Inside James Brown’s House: Can It Become the Next Graceland?
Nearly 18 years after his death, Primary Wave is planning to reinvigorate his legacy — starting with the place he called home.
Mr. David Washington stands on the grounds that he has tended for decades, amid the Georgia Pines that flood much of the property, as the early-morning June heat creeps across the lawns. Now in his 70s, he’s quick to laugh and does so often, each one punctuating his thick, Southern drawl as he tells the story of the day, some 35 years ago, when Mr. James Brown called out to him and changed his life.
It was the late 1980s, and Mr. Washington, as everyone calls him, had gotten off a 12-hour shift at the cotton mill in Graniteville, some 14 miles away, and gone straight to Mr. Brown’s estate in Beech Island, S.C., when the Godfather of Soul summoned him to the house’s front porch. He had a series of pointed questions for his groundskeeper: Did he smoke? Nothing other than his Newports, Mr. Washington said. Did he drink? He and his wife would have a glass on special occasions, but that was all. Well then, Mr. Brown wanted to know, why were his eyes so red? He explained about the mill job; that his part-time work for Mr. Brown was a way to make ends meet; that he had been on his feet, by then, for hours on end. Well, that wouldn’t do, Mr. Brown replied.
“ ‘You go back down to that plant and tell them you’re putting in your two-week notice — what you make down there, I’ll pay you double if you come work for me,’ ” Mr. Washington recalls the boss saying before breaking out in another laugh. “I said, ‘Yes, sir, Mr. Brown!’ ”
Over the next 15-plus years, Mr. Washington became more than just Mr. Brown’s full-time groundskeeper. He became a driver, an assistant, a confidant and, after Mr. Brown’s maid fell ill, something of a jack of all trades. “I started working in the house: running his bathwater, doing his grocery shopping, making the bed, babysitting; I did a little bit of everything around here,” he says. “He didn’t like to be by himself, so sometimes I’d sit right in the house with him and we’d watch Westerns, Jeopardy!, Wheel of Fortune, the news.” Mr. Washington was the one who, in late December 2006, drove Mr. Brown to the hospital after his dentist heard something in the Godfather’s chest and recommended he get it checked out; and he was there, in the early hours of Christmas Day, when the Hardest-Working Man in Show Business succumbed to pneumonia and took his last breath.
More than 17 years after he made the drive back to Beech Island alone, Mr. Washington is still here. He has kept watch over Brown’s house through a succession of three estate trustees, a Christie’s auction, a 15-year legal battle among Brown’s heirs over his assets and, now, under the stewardship of Primary Wave, which purchased the assets of his estate in December 2021 for a reported $90 million. Primary Wave — the publishing, marketing, branding and content firm that touts itself as being in the “icons and legends” business and also has stakes in the rights of Whitney Houston, Bob Marley, Prince and more — acquired Brown’s publishing, master-royalty income, name and likeness rights and the Beech Island property, with its 60-plus acres, the mansion in which Brown lived since the late 1970s and everything in it, including a dozen cars, two tour buses and even the food that had remained in the cabinets since his death. The company also retained Mr. Washington to look after the place. “He’s our resident historian,” says Donna Grecco, Primary Wave’s asset manager who has overseen the cataloging and archiving of the estate. “He’s a treasure.”
Primary Wave, founded by veteran label executive Larry Mestel in 2006, has a long history of reinvigorating the intellectual property of music’s giants, both living and departed, whether through new remixes, samples or interpolations of their work, partnerships with brands (its first major success, in 2008, was a sneaker deal with Converse that featured Kurt Cobain lyrics on a line of shoes) or big-ticket content plays like the 2022 Houston biopic I Wanna Dance With Somebody. Several estate and asset deals the company has done came with troves of personal items and memorabilia that took months to sift through and organize.
But the Brown deal marked the first time the company acquired an actual house. (After finalizing the acquisition of 50% of the Prince estate in August 2022, Primary Wave now also owns a stake in Paisley Park.) And what the company found on the compound, which sits just across the Savannah River from Augusta, Ga., was a home almost entirely preserved as it was on the day Brown died, down to the Christmas tree that still stands in the foyer, with unopened presents underneath.
