He grew up in a brothel in Augusta, Georgia. His mother left when he was four. His father was a turpentine worker who was rarely home. The aunts who ran the brothel -- Honey, Sarah, and Minnie -- raised him in the back rooms, and James shined shoes outside the radio station, tapping his foot to the music spilling into the street. He was sent to a juvenile detention center at 16 for stealing a car, and there he met Bobby Byrd, whose family took him in when he was released. Byrd's gospel group, the Famous Flames, became James's first band. The debt was never fully repaid.

The Godfather of Soul. Mr. Dynamite. The Hardest Working Man in Show Business. Soul Brother Number One. Every title was self-conferred and every title was earned. He recorded Live at the Apollo in 1962 by mortgaging his own future -- King Records refused to finance a live album, so James paid for it himself. It sold a million copies. It's still the blueprint for what a live album should be: the band impossibly tight, the audience losing its collective mind, and James screaming, pleading, grunting, and dancing across the stage like a man possessed.

Then he invented funk. Papa's Got a Brand New Bag. I Got You (I Feel Good). Cold Sweat. Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine. He turned the downbeat -- the one -- into the center of the musical universe. Every instrument in the band hit the one simultaneously, and the space between the ones was where the groove lived. He fined his band members for missed notes, for scuffed shoes, for being late. He docked their pay and humiliated them onstage. They hated him. They played better than any band on earth. Fred Wesley on trombone. Maceo Parker on saxophone. Bootsy Collins on bass. Clyde Stubblefield on drums -- his break on Funky Drummer is the most sampled six seconds in hip-hop history. Clyde never got paid for it.

He was complicated in the way great artists are complicated. He endorsed Nixon. He played for Nixon. The Black community felt betrayed, and James didn't apologize. He was arrested for domestic violence, for drug possession, for leading police on a two-state car chase while high on PCP. He served two years in prison. When he got out, he kept touring. He kept hitting the one. The cape routine -- collapsing onstage, being draped in a cape by his valet, throwing it off and returning to the mic -- was theater so perfect it became ritual. He died on Christmas Day, 2006, and his body lay in state at the Apollo Theater. Thousands of people filed past. The Godfather earned the farewell.