MR. KOJO NNAMDIFrom WAMU 88.5 at American University in Washington, welcome to "The Kojo Nnamdi Show," connecting your neighborhood with the world. Later in the broadcast, lessons from a school that provided a haven for multiracial education in apartheid-era South Africa. But first, the passing of a man who created a school of music that is entirely unique to urban culture here in Washington, D.C.

MR. KOJO NNAMDIChuck Brown, the godfather of the go-go sound that was provided a soundtrack for life or has provided a soundtrack for life in the nation's capital for the past three decades, died on Wednesday. He was 75 years old, but the sounds he created here in Washington will live on for much, much longer. That mishmash of funk and R&B, the conga beats blasting out of slow-moving cars and family barbecues, the rhythms that became a personal point of pride of Washingtonians across the city even when those songs never managed to escape far outside the Beltway.

MR. KOJO NNAMDIThe sounds that I myself still listen to every time I'm jogging and I'm sore when I get to the top of the hill and I'm looking for something to take me home.

MR. KOJO NNAMDIAppealing to everyone, Chuck Brown. And joining us in studio to talk about his story, life and career is Andre Johnson. He's a musician and founding member of the go-go band Rare Essence. Andre Johnson, good to see you again.

MR. ANDRE JOHNSONNice to see you.

NNAMDIAlso with us in studio is my friend Charles Stephenson, co-author of the book "The Beat: Go-Go Music from Washington, D.C." Charles, good to see you again also.

MR. CHARLES STEPHENSONGood to see you. Good to be seeing you.

NNAMDIChuck is the architect of a beat that's instantly recognizable to both him and his hometown in Washington. It became Chuck sound, our sound. But before Chuck was go-go, Chuck was this.

NNAMDI"We the People," Chuck Brown and the Soul Searchers' first recording. Joining us from studios in Woods Hole, Mass., is Kip Lornell. He's a musicologist and professor at George Washington University. He is with Charles Stephenson, co-author of the book "The Beat: Go-Go Music from Washington, D.C." Kip, thank you for joining us.

PROF. KIP LORNELLGood afternoon, gentlemen. Sorry, I can't be there. I'm up visiting my mother for a few days.

NNAMDIWell, hopefully, your mother is enjoying some Chuck Brown music also.

LORNELLWhether she wants to or not, she is grooving along.

NNAMDIKip, I'll start with you, but I'll ask the others to weigh in on this also. How did Chuck Brown go from that kind of sound that we heard on "We the People" to the go-go sound?

LORNELLWell, he discovered that if he could play nonstop, add that loud percussion and get in with what was happening with the disco, he could create a brand new sound, and that's what really set Chuck apart with that ability to synthesize all those different elementary together in the mid-1970s in a way that nobody had ever done it before. And once he figured that out, he knew he had something.

NNAMDIWhat do you say to that, Andre?

JOHNSONI'll say that that's absolutely right. But if you listen to that "We the People" song, the percussion is there.

NNAMDIYup.

JOHNSONThe pace is just a lot quicker than the normal go-go pace. So if you slow that record down, you would probably have a record that, you know, would have been -- you would have been listening to today.

NNAMDICharles Stephenson, I knew as a congressional -- an aide, an employee for many years before I knew of your involvement with go-go, how did you get involved with go-go, and what did Chuck Brown have to do with that?

STEPHENSONWell, how I got involved in go-go music is I was living in Southeast, Washington, D.C., and across the hall was a group of young men practicing. And one day, my best friend and I, Morris Johnson, just go over there to see what was going on, and it happened to be Sugar Bear and what was then the beginning of Experience Unlimited, E.U.

NNAMDIWhat was your own -- what was the nature of your own relationship with Chuck Brown?

STEPHENSONWell, as a friend, I mean, I'm a fan. I mean, Chuck gave E.U. their first big break. He allowed them to open up for him one night at the Panama Room. And I'd never forget that night, Andre. He told -- excuse me, he told Sugar Bear, he said, you know what, Son, they like you, stick with it.

NNAMDIAndre, what was the nature of your relationship with Chuck?

JOHNSONIt was also a friend, a fan but is also -- he's also a father figure to myself and countless other musicians around here. Like E.U., he gave us our first break out of the Club LeBaron, performing -- opening up for him. We performed in maybe 50 people were on the floor. Chuck comes on 15 minutes later, and the floor is jam-packed. So we figured, all right, we better take notes here.

NNAMDI800-433-8850 is the number to call as we reminisce on the life and influence of Chuck Brown in Washington. You can also send email to kojo@wamu.org. Andre Johnson, who is black is also known as White Boy, he makes up a different story every time we ask him why he has that nickname, so we're not going to ask him today. We spoke about a year ago, about how Chuck helped to produce the first Rare Essence record put out Body Moves. What did you learn from him in the studio, and how did that help to shape the -- or influence your own music?

