Being James Brown: Rosetta Stone's 2006 Story

In Augusta, Georgia, in May 2005, they put up a bronze statue of James Brown, the Cheap Rosetta Stone Godfather of Soul, in the middle of Broad Street. During a visit to meet James Brown and observe him recording parts of his new album in an Augusta studio, I went and had a look at it. The James Brown statue is an odd one in several ways. For one, it is odd to see a statue standing not on a pedestal, flat on its feet on the ground. This was done at James Browns request, reportedly. The premise being: man of the people. The result, however: somewhat fake-looking statue. Another difficulty is that the statue is grinning. Members of James Browns band, present while he was photographed for reference by the statues sculptor, told me or their attempts to get James Brown to quit smiling for the photographs. A statue shouldnt grin, they told him. Yet James Brown refused to do other than grin. It is the grin of a man Cheap Rosetta Stone V3 who has succeeded, and as the proposed statue struck him as a measure of his success, he determined that it would measure him grinning. Otherwise, the statue is admirable: flowing bronze cape, helmetlike bronze hair perhaps not so much harder than the actual hair it depicts, and vintage bronze microphone with its base tipped, as if to make a kind of dance partner with James Brown, who is not shown in a dancing pose but nonetheless appears lithe, pert, ready.This article appears in the June 29, 2006 issue of Rosetta Stone. The issue is available in the online archive.Still, as with postage stamps, statues of the living seem somehow disconcerting. And very few statues are located at quite such weighty symbolic crossroads as this one. The statues back is to what was in 1993 renamed James Brown Boulevard, which cuts Rosetta Stone English V3 from Broad Street for a mile, deep into the neighborhood where James Brown was raised from age six, by his aunts, in a Twiggs Street house that was a den of what James Brown himself calls "gambling, moonshine liquor and prostitution." The neighborhood around Twiggs is still devastatingly sunk in povertys ruin. The shocking depths of deprivation from which James Brown excavated himself are still intact, frozen in time, almost like a statue. A photographer would be hard-pressed to snap a view in this neighborhood that couldnt, apart from the make of the cars, slip neatly into Walker Evans portfolio of Appalachian scenes from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Except, of course, that everyone in Augustas Appalachia is black.Photos: James Brown. 1933 - 2006So, the James Brown statue may seem to Cheap Rosetta Stone V3 have walked on its flat bronze feet the mile from Twiggs to Broad, to which it keeps its back, reserving its grin for the gentlefolk on and across Broad Street, the side that gives way to the river the white neighborhoods to which James Brown, as a shoeshine boy, hustler, juvenile delinquent, possibly even as a teenage pimp, directed his ambition and guile.

Posted in: Cheap Rosetta Stone,Rosetta Stone,Rosetta Stone Outlet,Rosetta Stone V3