James Brown was no angel, in fact he was reputedly a bit of an asshole, but unless he has minor children, I hope his assets are disposed of according to his wishes. Is it just me, or do the details of the marriage - as related in the article - reek of opportunism? And if her marriage to the foreign national was under false pretenses and thus void, shouldn't she be prosecuted and fined for that?
I had heard that James Brown would stop a show if any of the musicians or back up singer of the band performed badly. He would request that that person pay him $50.00 in cash as an apology. He was a republican and had visited president Richard Nixon in the White House. When he was at the Playboy mansion, it was said the he tried to get close to Wheel Of Fortune's Vannah White, who had posed in Playboy(he exposed himself to her but Vannah casually moved away from him). He was, indeed, the hardest working man in show business. He wanted to elevate the black community by encouraging black people to fend for themselves. I knew he had married more than once. I knew that his marriage to Tommie Rae was very torrid and I wondered what had happened to his estate after he died.
G,did you see that doc on JB called Mister Dynamite? It was on HBO some months back. I remember a scene in which he was supporting Hubert Humphrey and then after Nixon won performed at his command performance in Jan,1969.
I heard those stories about how he treated the rest of the band members. I think it was Bobby Byrd that said when he was at the mic and he appeared to be counting off to the musicians, he was docking them for being off-beat. One finger meant $5 off their fee, two fingers for $10 and so on...
Legendary jazz drummer Buddy Rich often yelled and harshly criticized band members in his orchestra if he was not happy with a performance. He once had all his orchestra were ordered of the bus on the way to Las Vegas. He rode on the bus while the rest walked in the desert. My sax instructor told me that he and other musicians in his set thought Rich was too wild and his band reflected it, too.