Black Caesar (pt. 2)

Bob Davis, creator of the essential Soul-Patrol website, watched the Rev. Al Sharpton deliver his eulogy for James Brown on Friday at the Apollo. (Davis has posted a RealAudio file of interviews he conducted that day.) Here, with Bob Davis’s kind permission, is a little of what he wrote about it:

BOB DAVIS: "Rev. Al" gave the eulogy at around 6:30 pm. He "tore the roof off the sucka" as he described in detail just how James Brown told him how he created FUNK MUSIC ("the half note") and revolutionized the last 50 years of music, but also spoke of how James Brown was a mentor to him and to all of those around him.

"Rev. Al" spoke of how James Brown totally eradicated the term "NEGRO" from our collective vocabularies with a single song. "Rev. Al" talked about a conversation that he had recently with James Brown. He said that James Brown told him that he was very disturbed about the things that were being said in today's music, and that he felt that they were destructive. And then "Rev. Al" ROCKED the Apollo in a way that ONLY a Baptist preacher from the ghetto can and said…

WE CAN'T HAVE PEOPLE CALLING THEIR MOTHERS HOES, THEIR WIVES BITCHES AND THEMSELVES NIGGERS ANYMORE!!!

"Rev. Al" is not a person that I had much respect for prior to this day. But I watched Rev. Al stand silently next to the open casket of James Brown damn near all day long, mostly in silence, watching over his mentor, and then at 6:30 deliver a great speech in tribute to the man who invented FUNK MUSIC and truly created a "revolution of the mind" inside
of the heads of several generations of people around the world. And as I observed Alfred Sharpton today on December 29, 2006, I saw someone who just earned my respect.