worked harder than any other group on the circuit. And after three years of work, he finally had a second hit.   The new song was inspired by “For Your Precious Love” by Jerry Butler, another slow-burn ballad, though this time more obviously in the soul genre:   [Excerpt: Jerry Butler, “For Your Precious Love”]   As Brown told the story, he wrote his new song and took it to Syd Nathan at Federal, who said that he wasn’t going to waste his money putting out anything like that, and that in fact he was dropping Brown from the label. Brown was so convinced it was a hit that he recorded a demo with his own money, and took it directly to the radio stations, where it quickly became the most requested song on the stations that played it.   According to Brown, Nathan wouldn’t budge on putting the song out until he discovered that Federal had received orders for twenty-five thousand copies of the single.   Nathan then asked Brown for the tape, saying he was going to give Brown one more chance. But Brown told Nathan that if he was going to put out the new song, it was going to be done properly, in a studio paid for by Nathan. Nathan reluctantly agreed, and Brown went into the studio and cut “Try Me”:   [Excerpt: James Brown and the Famous Flames, “Try Me”]   “Try Me” became an even bigger hit than “Please Please Please” had, and went to number one on the R&B charts and number forty-eight on the pop charts.   But once again, Brown lost his group, and this time just before a big residency at the Apollo — the most prestigious, and also the most demanding, venue on the chitlin’ circuit. He still had Johnny Terry, and this was the point when Bobby Byrd rejoined the group after a couple of years away, but he was still worried about his new group and how they would fare on this residency, which also featured Little Richard’s old group the Upsetters, and was headlined by the blues star Little Willie John.   Brown needn’t have worried. The new lineup of Famous Flames went down well enough that the audiences were more impressed by them than by any of the other acts on the bill, and they were soon promoted to co-headline status, much to Little Willie John’s annoyance.   That was the first time James Brown ever played at the Apollo, a venue which in later years would become synonymous with him, and we’ll pick up in later episodes on the ways in which Brown and the Apollo were crucial in building each other’s reputation.   But for Brown himself, probably the most important thing about that residency at the Apollo came at the end of the run. And I’ll finish this episode with Brown’s own words, from his autobiography, talking about that last night:   “The day after we finished at the Apollo I was in my room at the Theresa, fixing to leave for Washington, when somebody knocked on the door.   “Come in,” I said. I was gathering up my belongings, not really watching the door. I heard it open, real slow, but that was all. After a minute, when I realized how quiet it was, I turned around. There was a small woman standing there, not young, not old. I hadn’t seen her since I was four years old, but when I looked at her I knew right away it was my mother.   I had no idea she was coming to see me that day or any day.   “I’ve been looking for you for a long time,” I said. “I’m glad to see you.”   She started to smile, and when she did I could see she’d lost all her teeth.   All I could think to say was, “I’m going to get your mouth fixed for you.”   She didn’t say anything. She just walked toward me. We hugged, and then I kissed my mother for the first time in more than twenty years.”  

    Episode thirty-nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Please Please Please” by James Brown, and at the early rock and roll career of the Godfather of Soul. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Come Go With Me” by the Del Vikings. —-more—-  Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.  I relied mostly on two books for this episode. James Brown: The Godfather of Soul, by James Brown with Bruce Tucker, is a celebrity autobiography with all that that entails, but a more interesting read than many.  Kill ‘Em and Leave: Searching for the Real James Brown, by James McBride is a more discursive, gonzo journalism piece, and well worth a read. And this two-CD compilation has all Brown’s singles from 1956 through 61.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Just as the other week we talked about a country musician who had a massive impact on rock and roll, one who was originally marketed as a rock and roller, so today we’re going to talk about a funk and soul musician who got his first hits playing to the rock and roll audience.   There is a type of musician we will come across a lot as our story progresses. He is almost always a man, and he is usually regarded as a musical genius. He will be focused only on two things — his music and his money — and will have basically no friends, except maybe one from his childhood. He has employees, not friends. And he only hires the best — his employees do staggering work while being treated appallingly by him, and he takes all the credit while they do most of the work. Yet at the same time, the work those employees do ends up sounding like that genius, and when they go on to do their own stuff without him, it never sounds quite as good. That one percent he’s adding does make the difference. He’s never really liked as a person by his employees, but he’s grudgingly respected, and he’s loved by his audience.   There are people like that in every creative field — one thinks of Stan Lee in comics, or Walt Disney in film — but there are a *lot* of them in music, and they are responsible for an outsized portion of the most influential music ever made. And James Brown is almost the archetypal example of this kind of musician.   James Brown had a hard, hard childhood. His mother left his father when James was four — stories say that Brown’s father pulled a gun on her, so her wanting to get away seems entirely reasonable, but she left her son with him, and James felt abandoned and betrayed for much of his life. A few years later his father realised that he didn’t have the ability to look after a child by himself, and dumped James on a relative he always called an aunt, though she was some form of cousin, to raise. His aunt ran a brothel, and it’s safe to say that that was not the best possible environment in which to raise a young child. He later said that he was in his teens before he had any underwear that was bought from a shop rather than made out of old sacks. In later life, when other people would talk about having come from broken homes and having been abandoned by their fathers, he would say “How do you think I feel? My father *and my mother* left me!”   But he had ambition. Young James had entered — and won — talent shows from a very young age — his first one was in 1944, when he was eleven, and he performed “So Long”, the song that would a few years later become Ruth Brown’s first big hit, but was then best known in a version by the Charioteers:   [Excerpt: The Charioteers, “So Long”]   He loved music, especially jazz and gospel, and he was eager to learn anything he could about it. The one form of music he could never get into was the blues — his father played a little blues, but it wasn’t young James’ musical interest at all — but even there, when Tampa Red started dating one of the sex workers who worked at his aunt’s house, young James Brown learned what he could from the blues legend.   