100 Greatest Songs of the 60’s #26 James Brown – Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag, Part I

Released: 1965

Writing in The Observer in 1990, profiler Cynthia Rose was barely into the first paragraph before she was fêting James Brown with the not inconsiderable legacy of inspiring both Prince and Michael Jackson – at this point jointly the world’s biggest pop stars – before then describing him as ‘The Andy Warhol of sound – a man who managed to change how pop music was made and heard.’

Brown’s vocal gymnastics – his unashamedly sexual whoops, grunts and hollers – had been adopted wholesale by both those would-be protégés, but try as they might neither ever got close to eclipsing his showmanship, a direct connection to live performance which at one point saw him playing 300 shows a year.

Despite this monster work ethic there were still nine years between his first hit Please, Please Me in 1956 and Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag, a maiden Billboard top 10 and eventually a track which earned him a Grammy for Best Rhythm and Blues song. Almost skeletal instrumentally and driven on by horns and killer bass riff, it was an inverse wall of sound, with Brown’s vocal gymnastics in a spotlight he was always happy to command. Was Cindy right to compare him to Andy? She may well have been.