To walk through its rooms is to step into a moment frozen in time: big, clunky TVs and VCRs by brands long out of business; Christmas decorations on the mantel; a matching collection of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books in his office; phone books on the shelves. Mirrors, elephant motifs, bamboo poles and marble are everywhere. Inside Brown’s personal hair salon there’s a basket of dozens of hair curlers, with bottles and cans of hair product lining the shelves. A mix of cultural artifacts — African, Native American, Indian, East Asian — adorn every room; each light switch cover is a photo of Brown holding a street sign with his name on it. Grecco, with her team’s help and Mr. Washington’s expertise, has been working to restore everything to precisely where it was during Brown’s life, before a series of museums (including the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame) and the one-time auction resulted in some items shifting around and being moved in and out.
“When we first came into this house, there were boxes everywhere,” Grecco remembers. She and a team of archivists went room by room, photographing everything, scanning documents, protecting clothing, entering information into spreadsheets and documenting where things were found and where they should go. “We’ve had this estate for two-and-a-half-years — we’re still doing it,” she says. “You put together a plan of how to approach it from the most delicate and respectful angle knowing that this isn’t a museum — this was somebody’s living space.”
At the same time, the rest of Primary Wave got to work, and the executive team went down to Beech Island to walk through the property. “When we are stepping into the full gamut of an artist’s life and you can touch the cars and go on the tour bus, it helps us with our ideation and what we’re going to do on a marketing level and a content level,” says Ramon Villa, Primary Wave’s COO. “The closer we are to the assets and we see how the artist lived, it helps us ideate more.”
Already, some of the team’s ideas have had an impact. In 2022, Primary Wave licensed Brown’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” to Amazon for its Mother’s Day “Woman’s World” campaign; the ad won a Clio Award in January for best use of music in film and video. The following month, plant-based milk company Silk featured Jeremy Renner singing Brown’s “I Got You (I Feel Good)” in a Super Bowl ad. The Netflix films You People (“The Payback”) and Shirley (“Think [About It]”) also dipped into the catalog, while the upcoming Peacock film Fight Night incorporated “The Boss” into its trailer and The Wonder Years used “I’m Black and I’m Proud” in a period-specific scene. “A lot of what we’re trying to connect the dots to is either period-specific projects in film and TV or just more generally catalog-based projects,” Primary Wave head of global synch Marty Silverstone says. In partnership with Republic Records, the estate also put out a previously unreleased archival song, “We Got To Change” — recorded in August 1970 — in tandem with the February release of a four-part A&E docuseries, James Brown: Say It Loud.
In fact, one of the challenges Primary Wave faces as it looks at content opportunities for the Brown estate is that so many things have already been done. In 2014, a biopic starring Chadwick Boseman, Get On Up, was released to positive reviews. Around a dozen other documentary-style or live performance-based films on Brown have come in the past 20 years. “There’s been a lot done,” Primary Wave partner/chief content officer Natalia Nastaskin says. “But there are so many stories that are part of Mr. Brown’s life.”
Nastaskin cites films such as 2023’s Air, about the creation of Michael Jordan’s Nike empire, and 2020’s Academy Award-nominated One Night in Miami…, centered on a meeting between Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, Sam Cooke and Jim Brown, as examples of how a figure like Brown could appear in a major film without making another cradle-to-grave biopic. “It’s about isolating these very important moments in time and focusing on them, and focusing on ways that they haven’t been dissected before,” she says. A live-theater project is also in the works.
But for an artist who dominated music for decades, then earned a second life as one of the most-sampled talents in hip-hop, Primary Wave is looking far beyond the obvious opportunities to keep Brown’s legacy front and center for future generations. “With new media and emerging platforms and things like [artificial intelligence], we get a ton of incoming traffic with wanting Mr. Brown, wanting to create the next ABBA: Voyage experience that is based on Mr. Brown’s live performances,” Nastaskin says, referencing the successful virtual concert series of the Swedish band that debuted earlier this year. “We’re having those conversations, but we’re very selective because it’s very hard to get Mr. Brown right as an avatar. It has to be perfect, and if it’s not perfect, then we’re not interested in doing it.”
The first thing most people notice when they get to Augusta is the heat. The summer has barely begun, but the heat already wraps the city like a cocoon, standing at 98 on the thermostat but more like quicksand on Broad Street. Anyone in their right mind is indoors, giving the streets an almost Potemkin feel, though one man lounging in the shade with a trumpet outside an empty club called The SOUL Bar hints at the history that thrums below the surface.