He learned to sing from the holiness churches, and his music would always have a gospel flavour to it. But the music he liked more than anything was that style of jazz and swing music that was blending into what was becoming R&B. He loved Count Basie, and used to try to teach himself to play “One O’Clock Jump”, Count Basie’s biggest hit, on the piano:   [Excerpt: Count Basie, “One O’Clock Jump”]   That style of music wouldn’t show up in his earlier records, which were mostly fairly standard vocal group R&B, but if you listen to his much later funk recordings, they owe a *lot* to Basie and Lionel Hampton. The music that Brown became most famous for is the logical conclusion to the style that those musicians developed — though we’ll talk more about the invention of funk, and how funk is a form of jazz, in a future episode. But his real favourite, the one he tried to emulate more than any other, was Louis Jordan. Brown didn’t get to see Jordan live as a child, but he would listen to his records on the radio and see him in film shorts, and he decided that more than anything else he wanted to be like Jordan. As soon as he started performing with small groups around town, he started singing Jordan’s songs, especially “Caldonia”, which years later he would record as a tribute to his idol:   [Excerpt: James Brown, “Caldonia”]   But as you might imagine, life for young James Brown wasn’t the easiest, and he eventually fell into robbery. This started when he was disciplined at school for not being dressed appropriately — so he went out and stole himself some better clothes. He started to do the same for his friends, and then moved on to more serious types of theft, including cars, and he ended up getting caught breaking into one.   At the age of sixteen, Brown was sent to a juvenile detention centre, on a sentence of eight to sixteen years, and this inadvertently led to the biggest piece of luck in his life, when he met the man who would be his mentor and principal creative partner for the next twenty years. There was a baseball game between inmates of the detention centre and a team of outsiders, one of whom was named Bobby Byrd, and Byrd got talking to Brown and discovered that he could sing. In fact Brown had put together a little band in the detention centre, using improvised instruments, and would often play the piano in the gym. He’d got enough of a reputation for being able to play that he’d acquired the nickname “Music Box” — and Byrd had heard about him even outside the prison.   At the time, Byrd was leading a gospel vocal group, and needed a new singer, and he was impressed enough with Brown that he put in a word for him at a parole hearing and helped him get released early. James Brown was going to devote his life to singing for the Lord, and he wasn’t going to sin any more. He got out of the detention centre after serving only three years of his sentence, though you can imagine that to a teen there was not much “only” about spending three years of your life locked up, especially in Georgia in the 1940s, a time and place when the white guards were free to be racially abusive to an even greater extent than they are today. And for the next ten years, throughout his early musical career, Brown would be on parole and in danger of being recalled to prison at any time.   Brown ended up joining Byrd’s *sister’s* gospel group, at least for a while, before moving over to Byrd’s own group, which had originally been a gospel group called the Gospel Starlighters, but by now was an R&B group called the Avons. They soon renamed themselves again, to the Flames, and later to the *Famous* Flames, the name they would stick with from then on (and a name which would cause a lot of confusion, as we’ve already talked about the Hollywood Flames, who featured a different Bobby Byrd). Brown’s friend Johnny Terry, who he had performed with in the detention centre, also joined the group. There would be many lineups of the Famous Flames, but Brown, Byrd, and Terry would be the nucleus of most of them.   Brown was massively influenced by Little Richard, to the extent that he was essentially a Little Richard tribute act early on. Brown felt an immediate kinship with Richard’s music because both of them were from Georgia, both were massively influenced by Louis Jordan, and both were inspired by church music. Brown would later go off in his own direction, of course, but in those early years he sounded more like Little Richard than like anyone else.   In fact, around this time, Little Richard’s career was doing so well that he could suddenly be booked into much bigger halls than he had been playing. He still had a few months’ worth of contracts in those old halls, though, and so his agent had a brainwave. No-one knew what Richard looked like, so the agent got Brown and the Flames to pretend to be Little Richard and the Upsetters and tour playing the gigs that Richard had been booked into. Every night Brown would go out on stage to the introduction, “Please welcome the hardest working man in showbusiness today, Little Richard!”, and when he finished ghosting for Little Richard, he liked the introduction enough that he would keep it for himself, changing it only to his own name rather than Richard’s. Brown would perform a mixture of Richard’s material, his own originals, and the R&B songs that the Flames had been performing around Georgia. They’d already been cutting some records for tiny labels, at least according to Brown’s autobiography, mostly cover versions of R&B hits. I haven’t been able to track down any of these, but one that Brown mentions in his autobiography is “So Long”, which he later rerecorded in 1961, and that version might give you some idea of what Brown sounded like at the period when he was trying to be Little Richard:   [Excerpt: James Brown, “So Long”]   Brown’s imitation of Richard went down well enough that Richard’s agent, Clint Brantley, decided to get the group to record a demo of themselves doing their own material.   They chose to do a song called “Please, Please, Please”, written by Brown and Johnny Terry. The song was based on something that Little Richard had scribbled on a napkin, which Brown decided would make a good title for a song. The song fits neatly into a particular genre of R&B ballad, typified by for example, Richard’s “Directly From My Heart to You”:   [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Directly From My Heart to You”]   Though both “Directly From My Heart” and “Please Please Please” owe more than a little to “Shake A Hand” by Faye Adams, the song that inspired almost all slow-burn blues ballads in this period:   [Excerpt: Faye Adams, “Shake a Hand”]   However, the real key to the song came when Brown heard the Orioles’ version of Big Joe Williams’ “Baby Please Don’t Go”, and used their backing vocal arrangement:   [Excerpt: The Orioles, “Baby Please Don’t Go”]   The Famous Flames were patterning themselves more and more on two groups — Billy Ward and the Dominoes, whose records with Clyde McPhatter as lead singer had paved the way for vocal group R&B as a genre, and Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, whose “Work With Me Annie” had had, for the time, a blatant sexuality that was unusual in successful records. They were going for energy, and for pure expression of visceral emotion, rather than the smooth sophisticated sounds of the Platters or Penguins.   