Gerald Ford saved the nation, it is said, by getting us out of a funk.

James Brown saved it by getting us into one.

Not since the coincidental deaths of Ronald Reagan and Ray Charles has destiny revealed two such divergent paths to American greatness. Whose death deserves greater coverage in the news? Could I, as a journalist, a person and an American, decide which man was greater?

Gerald Ford was from the Midwest and carried the name of an American automobile. James Brown was from the South and had a name that could describe the color of his skin.

Gerald Ford played football for Michigan but became an object of satire when, during his presidency, he started to fall down. James Brown played the drums for the Famous Flames, but stepped up to the mic, and became the object of gentle satire for his raspy discourse and gliding feet. One fell down a lot. The other floated across the stage.

The man who would become president was a man of his people, a hard-working, granite-jawed graduate of the Big Ten, who served 13 terms in Congress and, against all odds, become the first vice president, and then president, never elected to either office. The man who would become the Godfather of Soul, was a man of his people, too, not just because he rose from the depths of poverty and segregation in the South, but because he invented an attitude of identity and pride.

Gerald Ford dismantled the imperial presidency of Richard Nixon and said things like "Whip Inflation Now." James Brown claimed the cloak and scepter of musical royalty and said things like "I Don't Want Nobody to Give Me Nothing (Open Up the Door I'll Get It Myself)."

The young Gerald Ford had a head full of wavy reddish blond hair until he went bald. James Brown wore a pompadour to his grave.

Gerald Ford probably didn't know many great soul singers. James Brown knew a lot of presidents. And they knew him. Gerald Ford smoked a pipe. James Brown just smoked.

Gerald Ford helped lift the country out of a dark night of its soul, a malaise created by the war in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal. He restored a sense of stability, decency and civility to a troubled nation. Two crazy women tried to assassinate him. James Brown played a night of soul music in Boston after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and raised his voice against racism and violence.

Gerald Ford seemed as though he worked hard every day of his life and embraced a traditional American ethic of freedom and enterprise. He was a rock to the country, to his children and to his wife, whose own legacy might turn out to be greater than his. Before he entered public service, he practiced law.

From a young age, James Brown broke the law. He had trouble with women until the day he died, but sang that, although it was a man's world, "It wouldn't be nothing, nothing without a woman or a girl."  He served jail time for his drug abuse. He climbed a higher mountain than the man who became president and did it with the same American ethic of freedom and enterprise. He was the hardest working man in show business and one of the most demanding bosses on the planet.

Gerald Ford, of course, was white. James Brown was something else, a black man who once told Johnny Carson that white people -- like Elvis and Tom Jones -- could sing with soul. In the movie "The Commitments," a young band manager shows fledgling Irish soul musicians a tape of a James Brown performance and exhorts them toward identification as poor Dubliners with downtrodden African-Americans: "Say it loud," he tells them. "I'm black and I'm proud."

It is the summer of 1967, and I'm living in a house in Newport, R.I., with a group of nine college-aged white musicians, a blue-eyed soul band called The O.B. Williams Review, featuring the Sidewinders. Our leader, Arnie Gamino, sits us down to watch a television performance of James Brown, and we are mesmerized. "Listen to how tight the band is," he implores. Listen to the discipline behind the music. "That's what we're striving for."

On the morning of Ronald Reagan's funeral, I sit up in bed in a New Orleans hotel room, tears streaming down my face. A television clip shows Ray Charles singing "America the Beautiful" at the Republican National Convention, a version so heartfelt that it inspires the whitest of audiences to soulful swaying. Ronald Reagan and George Bush -- the elder -- reach down and lift the blind singer from his piano to triumph on the stage.

So I find myself asking this odd question: Among these great Americans, who is the greatest? Is it Ronald Reagan or Ray Charles? Whose death deserves greater play in the news stories of the day? Is it Gerald Ford, who lifted us out of our national funk? Or is it James Brown who showed us the funk, and asked us to live it, breathe it, smell it with him?

For Gerald Ford, the word "funk" derived from an old Flemish word, according to The American Heritage Dictionary, would have meant "a state of cowardly fright; a panic; a state of severe depression." Something we should declare war against.
 
When James Brown offered us the "funk," he was not only describing a musical style filled with a strong bass line, heavy rhythm, and syncopation, but prescribing a remedy for our ennui. His word goes back at least to the founding of the country in a reference to "musty, old, moldy cheese," a word that could also be used to describe the smell of human sweat.

Real. Gritty. Down to earth.

The sweat of a man working hard, playing hard, dancing hard, singing so hard, he'd collapse on stage, only to be reborn under a cloak of greatness, again and again.

Live from the Apollo Theater. The American Adam.

Brighter and hotter than the sun god.

Now in myth and memory.


Note: This essay invites a counter-intuitive speculation when it comes to news judgment. Of course, the death of a former president falls into a special category of news. But are all presidential passings equally newsworthy? And do we underplay the deaths of other important cultural figures? So we invite you to offer your take in this little game:
 
Whose death was more newsworthy, and why?
 
Dwight Eisenhower or Elvis Presley?
Ronald Reagan or Ray Charles?
Gerald Ford or James Brown?