The James Brown impersonator who found his own voice at 62

Charles Bradley's story reads like a long wait for a door to open. Abandoned by his mother at eight months, he was raised by his grandmother in Gainesville, Florida, until his mother returned and took him to Brooklyn. At fourteen he ran away from a basement bedroom with a sand floor and spent two years sleeping in subway cars.

The spark came in 1962, when his sister took him to the Apollo Theater to see James Brown. He went home and copied the singing and the stage moves. Later, after training as a chef through Job Corps in Maine, a co-worker said he looked like Brown and asked if he could sing. A push from a crew member got him onto the stage, and he performed with a band a few times before its members were drafted for Vietnam.

He worked ten years as a cook in Maine, then hitchhiked west, living in several places before settling in California in 1977. For about twenty years he took odd jobs and played small shows, sometimes as a James Brown tribute under names like the Screaming Eagle of Soul and Black Velvet. In the mid-1990s he moved back to Brooklyn at his mother's request, still working as Black Velvet.

There, Gabriel Roth of Daptone Records noticed him and introduced him to guitarist and producer Tom Brenneck, who invited him to a rehearsal and let him make up lyrics on the spot. Daptone began releasing his recordings in 2002, and his debut album No Time for Dreaming followed in 2011, with songs such as “Why Is It So Hard”. A documentary, Soul of America, premiered in 2012. One review said he echoed the delivery of Otis Redding. He died of stomach cancer in 2017, having finally become the singer he spent his life preparing to be.