They were signed to Federal Records, a subsidiary of King, by Ralph Bass, the visionary A&R man we’ve dealt with in many other episodes. Bass was absolutely convinced that “Please Please Please” would be a hit, and championed the Flames in the face of opposition from his boss, Syd Nathan. Nathan thought that the song just consisted of Brown screaming one word over and over again, and that there was no way on earth that it could be a hit. In Brown’s autobiography (not the most reliable of sources) he even claims that Bass was sacked for putting out the record against Nathan’s will, but then rehired when the record became a hit. I’m not sure if that’s literally true, but it’s a story that shows the emotional truth of the period — Bass was the only person at the record company with any faith in the Famous Flames.   But the song became hugely popular. The emotion in Brown’s singing was particularly effective on a particular type of woman, who would feel intensely sorry for Brown, and who would want to make that poor man feel better. Some woman had obviously hurt him terribly, and he needed the right woman to fix his hurt. It was a powerful, heartbreaking, song, and an even more powerful performance:   [Excerpt: James Brown and the Famous Flames, “Please Please Please”]   The song would eventually become one of the staples in the group’s live repertoire, and they would develop an elaborate routine about it. Brown would drop to his knees, sobbing, and the other band members would drape him in a cape — something that was inspired by a caped wrestler, Gorgeous George — and try to lead him off stage, concerned for him. Brown would pull away from them, feigning distress, and try to continue singing the song while his bandmates tried to get him off the stage.   Sometimes it would go even further — Brown talks in his autobiography about one show, supporting Little Richard, where he climbed into the rafters of the ceiling, hung from the ceiling while singing, and dropped into the waiting arms of the band members at the climax of the show.   But there was trouble in store. The record reached number six on the R&B chart and supposedly sold between one and three million copies, though record companies routinely inflated sales by orders of magnitude at this point. But it was credited to James Brown and the Famous Flames, not just to the Famous Flames as a group. When they started to be billed that way on stage shows, too, the rest of the band decided that enough was enough, and quit en masse.   Bobby Byrd and Johnny Terry would rejoin fairly shortly afterwards, and both would stay with Brown for many more years, but the rest of the group never came back, and Brown had to put together a new set of Famous Flames, starting out almost from scratch. He had that one hit, which was enough to get his new group gigs, but everything after that flopped, for three long years.   Records like “Chonnie On Chon” tried to jump on various bandwagons — you can hear that there was still a belief among R&B singers that if they namechecked “Annie” from “Work With Me Annie” by the Midnighters, they would have a hit — but despite him singing about having a rock and roll party, the record tanked:   [Excerpt: James Brown, “Chonnie On Chon”]    Brown and his new group of Flames had to build up an audience more or less from nothing. And it’s at this point — when Brown was the undisputed leader of the band — that he started his tactic of insisting on absolute discipline in his bands. Brown took on the title “the hardest working man in showbusiness”, but his band members had to work equally hard, if not harder. Any band member whose shoes weren’t shined, or who missed a dance step, or hit a wrong note on stage, would be fined. Brown took to issuing these fines on stage — he’d point at a band member and then flash five fingers in time to the music. Each time he made his hand flash, that was another five dollar fine for that musician. Audiences would assume it was part of the dance routine, but the musician would know that he was losing that money.   But while Brown’s perfectionism verged on the tyrannical (and indeed sometimes surpassed the tyrannical), it had results.   Brown knew, from a very early age, that he would have to make his success on pure hard work and determination. He didn’t have an especially good voice (though he would always defend himself as a singer — when someone said to him “all you do is grunt”, he’d respond, “Yes, but I grunt *in tune*”). And he wasn’t the physical type that was in fashion with black audiences at the time. While I am *absolutely* not the person to talk about colourism in the black community, there is a general consensus that in that time and place, black people were more likely to admire a black man if he was light-skinned, had features that didn’t fit the stereotype of black people, and was tall and thin. Brown was *very* dark, had extremely African features, and was short and stocky.   So he and his group just had to work harder than everyone else. They spent three years putting out unsuccessful singles and touring the chitlin’ circuit. We’ve mentioned the chitlin’ circuit in passing before, but now is probably the time to explain this in more detail.   The chitlin’ circuit was an informal network of clubs and theatres that stretched across the USA, catering almost exclusively to black audiences. Any black act — with the exception of a handful of acts who were aiming at white audiences, like Harry Belafonte or Nat “King” Cole — would play the chitlin’ circuit, and those audiences would be hard to impress. As with poor audiences everywhere, the audiences wanted value for their entertainment dollar, and were not prepared to tolerate anything less than the best.   The worst of these audiences was at the amateur nights at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem. The audiences there would come prepared with baskets full of rotten fruit and eggs to throw at the stage. But all of the audiences would be quick to show their disapproval.   But at the same time, that kind of audience will also, if you give them anything *more* than their money’s worth, be loyal to you forever. And Brown made sure that the Famous Flames would inspire that kind of loyalty, by making sure they worked harder than any other group on the circuit. And after three years of work, he finally had a second hit.   The new song was inspired by “For Your Precious Love” by Jerry Butler, another slow-burn ballad, though this time more obviously in the soul genre:   [Excerpt: Jerry Butler, “For Your Precious Love”]   As Brown told the story, he wrote his new song and took it to Syd Nathan at Federal, who said that he wasn’t going to waste his money putting out anything like that, and that in fact he was dropping Brown from the label. Brown was so convinced it was a hit that he recorded a demo with his own money, and took it directly to the radio stations, where it quickly became the most requested song on the stations that played it.   According to Brown, Nathan wouldn’t budge on putting the song out until he discovered that Federal had received orders for twenty-five thousand copies of the single.   Nathan then asked Brown for the tape, saying he was going to give Brown one more chance. But Brown told Nathan that if he was going to put out the new song, it was going to be done properly, in a studio paid for by Nathan. Nathan reluctantly agreed, and Brown went into the studio and cut “Try Me”:   [Excerpt: James Brown and the Famous Flames, “Try Me”]   “Try Me” became an even bigger hit than “Please Please Please” had, and went to number one on the R&B charts and number forty-eight on the pop charts.   But once again, Brown lost his group, and this time just before a big residency at the Apollo — the most prestigious, and also the most demanding, venue on the chitlin’ circuit. He still had Johnny Terry, and this was the point when Bobby Byrd rejoined the group after a couple of years away, but he was still worried about his new group and how they would fare on this residency, which also featured Little Richard’s old group the Upsetters, and was headlined by the blues star Little Willie John.   