Philadelphia ? James Brown, 73, the dynamic performer and incomparable bandleader who changed the shape of popular music in America and the world, and was known the “Godfather of Soul” and “The Hardest Working Man in Show Business,” died Monday.

Brown was admitted to Emory Crawford Long Hospital in Atlanta on Saturday to be treated for pneumonia, and he died there in the early hours of Christmas morning of congestive heart failure, according to his agent Frank Copsidas.

Among the iconic figures of 20th century popular music – from Louis Armstrong to Bob Dylan – Brown was a true titan. As the inventor of funk and progenitor of rap, the self-proclaimed “Mr. Dynamite” was far and away the most important figure in shifting modern pop music’s emphasis from melody to rhythm.

The electrifying singer and songwriter’s scores of hits include “Please, Please, Please,” “Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag,” “I Got You (I Feel Good),” “Get Up (I Feel Like Being A) Sex Machine,” “Say It Loud – I’m Black and I’m Proud,” and “Living in America.”

From funk to hip-hop

Full of guttural grunts and shrieks and precise polyrhythms, Brown remade rhythm and blues in his own rugged, intensely physical image. Along the way, he changed the way pop music sounded and what it looked like, which in his case was a sharply dressed, solidly built, pompadoured black man sweating up a storm on stage as he executed a series of daunting spins and splits.

The funk breaks in Brown’s songs like “Get Up Offa That Thing” and “Funky Drummer” formed the foundation of hip-hop, and Mick Jagger, Michael Jackson and Prince all copped his stage moves.

One of the first performers to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame – alongside Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry – Brown won a lifetime achievement Grammy award in 1992, as well as Grammys in 1965 for “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” and in 1987 for “Living in America.” Last year, Brown published his autobiography, “I Feel Good: A Memoir of a Life of Soul.”

Born James Joseph Brown in Barnwell, S.C., in the midst of the Depression, he moved to Augusta, Ga., as a youth and got into frequent trouble with the law, eventually winding up in reform school for armed robbery. Inside, he met Bobby Byrd, who would become a longtime Brown sideman, along with such other illustrious employees as bassist Bootsy Collins and saxophonist Maceo Parker.

James Brown sings Living

His declamatory vocal style, more spoken than sung, prefigured rap and was developed further in early hits like “Try Me” in 1959 and “Out of Sight” in 1964. Brown’s music grew more aggressive as the ’60s progressed; he asserted more artistic control over his productions and incorporated more complex rhythms into his sound.

A steady stream of R&B hits won him an enthusiastic black audience, who recognized the ecstatic screams of Southern gospel music in Brown songs such as “Think” and “Night Train” – heard on his great 1962 album “Live at the Apollo.” And he first broke though to the white mainstream in 1965, with the electric “Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag.”

Empowering voice

Brown’s music was always uncompromising, and he became a voice of empowerment and pride within the black community as well.

He was never a protest singer but always an advocate of education and increasing black economic clout. He purchased a string of radio stations in the mid-1960s, and in 1966 approached Vice President Hubert Humphrey to propose using his “Don’t Be a Dropout” hit as the centerpiece of a stay-in-school campaign for urban youth.

Encouraged by activist H. Rap Brown to become more prominent in the black power movement, the next year he released “Say It Loud – I’m Black and I’m Proud,” a watershed moment in America’s racial conversation.

Though Brown had become an oldies act by the 1980s, appearing in movies such as “The Blues Brothers” and “Rocky IV,” he wasn’t done yet and scored a hit in the mid-’80s with the epic “Living in America.”

Though more than 70 years old, Brown still toured regularly, appearing robust on stage and still capable of doing spins, if not splits. On Friday, he appeared at his annual toy giveaway in Atlanta, and was scheduled to perform on New Year’s Eve at B.B. King Blues Club & Grill in New York.

“I’ve been able to do it for over 40 years, and I’m still doing it,” Brown told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 2001. “Like Bob Hope or Frank Sinatra, James Brown is one of the things you don’t want to see stop. Like Santa Claus – everybody likes Santa Claus : I stop, what you gonna write about?”