With the granite anniversary of Chuck Brown’s birth right around the corner, District residents near and far have yet another opportunity to reflect on the life of the man known worldwide as The Godfather of Go-Go.
Such an opportunity has come in the form of “Soul Searcher: Life and Legend of Chuck Brown, Godfather of Go-Go” a newly released book by go-go historian Sundiata Ramin. As author of the first Brown biography, Ramin said he’s set out to document a global pioneer’s story.
“It’s the first book ever to talk about his life in a sense of where the rhythm came from,” Ramin told The Informer. “Chuck gives the attributes to his mother, saying she recognized that he can play on rocks with sticks, and say ‘That boy’s got my rhythm.’ And then his maturation from Richmond, Virginia to Washington, D.C., where he’s on U Street shining shoes. He’s seen Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Cab Calloway, and even Hank Williams.”
When he died in 2012, Brown received a hero’s tribute at what was then the newly reopened Howard Theatre in Northwest. By the age of 75, he accumulated more than half a century of experience as a musician and world-class performer who influenced the likes of Trouble Funk, Experience Unlimited, Rare Essence, and Junk Yard Band.
Ramin’s biography, not endorsed or approved by Brown’s family, represents his independent research about Brown’s upbringing and career, and go-go’s Diasporic African roots. Brown’s family, in an email, said they read an advanced copy of “Soul Searcher” after learning about Ramin’s endeavor and reaching out to him.
As the family continues to work on a film project about Brown’s life, they are not designating Ramin’s book a biography, rather a collection of publicly available information. Even so, Ramin, who unsuccessfully attempted to secure a foreword from Brown’s oldest son Nekos Brown, posits “Soul Searcher” as a necessity for go-go fans and students of Africa.
“This book is 40 years of preparation because it comes [from] understanding..the African origin of poly rhythms, call and response, and syncopated beats,” said Ramin, a student of Dr. Yosef Ben-Jochannan and Dr. John Henrik Clark, among others. “I was taught to look at the world in perspective from the eyes of Africa. Then I looked at Brazil, I looked at Cuba, I looked at Puerto Rico and I saw the same thing. I saw African people going there and bringing each rhythm.”
Since the June 1 release of “Soul Searcher,” Ramin has spoken before audiences at the Go-Go Museum and Cafe in Southeast, where he currently serves as a museum curator and director of tours. He also presented his book at Sankofa Video Books & Cafe on Georgia Avenue NW.
On Aug. 1, Ramin will appear at “Black Books Matter 2026” at MahoganyBooks in National Harbor, Maryland. His goal, he told The Informer, lies in fostering an appreciation for go-go and its development throughout the decades. The book release comes amid his and Go-Go Museum & Cafe co-founder Ron Moten’s assistance in launching Next Generation Crank, a Gen-Z go-go band with students primarily from Stuart-Hobson Middle School in Northeast.
“There haven’t really been any major documentaries done in the last 10 years on go-go,” Ramin told The Informer. “Not connecting with [the] bounce [beat], grown and sexy [go-go subgenres], the way this museum is trying to do it. We’re literally teaching you the differences between the two from the family tree.”
An Inside Look at Soul Searcher
To write “Soul Searcher,” Ramin watched a series of Chuck Brown interviews, including one the late music legend did with the National Visionary Leadership Project in 2007. Ramin also interviewed Soul Searchers drummer Kenneth Scoggins, Benjamin Walker of Los Latinos, and Go-Go Live promoter and Brown’s stage manager Darryll Brooks, among several others.
Another resource Ramin tapped into was Charles C. Stephenson Jr., the go-go scholar and activist who co-wrote “The Beat: Go-Go’s Fusion of Funk and Hip-Hop.”
“He was the first person I consulted, and he approved,” Ramin told The Informer. “He said, ‘Chuck would be proud of what you’ve done.’”
Stephenson, a cultural and political activist who moved to D.C. from Mount Vernon, New York during the Black Power Era, met Brown during the 1970s while serving as manager of Experience Unlimited, also known as EU. The men maintained a strong relationship for the rest of Brown’s life, the better part of which Stephenson hosted annual Malcolm X Day functions.
As Stephenson recounted, he had Brown’s blessing in uniting go-go bands around activism and spreading uplifting messages.
“The fact that he understood the struggles of brothers and sisters in the streets,” Stephenson said, “and he was going to be their uncle and their father to get them to rise above their current situations. He did that with his music. He did that with his presence.”
This fall, Stephenson, Alona Wartofsky, and Kato Hammond will release “Crankin!: Power and Resilience in Washington DC’s Go-Go Culture.” The book, which details go-go’s 50-year history, initially started as an endeavor to chronicle Brown’s life. As Stephenson recounted, those plans fell to the wayside when Brown’s family didn’t greenlight the project.
“The fact that we didn’t have the blessings of the family kind of deterred us from moving forward,” Stephenson said. “What was interesting about Sundiata was that he knew that, and he said ‘I’m just gonna move forward.’ And with that, he got my blessings.”
In Stephenson’s eyes, Ramin rose to the occasion.
“This is thorough,” Stephenson told The Informer about “Soul Searcher.” “To have a book dedicated to Chuck, his upbringing from where he was born to where he died. And then, obviously, incorporating the influences. There’s no other book I think that could compete with that.”