Brown needn’t have worried. The new lineup of Famous Flames went down well enough that the audiences were more impressed by them than by any of the other acts on the bill, and they were soon promoted to co-headline status, much to Little Willie John’s annoyance.   That was the first time James Brown ever played at the Apollo, a venue which in later years would become synonymous with him, and we’ll pick up in later episodes on the ways in which Brown and the Apollo were crucial in building each other’s reputation.   But for Brown himself, probably the most important thing about that residency at the Apollo came at the end of the run. And I’ll finish this episode with Brown’s own words, from his autobiography, talking about that last night:   “The day after we finished at the Apollo I was in my room at the Theresa, fixing to leave for Washington, when somebody knocked on the door.   “Come in,” I said. I was gathering up my belongings, not really watching the door. I heard it open, real slow, but that was all. After a minute, when I realized how quiet it was, I turned around. There was a small woman standing there, not young, not old. I hadn’t seen her since I was four years old, but when I looked at her I knew right away it was my mother.   I had no idea she was coming to see me that day or any day.   “I’ve been looking for you for a long time,” I said. “I’m glad to see you.”   She started to smile, and when she did I could see she’d lost all her teeth.   All I could think to say was, “I’m going to get your mouth fixed for you.”   She didn’t say anything. She just walked toward me. We hugged, and then I kissed my mother for the first time in more than twenty years.”  

    Episode thirty-nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Please Please Please" by James Brown, and at the early rock and roll career of the Godfather of Soul. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Come Go With Me" by the Del Vikings. ----more----  Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.  I relied mostly on two books for this episode. James Brown: The Godfather of Soul, by James Brown with Bruce Tucker, is a celebrity autobiography with all that that entails, but a more interesting read than many.  Kill 'Em and Leave: Searching for the Real James Brown, by James McBride is a more discursive, gonzo journalism piece, and well worth a read. And this two-CD compilation has all Brown's singles from 1956 through 61.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Just as the other week we talked about a country musician who had a massive impact on rock and roll, one who was originally marketed as a rock and roller, so today we're going to talk about a funk and soul musician who got his first hits playing to the rock and roll audience.   There is a type of musician we will come across a lot as our story progresses. He is almost always a man, and he is usually regarded as a musical genius. He will be focused only on two things -- his music and his money -- and will have basically no friends, except maybe one from his childhood. He has employees, not friends. And he only hires the best -- his employees do staggering work while being treated appallingly by him, and he takes all the credit while they do most of the work. Yet at the same time, the work those employees do ends up sounding like that genius, and when they go on to do their own stuff without him, it never sounds quite as good. That one percent he's adding does make the difference. He's never really liked as a person by his employees, but he's grudgingly respected, and he's loved by his audience.   There are people like that in every creative field -- one thinks of Stan Lee in comics, or Walt Disney in film -- but there are a *lot* of them in music, and they are responsible for an outsized portion of the most influential music ever made. And James Brown is almost the archetypal example of this kind of musician.   James Brown had a hard, hard childhood. His mother left his father when James was four -- stories say that Brown's father pulled a gun on her, so her wanting to get away seems entirely reasonable, but she left her son with him, and James felt abandoned and betrayed for much of his life. A few years later his father realised that he didn't have the ability to look after a child by himself, and dumped James on a relative he always called an aunt, though she was some form of cousin, to raise. His aunt ran a brothel, and it's safe to say that that was not the best possible environment in which to raise a young child. He later said that he was in his teens before he had any underwear that was bought from a shop rather than made out of old sacks. In later life, when other people would talk about having come from broken homes and having been abandoned by their fathers, he would say "How do you think I feel? My father *and my mother* left me!"   But he had ambition. Young James had entered -- and won -- talent shows from a very young age -- his first one was in 1944, when he was eleven, and he performed "So Long", the song that would a few years later become Ruth Brown's first big hit, but was then best known in a version by the Charioteers:   [Excerpt: The Charioteers, "So Long"]   He loved music, especially jazz and gospel, and he was eager to learn anything he could about it. The one form of music he could never get into was the blues -- his father played a little blues, but it wasn't young James' musical interest at all -- but even there, when Tampa Red started dating one of the sex workers who worked at his aunt's house, young James Brown learned what he could from the blues legend.   He learned to sing from the holiness churches, and his music would always have a gospel flavour to it. But the music he liked more than anything was that style of jazz and swing music that was blending into what was becoming R&B. He loved Count Basie, and used to try to teach himself to play "One O'Clock Jump", Count Basie's biggest hit, on the piano:   [Excerpt: Count Basie, "One O'Clock Jump"]   That style of music wouldn't show up in his earlier records, which were mostly fairly standard vocal group R&B, but if you listen to his much later funk recordings, they owe a *lot* to Basie and Lionel Hampton. The music that Brown became most famous for is the logical conclusion to the style that those musicians developed -- though we'll talk more about the invention of funk, and how funk is a form of jazz, in a future episode. But his real favourite, the one he tried to emulate more than any other, was Louis Jordan. Brown didn't get to see Jordan live as a child, but he would listen to his records on the radio and see him in film shorts, and he decided that more than anything else he wanted to be like Jordan. As soon as he started performing with small groups around town, he started singing Jordan's songs, especially "Caldonia", which years later he would record as a tribute to his idol:   [Excerpt: James Brown, "Caldonia"]   But as you might imagine, life for young James Brown wasn't the easiest, and he eventually fell into robbery. This started when he was disciplined at school for not being dressed appropriately -- so he went out and stole himself some better clothes. He started to do the same for his friends, and then moved on to more serious types of theft, including cars, and he ended up getting caught breaking into one.   