Brown was born in South Carolina but raised in Augusta, and the murals, statues and soul references that permeate the city reflect his continuing influence. He’s an icon, a genius and means many different things to many different people. “Entrepreneur, self-made, proud, confident,” says Bennish Brown, president/CEO of Destination Augusta, which promotes tourism in the city. “A lot of Augusta’s history and progress is tied to the way James Brown lived his life: constantly innovating, evolving and always looking for opportunities that made sense.”
Though the Brown house is technically in South Carolina, Augusta lies just 8 miles away. And the city will be an important partner in Primary Wave’s ultimate vision for the house: a Brown version of Elvis Presley’s home-turned-museum, Graceland.
In pursuit of that, Primary Wave will document the continuing restoration process through a development deal with Page Turner, the licensed real estate agent/TV producer who hosts HGTV’s Fix My Flip. “We want people to be able to come and peek behind the curtain of James Brown’s home and have a space with some creative and educational opportunities, too, because education was pretty important to him,” says Primary Wave’s Songhay Taylor, who runs point on all things house-related.
But there is one important distinction between Graceland and the Brown home. “Memphis is a city that gets a lot more tourists and traffic as a music city,” Villa says. “So as we look at what is a realistic approach to having his house be open to the public, we’re working with the city of Augusta as they try to build up their tourism to make a comprehensive plan.” That, Destination Augusta’s Brown says, could include marketing the estate as the focal point of a regionwide attraction with James Brown at its center — “a dream come true.”
To many, Augusta is most synonymous with The Masters, the crown jewel of global golf tournaments, played each April at Augusta National Golf Club. But Brown’s story aligns better with how locals see themselves and their city than The Masters, the Hardest-Working Man in Show Business a better avatar than the golfers who visit once a year to play an exclusive course. Brown, after all, pulled himself up from sharecropping roots to the top shelf of culture; from picking cotton to shaking hands with the Pope; from dropping out of school to working with a half-dozen successive American presidents on free education initiatives for kids across the country. (His estate stipulates that his master-recording royalties support educational opportunities for Georgia and South Carolina youth; Primary Wave has honored this by contributing a portion of all revenue to a permanent trust.)
His story was one version of the American dream — good, bad and ugly. And there was an ugly. Brown’s sterling musical reputation is deeply scarred by allegations of domestic violence against a series of wives and girlfriends, often spurred by alleged drug use, as well as arrests for assault and drug possession for which he served a prison sentence in the late 1980s, among other lurid incidents and accusations, particularly near the end of his life. “We’re not running from that aspect of him, but we’re also paying homage to what he did throughout history, the trails he blazed and the things he stood on from education to Black empowerment, entrepreneurialism, his principles,” Taylor says. “It’s about not ignoring the human elements of him, but also celebrating him as well.”
If things go to plan, Augusta will soon be even more widely known as the home of James Brown — the City of Soul, perhaps, or of Funk — where his legacy and influence are on full display. (As Brown put it in an interview featured in the A&E docuseries, “I created funk. God and me.”) “In order to create an overall immersive experience, we need the city of Augusta to help tell those stories,” Taylor says. “Where he shoeshined, where he buck-danced, where he would do shows, where he went to church — all of those things that are part of the overall story.”
And for some, that story is not entirely in the past. Mr. Washington recounts that long, lonely drive back to Beech Island from the hospital on Christmas Day, passing through the wrought-iron gates for the first time since the boss had gone.
“I come down the hill — you could see right to the porch — and it looked like he was standing out there with his hands folded up,” he says. “I was like, ‘Mr. Brown, you know you got pneumonia, you need to get back in the house!’ And then the closer I got, his spirit just faded away.” For a few days afterward, he remembers the house alarm going off for no reason, lights flickering in different rooms, an unsettling feeling.
He has other memories, too — driving back-and-forth with Mr. Brown to Atlanta, going down to church on Sundays and then visiting Mr. Brown’s mother in the nursing home afterward, stopping for fried chicken on the way back. “I’ve got a lot of good memories of him,” he says. “Any time he’d crack a joke or something…” Mr. Washington trails off, then laughs again. “I could visualize his face right there. I know it’s been some years, but it seems like he’s been gone just yesterday.”
For more exclusive photos of the James Brown home, read here.
This story will appear in the Aug. 24, 2024, issue of Billboard.