Stay On Up: Was James Brown mummified after death?
James Brown, the ‘Godfather of Soul’, may have departed this realm on Christmas Day in 2006, but he will never die.
You don’t earn the nickname ‘Mr Dynamite’ and let something as trivial as the expiration of your mortal form stop you from being one of the most beloved and inspirational musicians to ever pick up a microphone.
After all, he left us at the tender age of 73, which felt far too soon. Brown was touring months before he passed, and while he wasn’t the irrepressible dynamo of sheer charisma he was in his youth, sweating buckets to give us mere mortals the funkiest night of our lives, find me a 73-year-old who is.
Like it or not, the reaper comes for us all, and he came for James Brown. On a day that probably made a few soul devotees weep into their Christmas pudding after 17 glasses of Buck’s Fizz and a smidgen of sherry. For fans, that’s where the buck stops. We can move on with our lives and get to the serious business of seeing if we actually can make those tins of Quality Street last until New Years like we said we would (we won’t). But, for Brown’s family, that was a time of real grief.
They had to get to the always tough business of working out what to do with the body of someone who was part of their beloved family. By all accounts, a deeply complicated figure in their family with several stories that leave an unmovable stain on his legacy to boot. A father to anywhere between nine and 13 kids, a grandfather to eight and at the time of his passing, a great-grandfather to four. What do you do with him once he’s gone?
Well, according to one source, you take the sentiment of “he’s never really gone” and you make it all too literal.
Was James Brown mummified after death?!
The source of this is Brown’s chauffeur, William Murrell, whose client list reads like a who’s who of Black excellence over the past 50 years, including Prince, Chris Rock, Mary J. Blige, and many others. In 2014, when he published his book 365 Things That Make Ya Go Hmmm – Wisdom and Wit by William, many of the witticisms that made up the book came either directly from Brown himself or escapades that he and the ‘Godfather of Soul’ went on.
However, it was the interviews that surrounded the book that were possibly the most illuminating. Including one eyebrow raising chat with The Guardian where he claimed that, due to complications with his family, Brown’s body hadn’t been buried nearly a decade after his passing. “He’s been dead since 2006 but he still hasn’t been buried – he’s at his daughter’s house. They muminized [sic] his body so he would never rot, at $140,000 cost. Why? When you got almost 20 kids and six wives it’s hard to get you in the ground.”
Now, this is one hell of a claim. Especially when it comes packaged with a, shall we say, creative attempt at spelling “mummified” and an amount of kids that’s seemingly doubled from the actual amount. But it is true that Brown had his open-casket funeral and then was kept literally on ice for at least two months afterwards while his family bickered about who had final say over his final resting place.
As we found out with Charles Manson, dead bodies that aren’t looked after properly can go quite horribly to seed if not cared for. So, it’s possible that he was quite literally mummified in this process, before he was sent to a temporary crypt at his daughter’s house in Beech Island, South Carolina. From then on, the trail goes dead, with no official announcement about his final resting place. For all we know, he could still be there.
Truly, the ‘Godfather of Soul’ will never truly die.