At the age of sixteen, Brown was sent to a juvenile detention centre, on a sentence of eight to sixteen years, and this inadvertently led to the biggest piece of luck in his life, when he met the man who would be his mentor and principal creative partner for the next twenty years. There was a baseball game between inmates of the detention centre and a team of outsiders, one of whom was named Bobby Byrd, and Byrd got talking to Brown and discovered that he could sing. In fact Brown had put together a little band in the detention centre, using improvised instruments, and would often play the piano in the gym. He'd got enough of a reputation for being able to play that he'd acquired the nickname "Music Box" -- and Byrd had heard about him even outside the prison.   At the time, Byrd was leading a gospel vocal group, and needed a new singer, and he was impressed enough with Brown that he put in a word for him at a parole hearing and helped him get released early. James Brown was going to devote his life to singing for the Lord, and he wasn't going to sin any more. He got out of the detention centre after serving only three years of his sentence, though you can imagine that to a teen there was not much "only" about spending three years of your life locked up, especially in Georgia in the 1940s, a time and place when the white guards were free to be racially abusive to an even greater extent than they are today. And for the next ten years, throughout his early musical career, Brown would be on parole and in danger of being recalled to prison at any time.   Brown ended up joining Byrd's *sister's* gospel group, at least for a while, before moving over to Byrd's own group, which had originally been a gospel group called the Gospel Starlighters, but by now was an R&B group called the Avons. They soon renamed themselves again, to the Flames, and later to the *Famous* Flames, the name they would stick with from then on (and a name which would cause a lot of confusion, as we've already talked about the Hollywood Flames, who featured a different Bobby Byrd). Brown's friend Johnny Terry, who he had performed with in the detention centre, also joined the group. There would be many lineups of the Famous Flames, but Brown, Byrd, and Terry would be the nucleus of most of them.   Brown was massively influenced by Little Richard, to the extent that he was essentially a Little Richard tribute act early on. Brown felt an immediate kinship with Richard's music because both of them were from Georgia, both were massively influenced by Louis Jordan, and both were inspired by church music. Brown would later go off in his own direction, of course, but in those early years he sounded more like Little Richard than like anyone else.   In fact, around this time, Little Richard's career was doing so well that he could suddenly be booked into much bigger halls than he had been playing. He still had a few months' worth of contracts in those old halls, though, and so his agent had a brainwave. No-one knew what Richard looked like, so the agent got Brown and the Flames to pretend to be Little Richard and the Upsetters and tour playing the gigs that Richard had been booked into. Every night Brown would go out on stage to the introduction, "Please welcome the hardest working man in showbusiness today, Little Richard!", and when he finished ghosting for Little Richard, he liked the introduction enough that he would keep it for himself, changing it only to his own name rather than Richard's. Brown would perform a mixture of Richard's material, his own originals, and the R&B songs that the Flames had been performing around Georgia. They'd already been cutting some records for tiny labels, at least according to Brown's autobiography, mostly cover versions of R&B hits. I haven't been able to track down any of these, but one that Brown mentions in his autobiography is "So Long", which he later rerecorded in 1961, and that version might give you some idea of what Brown sounded like at the period when he was trying to be Little Richard:   [Excerpt: James Brown, "So Long"]   Brown's imitation of Richard went down well enough that Richard's agent, Clint Brantley, decided to get the group to record a demo of themselves doing their own material.   They chose to do a song called "Please, Please, Please", written by Brown and Johnny Terry. The song was based on something that Little Richard had scribbled on a napkin, which Brown decided would make a good title for a song. The song fits neatly into a particular genre of R&B ballad, typified by for example, Richard's "Directly From My Heart to You":   [Excerpt: Little Richard, "Directly From My Heart to You"]   Though both "Directly From My Heart" and "Please Please Please" owe more than a little to "Shake A Hand" by Faye Adams, the song that inspired almost all slow-burn blues ballads in this period:   [Excerpt: Faye Adams, "Shake a Hand"]   However, the real key to the song came when Brown heard the Orioles' version of Big Joe Williams' "Baby Please Don't Go", and used their backing vocal arrangement:   [Excerpt: The Orioles, "Baby Please Don't Go"]   The Famous Flames were patterning themselves more and more on two groups -- Billy Ward and the Dominoes, whose records with Clyde McPhatter as lead singer had paved the way for vocal group R&B as a genre, and Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, whose "Work With Me Annie" had had, for the time, a blatant sexuality that was unusual in successful records. They were going for energy, and for pure expression of visceral emotion, rather than the smooth sophisticated sounds of the Platters or Penguins.   They were signed to Federal Records, a subsidiary of King, by Ralph Bass, the visionary A&R man we've dealt with in many other episodes. Bass was absolutely convinced that "Please Please Please" would be a hit, and championed the Flames in the face of opposition from his boss, Syd Nathan. Nathan thought that the song just consisted of Brown screaming one word over and over again, and that there was no way on earth that it could be a hit. In Brown's autobiography (not the most reliable of sources) he even claims that Bass was sacked for putting out the record against Nathan's will, but then rehired when the record became a hit. I'm not sure if that's literally true, but it's a story that shows the emotional truth of the period -- Bass was the only person at the record company with any faith in the Famous Flames.   But the song became hugely popular. The emotion in Brown's singing was particularly effective on a particular type of woman, who would feel intensely sorry for Brown, and who would want to make that poor man feel better. Some woman had obviously hurt him terribly, and he needed the right woman to fix his hurt. It was a powerful, heartbreaking, song, and an even more powerful performance:   [Excerpt: James Brown and the Famous Flames, "Please Please Please"]   The song would eventually become one of the staples in the group's live repertoire, and they would develop an elaborate routine about it. Brown would drop to his knees, sobbing, and the other band members would drape him in a cape -- something that was inspired by a caped wrestler, Gorgeous George -- and try to lead him off stage, concerned for him. Brown would pull away from them, feigning distress, and try to continue singing the song while his bandmates tried to get him off the stage.   Sometimes it would go even further -- Brown talks in his autobiography about one show, supporting Little Richard, where he climbed into the rafters of the ceiling, hung from the ceiling while singing, and dropped into the waiting arms of the band members at the climax of the show.   