“It is indeed a great pleasure to present to you at this particular time — nationally and internationally known as the hardest working man in show business... the man that sang ‘I’ll Go Crazy,’ ‘Try Me,’ ‘You’ve Got the Power,’ ‘Think,’ ‘If You Want Me,’ ‘I Don’t Mind,’ ‘Bewildered,’ million-dollar-seller ‘Lost Someone,’ the very latest release ‘Night Train’ . . . Let’s everybody shout and shimmy! Mr. Dynamite, the Amazing Mr. Please Please himself: James Brown and the Famous Flames.”
Those words are shouted above the rising screams of a legion of female fans by organist and emcee Lucas “Fats” Ponder at the beginning of James Brown Live at the Apollo (Polydor). He’s introducing a man who, at the time this 1962 concert was being put to tape to result in one of the best live albums ever made, truly needed no introduction. Add to that list “Please Please Please,” “I Got You (I Feel Good),” “Prisoner of Love,” “ Soul Power,” “The Payback,” “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,” “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World,” “ Cold Sweat,” “ Licking Stick — Licking Stick,” “Mother Popcorn,” “Out of Sight,” “Sex Machine,” and “Living in America” and the titles become a roll call of some of the most vital tunes recorded in the rock era, and a memorial to their maker — a hardscrabble kid who got in trouble with the law and found salvation, if not always peace in music, and became the Godfather of Soul.
Brown died from congestive heart failure on December 25, Christmas day, at a hospital in Atlanta after being admitted for pneumonia 48 hours earlier. During his 73 years on Earth, Brown revolutionized popular music and set a standard for frenzied live performances that few musicians have equaled. Although age slowed his splits, high-speed pirouettes, and frenetic footwork in recent decades, the 1965 film The T.A.M.I. Show captures Brown at the climax of one of his concerts in peak form — wailing “Please, Please, Please” into the microphone, dropping to his knees and weeping in spasms, being draped in a cape and helped to his feet by his backing singers the Famous Flames only to run spinning and dancing back to center stage to do it all again until the crowd crackles with a howling intensity that’s the aural equivalent of fireworks.
Brown’s voice remained arresting until the end, shredded and distinct — a soul voice sprung from the clay of the city he called home, Augusta, Georgia, where he was buried on Saturday, and from the church, where he first experienced the evangelical fervor he injected into his shows.
The odds were stacked against Brown from the start. He was born on May 3, 1933 in a shack in Barnwell, South Carolina. Four years later he was taken to Augusta by his aunt Honey, who ran a brothel. Soon he was at work: picking cotton, shining shoes, and dancing for pennies in the streets. He was barred from school because his clothes were too shabby. And in 1949 he broke into a car and was sent to prison where he spent three years before parole.
Brown started singing in jail and, when he was released, joined the Gospel Starlighters, a group led by future Famous Flame Bobby Byrd. As the Starlighters evolved into a pop band, Brown, who played drums and swapped lead vocals with the other members, came to the fore. As the Flames, with Brown providing ignition, they cut “Please Please Please” in a basement studio in Macon in 1955. A talent scout heard the tune on local radio and signed them to a contract with King Records, who recut the song and released it nationally in 1956.
“Please Please Please” sold a million copies, and when “Try Me” hit the top of the rhythm and blues charts two years later, Brown’s stardom was concrete — at least in the realm of “race” artists. In 1963 he crossed the color line with the elegant “Prisoner of Love,” a sweet, soaring ballad that offset his raspy croon with an orchestra. It reached number 18 on the pop charts and was followed into the mainstream by Live at the Apollo, which became the number two album in America.
During these early years of his career Brown was still formulating his style. As the late musician and journalist Robert Palmer explained in his entry on Brown in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, his blend of clarion voiced gospel harmonies, driving horns, and exaggerated shuffles wasn’t unique. Ray Charles had crystallized the sound of soul music in 1953 with “I’ve Got a Woman.” But Brown began incorporating Latin cross-rhythms, and his guitarist Jimmy Nolen had invented a choked style of playing chords that amped up the group’s rhythmic thrust. By 1964, the bass and horn lines of Brown’s band had become so percussive under his direction that the entire unit had morphed into, essentially, a giant drum kit. All rhythm.