James Brown's youth was marked by a struggle for survival that made him work as a shoeshine boy when he was still grade-school age. He recounts ...Outside of school I was a hustler...we shined a lot of shoes, delivered groceries, racked pool balls, picked cotton, picked peanuts and cut sugarcane..there were a lot of shoe-shine parlours in those days and they all had licenses. They didn't like competition from freelancers, so they were all the time getting the police to run us off the streets. We had to do a lot of slipping around just to shine shoes. Sunday was the best day - we'd hit all the churches and at a nickel a shine make maybe as much as $20. I'd put some showmanship into it too, popping the rag and beating the brushes behind my back. When we got tired of dodging the police we went to work for Shoeshine King, a parlour on Broad Street...