JOHNSONWell, what he did was he came down and rehearsed with us a bunch of times before we even went to the studio, and he was just giving us, you know, small techniques, you know, just make sure you pay attention, make sure everybody can see each other. And it's more visual than it is vocal when you're recording because you can't stop the recording to talk. You know, you kind of have to visualize what's going on. So he helped us with all of that.

NNAMDIWhat did you learn from him do you think as a performer?

JOHNSONWell, to be able to watch the crowd and gaze the crowd because he never had a set list, and we don't perform with a set list right now. What we do is we go off of the way the crowd is feeling and where we think that they want to go next. Chuck was, of course, the master at, you know, being able to do that.

NNAMDII'm glad you brought up the crowd, because if you ever went to a Chuck Brown show, you felt like you were interacting with him personally just by the way he called back and forth with the audience and get them to interact with what was happening on stage.

NNAMDICharles Stephenson, how important is call and response in go-go music?

STEPHENSONIt is -- that's the element. It's the heartbeat. I mean, call and response is really what the music is all about. You will not have a go-go if you don't have audience participation. And so what White Boy was talking about in terms of looking at the audience, engaging them and actually feeling them. And that's what go-go music is. It's really about the feel. You go into a room, and you can just measure up the room and look at the audience and the first song really comes from the composition of the audience.

NNAMDIKip Lornell, can you talk about what kind of performer it takes to bring that off the way Chuck Brown was able to pull that off?

LORNELLA consummate professional every time he showed up on stage. I know that he would always, as Andre said, very good at counseling people, cowboy boots, got to have those boots, got to have the hat, got to appear a certain way. Whatever professional way you appeared, Chuck said, you know, you're going up there, they're paying you money, you better be putting on a good show, and you better be a professional about it. And whatever way that manifested itself, that was one of the big things that Chuck emphasized. And man, he could really pull that off too.

NNAMDICharles Stephenson, call and response is also an African tradition.

STEPHENSONIt certainly is. And a lot of the elements of go-go music are African tradition, and a matter of fact, Melvin Deal did a...

NNAMDIThe African Heritage Dancers and Drummers.

STEPHENSON...demonstration -- African Heritage Drummers and Dancers. He did a demonstration at Anacostia Museum. And Rare Essence conga player was there. And Melvin started to talk about the history of some of the beats, and he said that that was the first time he really heard and presented like that. He always knew that the music originated from Africa, but it was the first time that someone had ever laid it out for him like that so...

NNAMDIAndre Johnson, I often get the impression that one of the reasons that people outside of Washington don't quite get go-go is precisely because of the call and response. It's got to have audience participation. It's not just something you want to go and sit down and listen to.

JOHNSONNo, no, no. You need the participation definitely because the crowd is just as important as the band is.

NNAMDIThe crowd is part of the recording in...

JOHNSONYeah.

NNAMDI...if you hear Chuck's recording. Chuck continues to bridge different sounds throughout his career, but one of the most memorable moments came in the early 1990s when he hooked up with the late Eva Cassidy, a local singer with a voice that he and so many others fell in love with. Here are the two of them together.

NNAMDIKip Lornell, what do you think made that partnership between Chuck and Eva so powerful?

LORNELLBoy, I have not heard that in a while, but what struck me as I was listening to that was there's a real spiritual connection there. There are two kindred spirits singing, you know, very different in age, very different in gender and very different in race, but, boy, they did fit together so nicely. And I think they connected from talking to Chuck. As soon as they met, there was just something about them that worked, and, boy, did it work.

NNAMDIAnd the tragic death of Eva Cassidy after that brought out in Chuck something that I, for one, never knew before, and that is he said he couldn't go on to a recording studio for a long time after that because every time he thought about it, he would think about the last time he was in there was with Eva Cassidy. And, White Boy, that's a part of Chuck that a lot of people don't understand. He felt things very, very deeply, didn't he?

JOHNSONHe's incredibly sensitive. You wouldn't know it. If you didn't know him, you didn't really know that, but he is incredibly, incredibly sensitive. I remember when Benny passed...

NNAMDIYeah, Little Benny.

JOHNSON...several occasions, Chuck would just call me, hey, man, what you're doing, and just talk. And you can hear, you know, his voice kind of quiver and because he looked at -- he looks at all of us at his kids for real, and to a certain point, that is true. But you can hear that he was very, very disturbed about Benny's passing.

