Please, Please, Please - James Brown With The Famous Flames (Federal Records) 1956, 78 rpm!
Recorded directly off the Newcomb Record player seen in the video with the microphone in my computer.
James Brown has had more honours attached to his name than any other performer in music history. He has variously been tagged \"Soul Brother Number One,\" \"the Godfather of Soul,\" \"the Hardest Working Man in Show Business,\" \"Mr. Dynamite\" and even \"the Original Disco Man.\"
He was born into poverty in Barnwell, South Carolina, during the Great Depression. The only child of a poor backwoods family, he was sent to Augusta, Georgia at age five to live at an aunt's brothel. He earned his keep by running errands for soldiers at nearby Camp Gordon, entertaining them with his buckdancing and enticing them into his aunt's establishment.
At 16, he was caught and convicted of stealing and landed in reform school for three years. While incarcerated, he met Bobby Byrd, leader of a gospel group that performed at the prison. After his release, Brown tried his hand at semi-pro boxing and baseball. A career-ending leg injury inspired him to pursue music fulltime. He joined Byrd in 1952, in a group that sang gospel in and around Toccoa, Georgia called the Gospel Starlighters. One night, Byrd and Brown attended a rhythm & blues revue that included Hank Ballard and Fats Domino, whose performances lured them into the realm of secular music. Eventually, the Starlighters evolved into a rhythm and blues outfit. They were originally known as the Avons, then the Flames and became a tightly knit ensemble that showcased their abundant talents as singers, dancers and multi-instrumentalists.
In November 1955, while based in Macon, Georgia, the Flames cut a demo record at radio station WIBB of an original tune titled \"Please, Please, Please\". While passing through Atlanta, record producer Ralph Bass heard the demo and was so impressed with Brown's impassioned lead and the group's hard harmonies that he immediately drove to Macon and in January, 1956, signed them to King Records, a Cincinnati company for which two of the Flames' favourite groups, the Midnighters and the 5 Royales, were recording. He wired owner Syd Nathan about a new act that he wanted to sign to the Federal subsidiary and flew the group to the King studios in Cincinnati to cut \"Please, Please, Please.\" Bass was promptly fired by Nathan because the boss thought the song was \"a piece of s--t.\" Bass was eventually rehired once the single started selling. In March of 1956, \"Please, Please, Please\" reached Number Five on the Billboard's R&B chart.
Brown's boyhood dream of escaping poverty was not immediately realized, however. Although he and the Flames continued to make records for Federal, it would be nearly three years before they again hit the national charts. In 1958, Jame and his famous flames recorded their next hit, \"Try Me\".. which went to #1 on the R&B charts! The rest is history. The man is a legend, an icon, and definitely a trendsetter.
Soul music of the Sixties, funk music in the Seventies and rap music from the Eighties can all be directly attributable to James Brown.
