The music of Joseph James is the fruit of a long-standing collaboration between the composers:
- Francis James Brown
  and
- Stanley Joseph Seeger
Both are composers in their own right, having first met in Florence in the early 1950s while studying with Luigi Dallapiccola. Their recorded works include the film score for Priest of Love, a film biography of D.H.Lawrence directed by Christopher Miles, Sketches from The Scarlet Letter, an opera based on the novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Concerto for 3 Bouzoukis and orchestra and Requiem after J.S.Bach, a moving and imaginative interpretation of Bach's music used for a setting of the Latin requiem mass.

Francis James Brown (26/10/1925 - 18/01/2008), known to his friends as Jim and whose doughty Scottish ancestors were amongst the first to emigrate to the New World in the seventeenth century and settle in virtually uninhabited Iowa Territory, was born in Rochester, New York on 26 October 1925 to a mother with an artistic flair. His father was a professor of Sociology who worked in the Truman Administration and was the first American educationalist to be sent to the Soviet Union after the Second World War. Brown was a piano and composition graduate of Eastman School of Music and in 1951 earned a scholarship to study composition under Luigi Dallapiccola at Tanglewood. In 1952 he was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to continue his studies with Dallapiccola in Florence, where he met Stanley Seeger, with whom he was to collaborate on many musical works, including the score of the feature film ‘Priest of Love‘ directed in 1980 by Christopher Miles and starring Ian McKellen as DH Lawrence and Janet Suzman as Frieda. Writing as Joseph James ( Seeger’s middle name was Joseph) this was a triumphant collaboration.