"Papa Don't Take No Mess, Pt. 1" (James Brown)

"Papa Don't Take No Mess" was written for a soundtrack album that never came to be.
  After crafting the soundtrack for the 1973 blaxploitation flick Black Caesar, which follows the rise of protagonist "Tommy Gibbs" (played by actor Fred Williamson) from poverty to kingpin of a Harlem crime syndicate, James Brown and The JB's were again tapped by the film's producers to record the soundtrack for the sequel, Hell Up in Harlem, which hit theaters later that same year.  (You can about imagine the quality of the writing and production if the studio was able to churn out both feature-length films the same year.)  
Story goes, when the film's producers heard Brown's score for Hell Up in Harlem, they decided the tracks "didn't sound James Brown enough" (whatever that means).  In the end, they rejected Brown's soundtrack and went with Motown artist Edwin Starr instead.
Ultimately, tracks recorded for Hell Up in Harlem made their way onto Brown's best-selling album, The Payback (1973), and its equally successful followup, Hell (1974).  "Papa Don't Take No Mess" in its sprawling 13-minute incarnation appears on the latter album.
Being that the song was written for the film, it's a bit different thematically from a lot of Brown's other output during this period: there's no call to get on the dance floor, and no specific commentary about politics or civil rights.  It's more of a story-song, ostensibly about the film's badass protagonist.  
Although, looking at it in a different light, the song also could be about Brown's hardscrabble upbringing by his own father in Depression-era, rural South Carolina.  After James's mother, Susan, abandoned the family when he was four years old, James's father, Joe Brown, was left to look after his son.  More often than not, though, Joe would leave young James with neighbors while he was busy trying to make a meager living gathering pine sap to sell to turpentine manufacturers.  The neighbors often were not much help, however, considering they were preoccupied with trying to feed their own families; Joe returned home from work many a time to find James sitting, alone and hungry, in their one-room shack.  After several years of living this way, Joe decided they couldn't continue in that vein.  So he and James walked 11 miles from Barnwell, SC, across the state line to Augusta, GA, where he sent the youngster to live with his aunt Honey Stevenson, the madam of a bordello near Fort Gordon.  (Maybe not an ideal situation, but it quite possibly saved James from dying of starvation.)
Lines from the song like Papa is the man who can understand / How a man has to do whatever he can... and Papa would do his part / When the game get hard... easily could have been about Joe, who—if nothing else—gave James the will and grit to survive, against all odds.