There are times when I wish I was actually older than I am.

I sometimes wish I could have lived in the Deep South in the 1920s and 1930s, witnessing the emergence of blues and country, the two foundations of virtually all popular American music that followed.

Or to have lived in Post-Second World War Chicago, as the Great Migration picked up steam. People like McKinley Morganfield (aka Muddy Waters) moved from the cotton plantations around Rolling Fork or Coahoma County, Miss. to industrial jobs in that great Midwest city. In the process, musicians like Waters would urbanize and electrify the blues.

That music would go on to inspire bands like the Rolling Stones and the whole British rock scene of the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Then again, how about Memphis in the 1950s, as Elvis, Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins tore it up at Sun Records? Or Memphis again in the 1960s, as Stax/Volt Records artists recorded some of the best southern soul ever?

New York in the late 1950s, when Miles Davis and John Coltrane put out Kind of Blue, is another scene that fires my sense of musical romanticism (Check out the film The Sweet Smell of Success -- and its uber-cool jazz score -- for a compelling take on the spirit of that time and place).

However, if there is one performer I wish I could have seen in his or her prime, it would be James Brown.

But which James Brown? The one of the Live at the Apollo period in 1962, the mid-1960s period in which he had his greatest commercial success, or the late 1960s to about 1974, when he moved into funk in a big way?

I would have to say the latter. Personally, I've always had a thing for his 1971 live album Love, Power, Peace ever since I first heard it (thanks, Don!).

I never saw Brown live, but the energy that shoots out of performance footage always makes me wish I had. He appeared at (I believe), the MTV Video Music Awards about two or three years ago. JB gave a quick flash of his magic and just lit the place up. Remember, we're talking a man in his early 70s suffering from prostate cancer. Imagine him in 1970 or thereabouts.

There are lots of fantastic performers out there, but as JB has noted, there are basically two originals: Himself and Elvis Presley.

Rod Stewart once said (words to the effect of), "After Elvis, the rest of us were just imitators."

As we've seen in the last few days, lots of people have drawn heavily from JB's creative wellspring, whether to imitate his spins and splits, or to sample his beats. Very few could ever match his energy and intensity -- his soul power, for lack of a better phrase -- on a stage.

Brown's influence was global, reaching back to Momma Africa and artists like Fela Kuti who were inventing Afro-beat and other modern African musical forms. Some long-term readers might remember this July 6 post:

A snippet of an interview with Malian singer Salif Keita, playing at Harbourfront tonight:

Keita, 56, recalls listening to James Brown's 1962 Live at the Apollo album "over and over -- I didn't even try to understand the words, just the sounds," he says with the intermittent aid of a French translator, on the phone from a tour stop in Washington, D.C.

Asked if the roots of Brown's locomotive funk and pining ballads seemed African to African ears, Keita doesn't hesitate with his reply, in hearty English: "Of course!"

To a certain extent, I say words, schmerds. Soul music is about the feeling. Funk is about the beats and the groove.

Here's what an NYT story said about Brown's role in coaxing those beats out of his bands:

He was black and proud, he was a sex machine, but he was also a brilliant conductor, known for coaxing great performances out of the singers and musicians behind him. That, most of all, is what Mr. Brown did.

So celebrating the James Brown sound also means celebrating the musicians who created it. When he delayed the fourth and final beat of a measure, the drummer Clyde Stubblefield warped time in a way that helped inspire a whole constellation of rhythm-obsessed genres. Bobby Byrd (he of the famous “Yeah!” and “What?”), Maceo Parker, Fred Wesley, Bootsy Collins, Lyn Collins, Vicki Anderson: to love James Brown is to love them too. And not enough has been written about Jimmy Nolen, the visionary guitarist whose spidery licks helped inspire two generations of post-punk bands. (When people talk about “angular” guitars, they often mean “Jimmy-Nolen-ish.”)

Others have made the argument that because Brown couldn't read or write music, he required people in his band who had a solid base in music theory, and jazz in particular, to create his sound. Maybe so, but who hired them? Who provided the creative vision? The people mentioned in the NYT story went on to become influential funk musicians in their own right. JB knew talent when he saw it.

By all accounts, JB was a stern taskmaster. Charles Schaar Murray, author of the excellent Jimi Hendrix biography Crosstown Traffic had this to say about JB after talking in general about the skills of a bandleader:

The records Brown made with his greatest bands are proof of those skills: When his great mid-sixties band walked out on him in protest against his disciplinarianism, his stinginess and his unwillingness to credit them on his album sleeves, they formed their own group, and under the name Maceo and the Macks, created a series of staggeringly dull records ... "

Schaar Murray also wrote this:

Playing with James Brown was a great way to learn the business and to participate in the greatest rhythm machine of the sixties. It was a very poor way to get rich, to get famous, or to try out one's own ideas. Brown would fine his musicians for missing a note or a step, for lateness, talking back, or for breaking his stringent dress code. In James Brown's band, Hendrix would have lasted five minutes. Maximum.

OK, so nobody's perfect. JB was less perfect in his personal life than most. A performing artist succeeds by putting all of him or herself out there on stage. Adult life off-stage requires some degree of self-discipline, such paying taxes or not leading police on a two-state high-speed chase after smoking PCP. :)

But like the Godfather himself once sang:

I got something
That makes me wanna shout
I got something
That tells me what it's all about
I got soul
And I'm Super Bad!

This podcast at Paris DJs has assembled 31 minutes of stellar material from the 1971 to 1974 period. Check it out. I think you'll agree with JB's self-assessment.

Here's JB performing Out of Sight  in the TAMI show. And here's Prisoner of Love/Please, Please, Please.

Here he is performing Sex Machine/Soul Power.

For fun, here he is as a preacher in The Blues Brothers. And what round-up of James Brown video would be complete without Eddie Murphy's James Brown Celebrity Hot Tub sketch on SNL? :)