商品簡介
National Book Award winner James McBride goes in search of the “real” James Brown—and his surprising journey illuminates the ways in which our cultural heritage has been shaped by Brown's legacy.
A product of the complicated history of the American South, James Brown was a cultural shape-shifter who arguably had the greatest influence of any artist on American popular music. Brown was long a figure of fascination for James McBride, a noted professional musician as well as a writer. When he received a tip that promised to uncover the man behind the myth, McBride set off to follow a trail to better understand the personal, musical, and societal influences that created this immensely troubled, misunderstood, and complicated soul genius.
Kill 'Em and Leave is more than a book about James Brown. Brown's rough-and-tumble life, through McBride's lens, is an unsettling metaphor for American life: the tension between North and South, black and white, rich and poor. McBride's travels take him to forgotten corners of Brown's never-before-revealed history: the country town where Brown's family and thousands of others were displaced by America's largest nuclear power bomb-making facility; a South Carolina field where a long-forgotten cousin recounts, in the dead of night, a fuller history of Brown's sharecropping childhood, which until now has been a mystery. McBride seeks out the American expatriate in England who co-created the James Brown sound, visits the trusted right-hand manager who worked with Brown for forty-one years, and interviews Brown's most influential nonmusical creation, his “adopted son,” the Reverend Al Sharpton. He describes the stirring visit of Michael Jackson to the Augusta, Georgia,funeral home where the King of Pop sat up all night with the body of his musical godfather, spends hours talking with Brown's first wife, and lays bare the Dickensian legal contest over James Brown's estate, a fight that has consumed careers; prevented any money from reaching the poor schoolchildren in Georgia and South Carolina, as instructed in his will; cost Brown's estate millions in legal fees; and left James Brown's body to lie for more than eight years in a gilded coffin in his daughter's yard in South Carolina.
James McBride is one of the most distinctive and electric literary voices in America today, and part of the pleasure of his narrative is being in his presence, coming to understand Brown through McBride's own insights as a black musician with Southern roots. Kill 'Em and Leave is a song unearthing and celebrating James Brown's great legacy: the cultural landscape of America today.
Praise for Kill 'Em and Leave
“The definitive look at one of the greatest, most important entertainers, The Godfather, Da Number One Soul Brother, Mr. Please, Please Himself—JAMES BROWN.”—Spike Lee
“Please, please, please: Can anybody tell us who and what was James Brown? At last, the real deal: James McBride on James Brown is the matchup we've been waiting for, a musician who came up hard in Brooklyn with JB hooks lodged in his brain, a monster ear for the truth, and the chops to write it. This is no celeb bio but a compelling personal quest—so very timely, angry, hilarious, and as irresistible as any James Brown beat.”—Gerri Hirshey, author ofNowhere to Run: The Story of Soul Music
“An unconventional and fascinating portrait of Soul Brother No. 1 and the significance of his rise and fall in American culture.”—Kirkus Reviews
From the Hardcover edition.
作者簡介
James McBride is the author of the National Book Award winner and New York Times bestseller The Good Lord Bird, as well as the bestselling novelsSong Yet Sung and Miracle at St. Anna, and the #1 New York Times bestsellerThe Color of Water. He is also a saxophonist and composer who teaches music to children in the Red Hook, Brooklyn, housing projects where he was born, and a Distinguished Writer in Residence at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at NYU.
