I said I wouldn't post this week but I had to pay my respects to the Godfather of Soul...
When my parents got divorced and my father moved back to his home state of Indiana, I spent my summers there with him so we could get our quality father-daughter time. Before I started taking the plane alone, every June my father would drive to Maryland to pick me up and together we would head back up the road to Indiana, driving for twelve hours. Whew!! I remember so much about those trips on highway I-76 to I-80. I remember stopping at the different rest stops always excited to get McDonald's or Roy Rogers, and I can recall the feeling of putting my hands out the window catching the summer air on my fingertips, but the biggest thing that stands out in my memory from those trips was the music.
When traveling across the country back in those days, the radio would go out and you couldn't catch a decent station. So my father would dig through his stash of tapes and pop one into the cassette player (remember those?), and thus began my love for soul music and my relationship with James Brown. I loved listening to The Temptations, Smokey Robinson, and Gladys Knight & the Pips but it was Mr. James Brown that always made my fingers snap and made me wish I was not in the car but on a dance floor shaking my little hips. I loved the power in his voice and the passion in his music.
I kept this picture of James Brown from a 2002 issue of Vanity Fair. The picture itself was taken in 1980. I kept it among all my other magazine clippings and whenever I came across it I would think to myself that I had to use it for something. Sadly it's for this occasion, in remembrance, but with love, I share it with my earliest memories of Mr. James Brown.
