A study in contrasts, James Brown was an icon and iconoclast, an artist and an outlaw, a public persona and a private man who kept family and friends close.

In his 73 years, he succeeded as a peacemaker, a successful scribe of political polemics, a business tycoon and generous philanthropist, all the while altering the face of popular music time and time again.

It's little wonder he was known as the Hardest Working Man in Show Business.

Although the details of Mr. Brown's early life remain sketchy, he has said he was born May 3, 1933, in a small country cabin outside of Barnwell, S.C. As a child, he was sent to live with an aunt in Augusta, growing up in a reputed brothel on Twiggs Street. It was in Augusta that he took his first steps into show business. With money a constant worry for a young black man growing up during the Depression in the segregated South, Mr. Brown earned change dancing for soldiers and polishing shoes on the corner of Broad Street and what is now James Brown Boulevard.

He was arrested for breaking into cars at 16 and spent four years in the Georgia State Correctional system. His salvation came, appropriately enough, in the form of a gospel group. Mr. Brown attracted the interest of Bobby Byrd, a singer and piano player in a group called the Gospel Starlighters. By 1954, Mr. Brown was an official member and soon had taken over, renaming the act James Brown and the Famous Flames. Using gospel, blues and early soul records as a template, he tapped into a singular style that would come to mark his entre into popular culture.

Mr. Brown once said that if he could only perform a single song from his extensive catalog, it would be Please, Please, Please. That, he explained, is where it all started.

Recorded in a small Macon, Ga., studio in 1956, the song combined the emotional honesty of the church music Mr. Brown had grown up with and married it to decidedly secular lyrics. The results were galvanizing and, combined with Mr. Brown and the Flames' energetic and athletic performance style, made the band popular first on the regional circuit and then the national stage.

A focused businessman from the start, Mr. Brown paid careful attention not only to the details of performance, but also to the details of band bookings, record sales and writing royalties. Over the course of his career, he expanded his interests, eventually owning a string of radio stations, including WRDW and WAAW in Augusta, restaurants and a popular night club. Still, Mr. Brown understood that the core of his empire was always the music, going as far as personalizing his private jet with the titles of his hits, carefully painted alongside the fuselage door. When his record company balked at the idea of a live album, Mr. Brown paid for the project out of his own pocket. The album, titled Live at the Apollo, eventually reached No. 2 on Billboard's album chart and is still considered one of the finest live sets ever recorded. Even performances were treated like a business, with Mr. Brown levying fines in the middle of performances for missed cues, unshined shoes and other unprofessional behavior.

Having already reinvented soul music and setting the standard for every R&B record that would follow, Mr. Brown could have easily rested on his laurels. Instead, he chose to confound expectations once again, replacing harmony with the hard, sharp rhythms and textured arrangements which would become known as funk.

Legend has it that Mr. Brown, working with Mr. Byrd, penned the earth-shaking Papa's Got a Brand New Bag in a single evening. True or not, the resulting song was as much a mission statement as a musical moment. The seemingly simple song, which appeared to cast the entire band in the role of rhythm section, featured an insistent beat punctuated by blaring horns and Mr. Brown's guttural growl that commanded audiences not only to listen, but to move.

Given his interest in dance-ready grooves, it's not surprising that Mr. Brown became an early touchstone for the disco movement. A string of albums on the Polydor label in the 1970s with titles such as Everybody's Doin' the Hustle & Dead On the DoubleBump and The Original Disco Man featured Mr. Brown's distinctively funky style retooled for the burgeoning dance club scene.

Still, it was the thousands of tracks Mr. Brown never knowingly played on that came to represent one of his most enduring contributions. Recognized as one of the most sampled artists in history, Mr. Brown and his funky sound were adopted by early rap artists as the perfect template for the emerging musical form. The track Funky Drummer was a particular favorite and has been acknowledged as the rhythmic root on more than 1,200 separate songs.

As a musician, the sound of James Brown can be heard in the music of everyone from Otis Redding to Usher, from the Beatles to Beastie Boys. His singular stage style was co-opted by artists as diverse as George Clinton, Prince and Michael Jackson, who has admitted that Mr. Brown was an early dance inspiration.

Had Mr. Brown remained merely a musician, his status as one of the most important artists of the 20th century would have been assured. But both aware of and active in politics, Mr. Brown believed his fame should be a platform, one he used to speak out on issues such as race, education, poverty and drugs - issues that hit close to home.

Whether offering counsel to presidents and civil rights leaders or penning anthems of empowerment such as Say It Loud (I'm Black and I'm Proud), Mr. Brown put his money and his mouth into action time and time again. In 1968, he was called on by the city of Boston to quiet race riots in the wake of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. In 1970, he helped end a deadly riot in Augusta. Although his causes and concerns were often played out in the public eye, the target was always the common man, the fan struggling to make ends meet or encountering indifference and injustice because of race, creed or color.

His image was sometimes tarnished by his own errors in judgement, most notably a police chase through Augusta in 1988 that ended in his arrest and eventual six-year prison sentence. He has been arrested for possession of drugs and assaulting his wives. He has been in trouble with the IRS through the years and his belongings, cars, even his home have been sold to pay back taxes. But he always recovered from personal and financial tragedy and preserved his commitment to those less fortunate until the end of his life. His yearly turkey and toy giveaways, held at Thanksgiving and Christmas respectively, became important local events.

In fact, Mr. Brown's final public appearance was his annual toy giveaway at the Imperial Theatre just three days before he died. It seems fitting that Mr. Brown's last appearance wasn't facing an anonymous audience through the harsh glare of footlights but meeting fans one-on-one.

He offered them season's greetings for a Christmas he would never celebrate.