James Brown, rest in peace

As many of you probably know already, James Brown — the Godfather of Soul — died on Christmas morning. He was 73 years old.

Like most Americans, I’d been familiar with Brown’s music since childhood, but I didn’t really learn to appreciate it until one evening in Syria nearly seven years ago. I wrote about this epiphanic James Brown experience in an essay called Anthem Soul, which originally appeared in World Hum — and later appeared as both a radio essay on NPR, and a chapter in The Best Travelers’ Tales 2004.

In the essay, I recall the oddly patriotic experience of eavesdropping on the sound of James Brown music through the wall of my hotel in Aleppo, concluding that I’d come to find my patriotic anthems not in songs like the “Star-Spangled Banner,” but “within warmer, more infectious rhythms.”

My full James Brown essay can be found here.