But there was trouble in store. The record reached number six on the R&B chart and supposedly sold between one and three million copies, though record companies routinely inflated sales by orders of magnitude at this point. But it was credited to James Brown and the Famous Flames, not just to the Famous Flames as a group. When they started to be billed that way on stage shows, too, the rest of the band decided that enough was enough, and quit en masse.   Bobby Byrd and Johnny Terry would rejoin fairly shortly afterwards, and both would stay with Brown for many more years, but the rest of the group never came back, and Brown had to put together a new set of Famous Flames, starting out almost from scratch. He had that one hit, which was enough to get his new group gigs, but everything after that flopped, for three long years.   Records like "Chonnie On Chon" tried to jump on various bandwagons -- you can hear that there was still a belief among R&B singers that if they namechecked "Annie" from "Work With Me Annie" by the Midnighters, they would have a hit -- but despite him singing about having a rock and roll party, the record tanked:   [Excerpt: James Brown, "Chonnie On Chon"]    Brown and his new group of Flames had to build up an audience more or less from nothing. And it's at this point -- when Brown was the undisputed leader of the band -- that he started his tactic of insisting on absolute discipline in his bands. Brown took on the title "the hardest working man in showbusiness", but his band members had to work equally hard, if not harder. Any band member whose shoes weren't shined, or who missed a dance step, or hit a wrong note on stage, would be fined. Brown took to issuing these fines on stage -- he'd point at a band member and then flash five fingers in time to the music. Each time he made his hand flash, that was another five dollar fine for that musician. Audiences would assume it was part of the dance routine, but the musician would know that he was losing that money.   But while Brown's perfectionism verged on the tyrannical (and indeed sometimes surpassed the tyrannical), it had results.   Brown knew, from a very early age, that he would have to make his success on pure hard work and determination. He didn't have an especially good voice (though he would always defend himself as a singer -- when someone said to him "all you do is grunt", he'd respond, "Yes, but I grunt *in tune*”). And he wasn't the physical type that was in fashion with black audiences at the time. While I am *absolutely* not the person to talk about colourism in the black community, there is a general consensus that in that time and place, black people were more likely to admire a black man if he was light-skinned, had features that didn't fit the stereotype of black people, and was tall and thin. Brown was *very* dark, had extremely African features, and was short and stocky.   So he and his group just had to work harder than everyone else. They spent three years putting out unsuccessful singles and touring the chitlin' circuit. We've mentioned the chitlin' circuit in passing before, but now is probably the time to explain this in more detail.   The chitlin' circuit was an informal network of clubs and theatres that stretched across the USA, catering almost exclusively to black audiences. Any black act -- with the exception of a handful of acts who were aiming at white audiences, like Harry Belafonte or Nat "King" Cole -- would play the chitlin' circuit, and those audiences would be hard to impress. As with poor audiences everywhere, the audiences wanted value for their entertainment dollar, and were not prepared to tolerate anything less than the best.   The worst of these audiences was at the amateur nights at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem. The audiences there would come prepared with baskets full of rotten fruit and eggs to throw at the stage. But all of the audiences would be quick to show their disapproval.   But at the same time, that kind of audience will also, if you give them anything *more* than their money's worth, be loyal to you forever. And Brown made sure that the Famous Flames would inspire that kind of loyalty, by making sure they worked harder than any other group on the circuit. And after three years of work, he finally had a second hit.   The new song was inspired by "For Your Precious Love" by Jerry Butler, another slow-burn ballad, though this time more obviously in the soul genre:   [Excerpt: Jerry Butler, "For Your Precious Love"]   As Brown told the story, he wrote his new song and took it to Syd Nathan at Federal, who said that he wasn't going to waste his money putting out anything like that, and that in fact he was dropping Brown from the label. Brown was so convinced it was a hit that he recorded a demo with his own money, and took it directly to the radio stations, where it quickly became the most requested song on the stations that played it.   According to Brown, Nathan wouldn't budge on putting the song out until he discovered that Federal had received orders for twenty-five thousand copies of the single.   Nathan then asked Brown for the tape, saying he was going to give Brown one more chance. But Brown told Nathan that if he was going to put out the new song, it was going to be done properly, in a studio paid for by Nathan. Nathan reluctantly agreed, and Brown went into the studio and cut "Try Me":   [Excerpt: James Brown and the Famous Flames, "Try Me"]   "Try Me" became an even bigger hit than "Please Please Please" had, and went to number one on the R&B charts and number forty-eight on the pop charts.   But once again, Brown lost his group, and this time just before a big residency at the Apollo -- the most prestigious, and also the most demanding, venue on the chitlin' circuit. He still had Johnny Terry, and this was the point when Bobby Byrd rejoined the group after a couple of years away, but he was still worried about his new group and how they would fare on this residency, which also featured Little Richard's old group the Upsetters, and was headlined by the blues star Little Willie John.   Brown needn't have worried. The new lineup of Famous Flames went down well enough that the audiences were more impressed by them than by any of the other acts on the bill, and they were soon promoted to co-headline status, much to Little Willie John's annoyance.   That was the first time James Brown ever played at the Apollo, a venue which in later years would become synonymous with him, and we'll pick up in later episodes on the ways in which Brown and the Apollo were crucial in building each other's reputation.   But for Brown himself, probably the most important thing about that residency at the Apollo came at the end of the run. And I'll finish this episode with Brown's own words, from his autobiography, talking about that last night:   "The day after we finished at the Apollo I was in my room at the Theresa, fixing to leave for Washington, when somebody knocked on the door.   “Come in,” I said. I was gathering up my belongings, not really watching the door. I heard it open, real slow, but that was all. After a minute, when I realized how quiet it was, I turned around. There was a small woman standing there, not young, not old. I hadn’t seen her since I was four years old, but when I looked at her I knew right away it was my mother.   I had no idea she was coming to see me that day or any day.   “I’ve been looking for you for a long time,” I said. “I’m glad to see you.”   She started to smile, and when she did I could see she’d lost all her teeth.   All I could think to say was, “I’m going to get your mouth fixed for you.”   She didn’t say anything. She just walked toward me. We hugged, and then I kissed my mother for the first time in more than twenty years."  

