“I love all of you out there that made my dreams come true,” he said in a statement then. “When I come back, I’ll come back strong, with God’s love. With God’s will, I’ll be back soon.”
On Saturday a statement posted to social media said: “It is with a heavy heart that we announce the passing of Charles Bradley. Thank you for your thoughts and prayers during this difficult time.”
Born in Gainesville, Florida in 1948, Bradley was raised in poverty in Brooklyn. He travelled widely, working jobs including being a cook in a psychiatric hospital in Maine, and was homeless for a time. Not long before he was discoveredperforming a James Brown tribute act under the name “Black Velvet”, his brother Joe was murdered.
“It took 62 years for somebody to find me,” he told NPR in 2011, “but I thank God. Some people never get found.”
In a 2016 interview with Rolling Stone, he said his first experience of a James Brown concert, at the Apollo Theater in New York City in 1962, was “breathtaking”.
“I didn’t know who James Brown really was but I wanted to go see,” he said. “When they called James Brown on stage, I’ll never forget they had this purple light and yellow light – my two favorite colors. And when they introduced him, he came flying on the stage on one leg and I said, ‘What in the hell is this?’
“And I was mesmerized. I was just gone. I was just shocked. Shocked. I said, ‘Wow. I wanna be something like that.’”