Bobby Byrd (R.I.P.)

found this plain layout at HOT FreeLayouts.com :: MyHotCommentsIn the afternoon of September 12th, 2007, the great Bobby Byrd made his transition, comforted by Vicki Anderson-Byrd, his wife of 37 years. His family and friends have decided to create this MySpace page to remember and honor the legacy of this legendary singer, songwriter, arranger, musician and showman. We feel that his impact on popular music culture should be remembered forever, and the songs that he left us behind should be passed on to the next generations. Bobby Byrd must never be forgotten, and by visiting this site and making friends, you are paying your own contribution to this legacy.Bobby Byrd was born on August 15th, 1934, in Toccoa, Georgia. As a teenager, he met James Brown when he visited a Georgia youth detention facility, where Brown served time for juvenile offenses. It is often rumoured that Byrd was also an inmate, but he actually was a member of a local baseball team that played against the prison team. Brown had already worked on his reputation as a singer (his fellow inmates called him “Musicbox”), and the young Bobby was impressed. When James Brown was finally released, it was Bobby Byrd who waited at the gate and invited him to live with his family. Not long after that, James joined the Avons, a vocal group that Bobby had founded. The rest is history, and it is pretty safe to say that James Brown’s career would have taken a different direction if it wasn’t for Byrd. The Avons soon changed their name to The Flames and later The Famous Flames, and James eventually became the lead singer. The group recorded many hits together, such as “Please, please, please”, “Think”, “Bewildered”, “I’ll go crazy” and more. In the early 1960s, they became known for their powerful stage performances and began to play all over the country, at the nation’s finest venues like the “Apollo” in New York City, “The Regal” in Chicago and “The Royal Theatre” in Baltimore. At the now famous 1964 T.A.M.I. show in Santa Monica, Byrd and Brown upstaged even the Rolling Stones. That same year, they also appeared in the Frankie Avalon motion picture “Ski Party”. Until the group disbanded in 1968, they made several appearances on national television shows like “American Bandstand” and the “Ed Sullivan Show”.After the group split up, Byrd stayed with James Brown and worked as back-up-singer, organist, Emcee, dancer. In 1970 he married Vicki Anderson, Brown’s female lead vocalist at that time. Besides being co-vocalist on hits like “Licking Stick – Licking Stick”, “Get up, Get into it, Get involved” and “Sex Machine”, Byrd recorded many solo hits, among them “I need help”, “You gotta have a job (if you don’t work, you can’t eat)” and most importantly “I know you got Soul”, which was sampled by Public Enemy, Eric B. & Rakim, Ice Cube, LL Cool J and A Tribe called Quest. In October 2004, the track was even featured on the “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas” soundtrack.Bobby Byrd left James Brown in 1973 to pursue his solo career, collaborating with Henry Stone. Some of the sides he cut – like “Headquarters(Augusta, G.A.)”, “Back from the dead” and “I’m on the Move” are heavily saught after in the global Funk scene. He continued touring and in 1988 re-united many of James Brown’s former associate artists like Maceo Parker, Pee Wee Ellis, Fred Wesley, Lyn Collins, Marva Whitney and Martha High for the Bobby Byrd Show, which toured Europe with the help of Serge Dodwell until the late 1990s, when Bobby had to fight cancer for the first time. In the summer of 2005, he returned to Europe one more time to perform at the Supernatural Festival in Utrecht, Holland, backed up by the Soulpower Allstars, his wife Vicki Anderson-Byrd and son Bart. A European tour planned for later that year never materialized, consequently the performance in Holland was Bobby’s last apart from a short appearance at James Brown’s funeral in December 2006. His wish was to perform in front of a large audience one more time in his life, and he was looking forward to appear in Belgrade, Serbia, on September 22nd, 2007, for a James Brown Tribute show with Marva Whitney, Martha High, Fred Wesley and Pee Wee Ellis. It was not meant to me. Bobby Byrd passed away only one week before this concert.