The calling card for a writer/producer/arranger due to the song was huge for Martha and the Vandellas (#10 Pop; #1 R&B). The original, the man, is even bigger. A broad 6ft. 7in., slow walking, slow talking, with sausage-sized double-jointed fingers long enough to span one-and-a-half piano octaves, is now introduced simply as James.

For seventeen years James has lived downstairs in the 1877 brownstone that is St. Pauls House, a Hells Kitchen mission directed towards the homeless. He is a computer wizard, self-taught, who "didn't know nothin", speaking of when he started the Job Start Program, (a program developed to teach computer skills to New Yorkers that can't afford formal training), and still gets up at all hours to read relevant material. He started there by turning around a disorganized shelter program. He eventually became the developer and now is St. Pauls' Coordinator of Job Start Program. A program which includes Computer Applications, Computer Tech Training, Web-site Development, Job Readiness, and GED Preparation. He has also worked with the Lambs Training Program. Yet he has found time to help training center across the country develop a system for teaching computers. He goes to New Jersy to pick up bread for the homeless teaches Bible Studies, plays keyboard both for the Music Ministry and, independently, and he runs an arts-based website, one dedicated to helping, present and prospective musicians/artist.

Some call him Slim (though he no longer is), but many still call him Jimmy Mack, a name that is known in the music industry as a writer/arranger/producer that sold his rights to many songs, all written so spontaneous that, in his words, "I can't remember the names, ask some of the old-timers on Broadway, they know more about my work than I do."

In San Antonio where a half-sister still sings gospel, (James says she is one of the most talented singer he has ever known), and only miles from his half-brother's ranch, who promotes rodeos. James was a music prodigy rather than an athlete. Music was,his pick since as he put it, "I noticed that James Brown and Ray Charles made much more money than Wilt the Stilt or Bill Russell." With classical training as well as the influence of church and chitlin circuit blues musicians, and playing some dozen musical instruments, he spent short periods at two different small colleges due to a music scholarship, but left when racial/social problems surfaced, and went into the service.

He wound up in the Navy and after that headed to New York, which seemed better for music than Detroit, Nashville or California. Arriving in December, without money, relationships or friends, the tall young man was so country as to sleep the first night at an outdoor construction site and woke up covered with snow. Clubs like the Dom and Five Spot offered shelter, and in them James was introduced to jazz and hung with bands that included jazz greats like Tony Scott, Lamont Johnson, Eddie Marshall, Roland Kirk, Jackie Byard, Blue Mitchel.

With a newly met acquaintance, he began writing quickie songs for Tin Pan Alley, which he realized was a rat-race hustle, yet he soon learned that artist were no more than a commercial puppet. The artist did what he was told to do and sang what he or she was told to sang. When they did in most casses they found some success. Writers had a different situation to face in that no one wanted to publish a serious song if the writer wanted to retain rights to the material. Many songs were publish by major publishers with another writers name on the song. Black writers could maintain the rights to some songs, but only in the R&B, Gospel, or Jazz market. These were however, the smallest markets in the record industry. So James and other songwriters sold their wares outright. This allowed him to maintain a presence in the music industry and become known to industrial people for his writing ability, his studio work as a pianist and drummer, and his administrative work which he learned, as James puts it, "by the grace of God".

James developed administrative and promotional experience at fellow Texan's (Don Robies) record company. Duke Peacock Records, which was a major company in the R&B and Gospel market. His experience with Duke/Peacock was useful, along with later work at other recording companies like the label that he co-own with Lamont Johnsons, Down East Records. When Down East Records started to get national reconition selling in the USA and Africa, James was acknoweldged for being the youngest black owner of a nationally distrubuted independent Record Company. He also gained experience with Mr.Clarence Williams who owned Free As a Breeze label. With his training, James began to do musical arrangements for artist and producer. He adopted a writers formula from Johnny Nash's writer/arranger Art Jenkins. Mr Jenkins explained to James that every song should have a story, one built on who/what/when/where, and a chorus to answer the how or the why. James soon related this formula to writers of articles and stories. It was the answer to survival for James because it allowed him to write many songs qucikly.

So he took to going to the Broadway's Horn & Hardhart and in the morning writing nine or ten songs, simple stories with the melody, as James puts it, "the melody simply followed the way I'd actually say the words." He'd sell enough of them to buy overstock records, which could then be resold for up to a thousand dollars a day. Through this little business James be-friended Sam Goody, who supported James' efforts completely. Similarly, he sold to Harlem deejays the boxes of James Brown records which the Godfather used to supply, (a generous side of the singer that often goes unpublicized.)

Along the way, James met, and in many cases remains friends with, Harry Bass, Ben Boyce, Jimmy Hall, TV Mama, Sonny Til, Tommy Hunt, Wilbert Harrison, Otis Blackwell, Tony Williams, Charles Otis, Sam Goody, Gene Red, Jackie Wilson, Ralfie Pagan, Johnny Northern, B.J. Jones and many others, which included certain members of the Colombo family, for whom he promoted and marketed a string of lucrative massage parlors.

He had started using all sorts of drugs, as James puts it, "I had become a walking pharmacy", which among other things, cost him his girl. He felt bored, unchallenged by the work, lacking any spontinuity in his daily activities, while the pharmacopoeia of drugs was troubling, and amazingly, he was allowed simply to walk away from that world of crime: "they knew they could trust me." With Hal Martin, he subsequently did some chart-climbing rap productions. This Is a Party, for example, and The Micstro. Yet with this new wave of success James was still bored and finally wound up on a Central Park bench, where, at about the same age as and like his father, who had once floundered in alcohol and gambling, James became the man who could not remember the Twenty-Third Psalm or Lords Prayer, the man who once was lost, was about to be found. James eventually challenged God and his childhood faith by asking God to take away his addictions. James says, "without any outside help or influence the desire fir durgs was removed from my life, and it was replaced with a compassion to help others".

After over fifteen years work in the House of the Lord, helping the disenfranchised and outcast through music and job training, James feels that, if for anything, he would prefer to be remembered for starting a free computer school to which over a thousand people have come, some of them homeless, over seven hundred of whom found jobs; and more important, that many people in and out of the program, have found hope and courage to live.