Behind wrought-iron gates, beneath a polished granite slab, James Ambrose Johnson Jr. whiles away eternity in Buffalo. His earthly life ended in 2004, in Los Angeles, after 56 years, but Johnson returned for posterity to his hometown, to the city of his angry youth. That anger, Johnson long ago said, was fed by tributaries global (“I was angry about the poor people in Ethiopia”), national (“I was angry about the politics of the country”) and, most notably here, local: “I was angry that the Buffalo Bills were losing.”
Johnson rose to fame as an R&B artist whose stage name, Rick James, gets top billing on his headstone at Buffalo’s Forest Lawn Cemetery, etched in larger font above his real name, so that Johnson appears to be opening for his alter ego in the afterlife. In 2020, Bills receiver Stefon Diggs paid homage to the “Super Freak” singer by wearing on his cleats a portrait of the same Rick James, as Dave Chappelle played him on Chappelle’s Show. Diggs had learned that the real-life Rick James was a Buffalonian and a Bills fan from a local dentist who was capping one of Diggs’s teeth following a root canal. This was the Buffalo way, finding higher purpose in pain, the Bills and their fans raising one another up in the self-styled “City of Good Neighbors.”
That nickname never got much traction outside of Buffalo, whose Good Neighbors are now better known to the world by another handle, one that embraces the same virtues of small-town civic connectivity through cold-weather football. That new name, Bills Mafia, is barely 12 years old, but it feels ancient, timeless and eternal, with an origin story that is downright Biblical.