For nearly 200 pages, readers of “Soul Searcher” learn about Brown’s early life, starting in his birthplace of Gaston, North Carolina, and later when he and his mother moved to Richmond, Virginia, and finally, the nation’s capital. That’s where, according to the book, Brown shined shoes for jazz stars, developed an interest in boxing, and fell for the allure of the streets.
Subsequent chapters delve into Brown’s adolescent struggles and eventual incarceration at Lorton Reformatory, where he learned to tailor and play guitar. Readers also gain insight into Brown’s “backyard barbeque gigs,” his formation of Los Latinos, and ultimately The Soul Searchers, through which he created the sound known to many as go-go.
With each turn of the page comes mention of the various musical genres that go-go encompassed, as well as the events that influenced critical elements of the culture, including the pocket groove and call-and- response.
“Record companies did not know how to structure go-go, because they wanted to put them in the studio and take them away from the call and response for a live album,” Ramin said. “The first live album wasn’t by Chuck Brown, it was by Trouble Funk in 1981. So people have to understand the live sound is what we were pushing for, and the record companies were saying, ‘No, we don’t need that,’ because they don’t want to pay the money for the audience to be there.”
Other parts of Ramin’s book touch on more of the controversial aspects of Brown’s career, like a hiatus between 1979 and 1984 that opened the door for Trouble Funk, Rare Essence and EU. Later on, readers learn about Brown’s reemergence during the 1980s and well into the turn of the century with the help of manager Tom Goldfogle and late record producer Chucky Thompson, the latter of whom he released “We’re About the Business” with in 2007.
Toward the end of the book, Ramin chronicles Brown’s gigs abroad. He also delves further into go-go’s return to Africa, primarily by highlighting his educational work alongside R&B/Soul artist Michelle Blackwell in Ghana and performances by Team Familiar, Black Alley, and Backyard in the Motherland.
In focusing on the continuity of Africa in go-go, Ramin pays homage to the late Mamadi Nyasuma, founder of the 2000 BLACK – The World Percussion Ensemble, as well as the late Baba Melvin Deal, founder of the African Heritage Dancers and Drummers.
“Baba Melvin Deal was talking about the rhythms coming specifically from Nigeria, connected to Shango, the god of lightning and thunder,” Ramin said of his first encounter with Deal, “and he was saying that the guaguancó beat that became popular in Cuba started in Nigeria. Those Africans who were taken from there brought those beats to Matanzas, Cuba, and other areas. So I knew about that in the early 90s, but there was no outlet and very few people knew that.”
A Work of Art, and a Board Member’s Call to Action
“Soul Searcher,” published by Ramin’s Sun Ra Publishing, has as its cover a photo taken from the Chip Py Go-Go Collection at the D.C. Public Library People’s Archive. In the photo, an ever-dapper Brown is performing before an audience, holding his guitar in one hand and the mic in the other as he leads the call and response.
For Paul Coates, the cover provided more than enough motivation to read “Soul Searcher.”
“When I first saw the book, I was attracted and I had to pick it up,” said Coates, founder of Black Classic Press, the nation’s only Black-owned book printing company. “Then when I went inside the book, the professional design continued, which drew me into the subject of the book. I was just very impressed with the whole thing as a package.”
Black Classic Press, launched in Baltimore in 1978, and BCP Digital Printing, launched in 1995, print original works and revitalizes previously out-of-print books by and about Black people. As Coates recounted, his comments about “Soul Searcher” eventually made their way back to Ramin, who had already set out to collaborate with the Black printing company.
“Him bringing the book to us was a double honor,” Coates said. “This is the type of work that we support on our publishing side. You have an insider who knows the music, who’s committed to the music and telling the tale. In that sense, it becomes ground zero, a reference point for folks to follow up on.”
This Aug. 22, what’s been designated as Chuck Brown Day, marks what would have been Brown’s 90th birthday. In advance of that milestone, and go-go’s 50th anniversary, the D.C. Department of Parks and Recreation will host annual festivities at Fort Dupont Park.
For Dr. Deborah Matthews Evans, go-go history and culture must be sustained for generations to come.
Being in a city that’s run by Black people, I’m not sure why we’re not requiring our students or teaching in school Black history,” said Matthews Evans, a founding board member of the Go-Go Museum & Cafe. “It saddens me that we don’t have that in the schools, but I know we have young people who have taken up this mantle because they’re coming to the museum.”
As Matthews Evans explained, Ramin confided in her about “Soul Searcher,” and even brought her on as an editor. She said she gave the book at least five reads, falling in love with what it had to offer readers and novices of go-go culture.
“It was informative, riveting, and instructive,” Matthews Evans told The Informer. “I was really intrigued by Chuck Brown’s early life, him coming from the South, where he lived and the things he did in his lifetime. Often we know artists, but we don’t know their background and what makes them or made them who they are.”
Matthews Evans, a native Tennessean, first saw the Soul Searchers during her summers in the District throughout the 1980s. Through her connection with the late Soul Searcher saxophonist Leroy Fleming, Matthews Evans spent many hours in what was then called The Black Hole on Georgia Avenue NW.
She said that’s where she became one with the sounds and the culture that she currently protects as a museum board member. For her, Brown created the atmosphere that represents D.C. at its best.
“Everybody was having a great time. There was no violence. Nobody was angry. Chuck just had that magic,” Evans told The Informer. “Just looking around, you couldn’t see the floor, but you could see faces of people dancing, being happy and communing with each other and just sort of experiencing something that I don’t think one could experience outside of that venue.”