A match official has admitted it was wrong for Black Caps all-rounder Daryl Mitchell to be dismissed followed a television replay in Friday's Twenty20 clash against India.The decision by third umpire Shaun Haig to call Mitchell out baffled fans, with the Black Caps themselves left just as confused after the match.The drama came after Mitchell was given out lbw to spinner Krunal Pandya. Mitchell quickly reviewed after consultation with captain Kane Williamson, indicating that he felt he had hit the ball.That was what the review seemed to show as well, with the "Hotspot" technology showing a mark on Mitchell's bat. There was no such mark when the ball passed the bat on "Snicko", but replays also seemed to confirm an inside edge.But there wasn't enough evidence for Haig to overturn the decision and with ball-tracking showing that the delivery would have gone on to hit the stumps, Mitchell was given out.The supposed inside edge. Photo / SKYHowever, New Zealand Cricket Match Officials Manager Sheldon Eden told Jason Pine that upon review, Haig's call was wrong and explained how third umpire's decisions were made in accordance with the technology."On review, we deemed that he made an error there, there was a hot spot, he should've gone with that but he's the first to put his hand up post the event and say he made an error," Eden said."He deemed on the night that the mark on the bat was from the inside edge of the bat brushing the pad, in hindsight that was wrong, there was a clear inside edge on review at the time."We've got a really strong process around DRS ... there's always tinkering and there's always improvements to be made but holistically it's a very good system, 99 per cent of the time it comes to the right outcome."You've got all this technology but there's still humans behind it operating it ... we want them to interpret the information how they see it through their experience, through their time in the game."Controversy over another third umpire's call in Sunday night's final Twenty20 clash sparked further debate among cricket fans.India's MS Dhoni was hailed as the "master of stumpings" when the veteran wicketkeeper took off the bails in 0.099 seconds. The speed of the event saw third umpire Chris Brown summoned to make the potentially pivotal call on whether Black Caps opener Tim Seifert was indeed out.After stating that in his opinion, there was "nothing behind the line," Brown dismissed Seifert, much to the surprise of commentators and fans who believed the Kiwi's foot was planted behind the line.Tim Seifert was given out. Photo / SkyWhile many still gave credit to Dhoni's fast hands, the decision to call Seifert out didn't go down well, with some Black Cap fans sparking another debate on Twitter."And this was given out," one fan questioned on Twitter, posting a screenshot of the replay."On the line is out. The batsman has to behind the crease, not on the crease," one user replied."We shall need a 4th umpire to review the 3rd umpire. Questionable decision but nevertheless MSD is lighting quick. Classic stumping," posted another. Twitter Ads info and privacyEden said that they were still in the process of reviewing Brown's call but that it was likely to stand."In [Brown's] view, there was nothing grounded behind the line, Eden said. "It was a pretty straight forward decision for him to make. We're still going through the review process but from what we've seen we believe he was correct."  

What can judges do to change society? Fifty-seven years ago, the Supreme Court resolved to find out: the unanimous ruling they issued in Brown v. Board of Education threw the weight of the Constitution fully behind the aspiration of social equality among the races. The possibilities of law as an engine of social justice seem to be encapsulated in the story of the decision — and in the many decades of resistance to its enforcement. Today, there are those who argue that the Court failed in its goal, since actual racial mixing in U.S. schools has declined steadily over the last 35 years. But in her new book, In Brown's Wake: Legacies of America's Educational Landmark (Oxford UP, 2011), Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow argues that the legacy of Brown should be viewed in a larger context. Neither a self-executing mandate for racial equality nor a futile rhetorical exercise, the decision was destined to become a lodestar for a wide variety of reformers in all areas of American society — and beyond. In a series of case studies, Dean Minow's book reveals how Brown, the milestone in American jurisprudence, took on meanings the judges never envisioned, in the hands of advocates who, in 1954, nobody could have expected. Whatever else it was, the decision was that vital ingredient to be coupled with any kind of action: an idea whose time had come. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What can judges do to change society? Fifty-seven years ago, the Supreme Court resolved to find out: the unanimous ruling they issued in Brown v. Board of Education threw the weight of the Constitution fully behind the aspiration of social equality among the races. The possibilities of law as an engine of social justice seem to be encapsulated in the story of the decision — and in the many decades of resistance to its enforcement. Today, there are those who argue that the Court failed in its goal, since actual racial mixing in U.S. schools has declined steadily over the last 35 years. But in her new book, In Brown’s Wake: Legacies of America’s Educational Landmark (Oxford UP, 2011), Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow argues that the legacy of Brown should be viewed in a larger context. Neither a self-executing mandate for racial equality nor a futile rhetorical exercise, the decision was destined to become a lodestar for a wide variety of reformers in all areas of American society — and beyond. In a series of case studies, Dean Minow’s book reveals how Brown, the milestone in American jurisprudence, took on meanings the judges never envisioned, in the hands of advocates who, in 1954, nobody could have expected. Whatever else it was, the decision was that vital ingredient to be coupled with any kind of action: an idea whose time had come. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What can judges do to change society? Fifty-seven years ago, the Supreme Court resolved to find out: the unanimous ruling they issued in Brown v. Board of Education threw the weight of the Constitution fully behind the aspiration of social equality among the races. The possibilities of law as an engine of social justice seem to be encapsulated in the story of the decision — and in the many decades of resistance to its enforcement. Today, there are those who argue that the Court failed in its goal, since actual racial mixing in U.S. schools has declined steadily over the last 35 years. But in her new book, In Brown's Wake: Legacies of America's Educational Landmark (Oxford UP, 2011), Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow argues that the legacy of Brown should be viewed in a larger context. Neither a self-executing mandate for racial equality nor a futile rhetorical exercise, the decision was destined to become a lodestar for a wide variety of reformers in all areas of American society — and beyond. In a series of case studies, Dean Minow's book reveals how Brown, the milestone in American jurisprudence, took on meanings the judges never envisioned, in the hands of advocates who, in 1954, nobody could have expected. Whatever else it was, the decision was that vital ingredient to be coupled with any kind of action: an idea whose time had come.