NNAMDIAnd, Charles Stephenson, as I said, that's a part of Chuck because Chuck had a rough gravelly voice and he had hard upbringing. But in a lot of ways, he was a very soft guy.

STEPHENSONYeah, he was a Leo so he had, you know, but a heart of gold. And he was just -- his heart was so warm. And I think one of the things that, I think, that Chuck wanted to make sure that he communicated to his audiences, particularly to young brothers, is don't repeat the mistakes of my life. You know, he wanted them to understand that for them to move forward with respect and to do the kinds of things on Earth that he was sent here to do that was important for him.

STEPHENSONAnd that was his message. I mean, if you went to any of his shows -- and I use a slang here. I mean, you know, they had the hustlers and everybody would be there, but they would act in a certain kind of way.

NNAMDICorrect.

STEPHENSONThey would not misbehave around Chuck Brown.

JOHNSONRight, right, right.

STEPHENSONSo we say affectionately that he's the godfather of go-go. But really, he's the godfather of Washington, D.C.

JOHNSONRight, right.

NNAMDIIndeed.

STEPHENSONI mean, he raised four or five generations. Kojo, I mean...

NNAMDIHe's the only person who has so many different generations.

JOHNSONYeah.

STEPHENSONI'm telling you, he walks into a room right now, people just stand up.

NNAMDIYeah.

STEPHENSONThey stand up because that's the kind of respect and reverence that he has in this city.

NNAMDIYou get that warm feeling, and I'm glad that Andre Johnson said that we were just like his children because his real children feel much the same way about him. He collaborated with his daughter on some tracks, most memorably for me, and I got to tell a story about this. A few years ago, I was speaking -- I was asked to address the freshman class at American University.

NNAMDIAnd after telling them about all of the things they were likely to encounter during their four years in Washington and all of the national institutions and the diversity they would encounter here, I said, but after you've been here for a while, you will realize that there's one thing that's unique about Washington. And when you go home, you'll probably have a few of them in your suitcase with you. So, please, now, get to know and understand that this is what defines Washington. Here's Chuck with his daughter.

NNAMDIChuck Brown with his daughter. Chuck Brown never got rich, Kip Lornell, but from everything that I have heard about him over the years, all of the people that he worked with respected him because Chuck Brown paid his musicians often before he paid himself. Is that correct?

LORNELLWell, as a professional, he knew he had to take care of the sidemen because they were really the folks that helped him out a lot. And he was generous in other ways as well. I remember when Charles and I had the first edition of "The Beat" out in 2001, we did a bunch of book signings at Howard University and other places around. And Chuck was very gracious in appearing to most of those.

LORNELLAnd we knew quite well that most people were there not to hear the -- our little reading from "The Beat" and to see -- to see Charles and I. Most people were there to see Chuck Brown. And he was very generous. He showed up at virtually all of the book signings, and that was a great help to us. And he did it with graciousness as well.

NNAMDIHonored in several ways, he had a street named after him in the vicinity of the Howard Theater. Charles Stephenson, you were out there last night. What was it like?

STEPHENSONI was so proud. It was festive. People were having a good time. They were calm. I mean, just a lot of hugging and just smiling and just the -- the revelation was just great. It was a positive atmosphere. I just felt so good last night.

NNAMDIThis town loves Chuck Brown and was ready to come out last night and today and tomorrow and for -- to continue to show that love. In 2005, Chuck Brown was named an NEA National Heritage Fellow, our nation's highest honor for people practicing folk and traditional arts. And in the music industry, he may not have got that much recognition, but a few years ago, he was nominated for his first Grammy on a song he cut with Jill Scott. Andre Johnson, how important was that to him?

JOHNSONThat was -- he was very proud because he was -- he loved that song, and to finally get that type of recognition -- that type of national recognition, he's very proud of that. He called and told me, you know, when he got nominated.

NNAMDIAnd the reason -- one of the reasons I like the fact that he got nominated for that song is that if you listen to "We the People," his first recording, it was all about love.

JOHNSONRight. That's right.

NNAMDIAnd if you listen to this recording with Jill Scott some 37 years later, same thing.

NNAMDIChuck Brown and Jill Scott. Here is Joe in Northwest, D.C. Joe, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

JOEHey, gentlemen, it's a pleasure. Andre, it's a pleasure. Gentlemen with the book, I never read it, but plan to. I had this (unintelligible)...

NNAMDIIt's called "The Beat."

JOEI'm sorry.

NNAMDIThe book is called "The Beat: Go-Go Music from Washington, D.C." But go ahead, Joe.

JOEOh, yes, absolutely. Thanks for putting it out, though. I just wanna say real quick with a pause afterward, where would we be without go-go music in the next (word?) ? I've been, you know, I'm 42...

NNAMDIUh-oh, you're breaking up on us, Joe. We can't hear you anymore. Uh-oh, Joe seems to have dropped off. But Charles Stephenson...

STEPHENSONWell, that's a very good question. I'll tell you. We would -- we would miss a lot of smiles and miss a lot of good times. I just say, again, between Chuck and Rare Essence and EU and Trouble and Big G and all the other bands, I mean, all the children that they've raised in the city that people really don't realize that they babysat at the go-gos for years and years.

STEPHENSONI mean, and most of them turned out to be very, very positive. Unfortunately, we hear about the negative, but on the positive side, they have been our parents for a lot of the children coming up in this town. So without go-go, I just -- I don't even wanna think about it.

NNAMDIAndre Johnson, where would you be without go-go?

JOHNSONYou know, I absolutely have no idea. This is all that I've ever wanted to do because we started when we were, like, 12 years old, and this is all I've ever wanted to do. So I have no idea what I'll be doing.

NNAMDIKip Lornell, will go-go go in the pantheon of Washington music eventually?

LORNELLOh, it's at the core. There's no doubt about it. It is a unique art form to Washington, D.C. And I'm working on a book on bluegrass in D.C., but bluegrass is important in Washington, D.C., but it's not unique to Washington, D.C. And that's really what sets go-go apart the fact that it's from Washington, D.C. It's a point of pride. It's a sense that a lot of black Americans in Washington can rally around and it's not going away any time soon.

NNAMDIWe did a history -- we did a show about the history of go-go back on May 5, 2011. It's available at our website, kojoshow.org. Both Andre and Kip were involved in that show. But, Charles, I want to see if you remember. There was one summer in D.C. -- it really only happened for one summer when there was a unique phenomenon occurring around D.C. And somehow or the other, Chuck Brown captured it on record that every time I hear that record, I reflect on that unique phenomenon. We're gonna talk about it afterwards, but listen to the record.

STEPHENSONOh, he was.

NNAMDIFor those who were not living in Washington at that time, you have to understand that there were as a phenomenon of young men riding bicycles around the city in very large groups just blowing whistles. What was that all about?

STEPHENSONI have no idea. But it was a fury, it was a lot of fun. It was a lot whistle blowing, and it was all over the city.

NNAMDIAnd I met guys who are in their 50s now who are part of those groups. This guy said, yeah, I was one of those.

STEPHENSONThat's right. But what about...

NNAMDIWhat was that all about, White Boy?

JOHNSONYou know, I'm not sure because I was very young at that point. I'm not sure.

NNAMDIToo young to even understand.

STEPHENSONBut they were blowing them in the clubs. They were blowing them everywhere, not just on their bikes. I mean, the whistle blowing was everywhere during that period of time.

NNAMDIEverybody had a whistle. Did you know about that one, Kip Lornell?

LORNELLOnly in retrospect 'cause I was not in Chocolate City at that time.

NNAMDIYeah. Well, you had to be here to see large groups of young men riding bicycles and blowing whistles. We have been spending this time reflecting on the lifetimes and influence of Chuck Brown who died this past Wednesday. And I guess it's all captured in a few words that were in the introduction to one of Chuck's albums because this was really, in a lot of ways, Chuck Brown's town.

NNAMDIIs it -- Charles Stephenson, is this Chuck's town?

STEPHENSONThis is definitely Chuck's town and just one bit of unfinished business.

NNAMDIYes.

STEPHENSONAnd that's getting Chuck inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

NNAMDIOh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

STEPHENSONIt is one, I mean, and because, you know, his influence musically around the country is magnificent, he's, I mean, you know, Jill Scott, I mean, Kurtis Blow, you just look at the music flowing in the records, musicians -- his influence. I think he's done enough to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

NNAMDIDavid Simon, the creator of "The Wire," tweeted about that yesterday. It's about time for us to get Chuck into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

STEPHENSONAll right. Okay. It's about time. It's about time. That's right.

NNAMDICharles Stephenson, thank you so much for joining us.

STEPHENSONThank you for having me.

NNAMDICharles is the co-author of the book, "The Beat: Go-Go Music from Washington, D.C." His co-author on that book is Kip Lornell. Kip is a musicologist and professor at George Washington University. Kip, thank you for joining us.

LORNELLA pleasure, gentleman.

NNAMDIAnd Andre Johnson is a musician and a founding member of the go-go band Rare Essence. Andre, always a pleasure.

JOHNSONThank you, Kojo.

NNAMDIWe're gonna take a short break. When we come back, lessons from a school that provided a haven for a multiracial education in apartheid era South Africa. I'm Kojo Nnamdi.