What can judges do to change society? Fifty-seven years ago, the Supreme Court resolved to find out: the unanimous ruling they issued in Brown v. Board of Education threw the weight of the Constitution fully behind the aspiration of social equality among the races. The possibilities of law as an engine of social justice seem to be encapsulated in the story of the decision — and in the many decades of resistance to its enforcement. Today, there are those who argue that the Court failed in its goal, since actual racial mixing in U.S. schools has declined steadily over the last 35 years. But in her new book, In Brown’s Wake: Legacies of America’s Educational Landmark (Oxford UP, 2011), Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow argues that the legacy of Brown should be viewed in a larger context. Neither a self-executing mandate for racial equality nor a futile rhetorical exercise, the decision was destined to become a lodestar for a wide variety of reformers in all areas of American society — and beyond. In a series of case studies, Dean Minow’s book reveals how Brown, the milestone in American jurisprudence, took on meanings the judges never envisioned, in the hands of advocates who, in 1954, nobody could have expected. Whatever else it was, the decision was that vital ingredient to be coupled with any kind of action: an idea whose time had come. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What can judges do to change society? Fifty-seven years ago, the Supreme Court resolved to find out: the unanimous ruling they issued in Brown v. Board of Education threw the weight of the Constitution fully behind the aspiration of social equality among the races. The possibilities of law as an engine of social justice seem to be encapsulated in the story of the decision — and in the many decades of resistance to its enforcement. Today, there are those who argue that the Court failed in its goal, since actual racial mixing in U.S. schools has declined steadily over the last 35 years. But in her new book, In Brown’s Wake: Legacies of America’s Educational Landmark (Oxford UP, 2011), Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow argues that the legacy of Brown should be viewed in a larger context. Neither a self-executing mandate for racial equality nor a futile rhetorical exercise, the decision was destined to become a lodestar for a wide variety of reformers in all areas of American society — and beyond. In a series of case studies, Dean Minow’s book reveals how Brown, the milestone in American jurisprudence, took on meanings the judges never envisioned, in the hands of advocates who, in 1954, nobody could have expected. Whatever else it was, the decision was that vital ingredient to be coupled with any kind of action: an idea whose time had come. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What can judges do to change society? Fifty-seven years ago, the Supreme Court resolved to find out: the unanimous ruling they issued in Brown v. Board of Education threw the weight of the Constitution fully behind the aspiration of social equality among the races. The possibilities of law as an engine of social justice seem to be encapsulated in the story of the decision — and in the many decades of resistance to its enforcement. Today, there are those who argue that the Court failed in its goal, since actual racial mixing in U.S. schools has declined steadily over the last 35 years. But in her new book, In Brown’s Wake: Legacies of America’s Educational Landmark (Oxford UP, 2011), Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow argues that the legacy of Brown should be viewed in a larger context. Neither a self-executing mandate for racial equality nor a futile rhetorical exercise, the decision was destined to become a lodestar for a wide variety of reformers in all areas of American society — and beyond. In a series of case studies, Dean Minow’s book reveals how Brown, the milestone in American jurisprudence, took on meanings the judges never envisioned, in the hands of advocates who, in 1954, nobody could have expected. Whatever else it was, the decision was that vital ingredient to be coupled with any kind of action: an idea whose time had come. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What can judges do to change society? Fifty-seven years ago, the Supreme Court resolved to find out: the unanimous ruling they issued in Brown v. Board of Education threw the weight of the Constitution fully behind the aspiration of social equality among the races. The possibilities of law as an engine of social justice seem to be encapsulated in the story of the decision — and in the many decades of resistance to its enforcement. Today, there are those who argue that the Court failed in its goal, since actual racial mixing in U.S. schools has declined steadily over the last 35 years. But in her new book, In Brown’s Wake: Legacies of America’s Educational Landmark (Oxford UP, 2011), Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow argues that the legacy of Brown should be viewed in a larger context. Neither a self-executing mandate for racial equality nor a futile rhetorical exercise, the decision was destined to become a lodestar for a wide variety of reformers in all areas of American society — and beyond. In a series of case studies, Dean Minow’s book reveals how Brown, the milestone in American jurisprudence, took on meanings the judges never envisioned, in the hands of advocates who, in 1954, nobody could have expected. Whatever else it was, the decision was that vital ingredient to be coupled with any kind of action: an idea whose time had come. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices