MR. BROWN.(legendary musician James Brown)

Forty-seven years ago, at a radio station in Macon, Georgia, five young men stood around a microphone and sang a song. One played guitar, another played piano, but the station's recording equipment picked up the instruments so faintly that the tape they made that day is often recalled as an a-cappella performance. The lead singer was shorter than the others. He had to stand on an overturned Coca-Cola crate to get his mouth level with the mike. When the tape started rolling, he cried out the word "Please" with an immensity of feeling that might, more conventionally, have been reserved for a song's climax. Then he cried out again, "Please," and again and again, "Please, please," at heartbeat intervals. With each repetition, he invested the monosyllable with a different emotional accent and stress--prayer and pride, impatience and invitation--and although there was ache in his voice, he did not sound like a man pleading so much as commanding what was rightfully his. After his fourth "Please," the rest of the group filled in softly behind him, crooning, "Please, please don't go," until the lead singer's colossal voice surged back over theirs: "Please, please, please." That was the name of the song, the same word thrice, and, like all truly original things, this song had a past to which it simultaneously paid tribute and bid adieu. Its genesis lay in a rearrangement of the standard "Baby Please Don't Go," so that the rhythmic backup line became the lead, and the melodic lead was relegated to the chorus. A simple gimmick; but, as "Please, Please, Please" progressed, the lead singer's initial passion only intensified, and it became clear that the reversal of foreground and background voices reflected a deliberate emotional attitude that brought a bold new energy and freedom to the spirit of black popular music. Instead of describing feelings in the smooth lyrical surface of a tune you could whistle or at least hum, the singer created the impression of sounds rising untamed from the rawness and obscurity of a soul that refused all masks.

The song was over in less than three minutes, but that time had the sense of compressed eternity which one experiences in the memory of dreams. Transcribed as text, the words suggest a man gnawing at the last frayed ends of his tether, yet the febrile repetitions, elongations, and elisions of the singer's phrasing make of these words not a lament but a rhapsody, even an ecstasy:

Please. Please. Please. Please. Please. Please. Please. Honey, please! Don't. Yeah! Oh, yea-ah. Oh. I love you so. Baby! You did me wrong. Whoa! Whoa-oh. You done me wrong. You know you done! Done me wrong. Whoa. Oh yeah! You took my love. And now you're gone. Please! Please. Please. Please. Please. Please. Please. Please. Please. Please. Honey, please. Don't! Whoah. Oh, yeah. Lord. I love you so. I just want to hear you say, I . . . I . . . I . . . I . . . I . . . I . . . I . . . I . . . I! Honey, please. Don't. Oh! Oh, yeah. Oh. I love you so. Baby! Take my hand. I want to be your lover man. Oh, yes. Good God almighty. Honey, please! Don't. Ohhh. Oh. Yeahh. Lord. I love you so! Pleeeeeeeease. Don't go. Pleeee-ee-ee-ease. Don't go. Honey, please don't go. Oh. I love you so. Please. Please.

The song doesn't tell a story so much as express a condition. The singer might be speaking from the cradle of his lover's arms, or chasing her down a street, or watching the lights of her train diminish in the night; he might be crouched alone in an alleyway, or wandering an empty house, or smiling for all the world to see while his words rattle, unspoken, inside his skull. He could be anyone anywhere. His lover might be dying. He might be dying. He might not even be addressing an actual lover. He could be speaking of someone or something he's never had. He could be talking to God, or to the Devil. It doesn't matter. Despite the implication of a story, a specific predicament, the song is abstract. The words jockey for release and describe the impossibility of release, yet the singing is pure release, defiant, exultant. Speech is inadequate, so the singer makes music, and music is inadequate, so he makes his music speak. Feeling is stripped to its essence, and the feeling is the whole story. And, if that feeling seems inelegant, the singer's immaculately disciplined performance makes his representation of turmoil unmistakably styled and stylish--the brink of frenzy as a style unto itself.

A few months after the Macon recording session, Ralph Bass, a talent scout for King Records, heard a copy of the tape in Atlanta. King was one of the country's leading independent labels, with a particularly strong catalogue of what was then known as "race music"--the music produced by black artists for black audiences which, despite its ghettoized marketing label, was already widely recognized by the mid-fifties as the defining sound of the twentieth century. In the early postwar years especially, King played a big part in bringing rhythm and blues to a national audience, recording and publishing the work of such now largely forgotten acts as Bull Moose Jackson and Eddie (Cleanhead) Vinson, as well as more enduring names: the Five Royales, Little Willie John, and Hank Ballard and the Midnighters. So Ralph Bass knew the repertoire; he'd heard more gravel-voiced shouters, high-pitched keeners, hopped-up rockers, churchy belters, burlesque barkers, doo-wop crooners, and sweet, soft moaners--more lovers, leavers, losers, loners, lady-killers, lambasters, lounge lizards, lemme-show-you men, and lawdy-be boys--than any dozen jukeboxes could contain. But he had never heard a voice that possessed the essence of all these styles while moving beyond them toward a sound at once more feral and more self-assured, until he heard "Please, Please, Please."

The tape identified the singers collectively as the Famous Flames. That was it: nothing more about them, or where they might be found. The Flames, however, had been performing nearly constantly around Georgia, where they were known as "house-wrecking" showmen who danced as they sang, in paroxysms of astounding acrobatic agility. Bass, a white man who always stayed in black hotels along with the musicians, promoters, and disk jockeys who best knew his terrain, soon tracked down the group's manager at a barbershop in Macon. He brought two hundred dollars in cash and a contract, and declared, "I want them now." The Flames were summoned, they signed, and left for a gig. "I still didn't know who the lead singer was," Bass later told the writer Geoff Brown, but he figured it out that night when he stopped in at the club where the Flames were billed to play at ten o'clock. Right on time, Bass said, "out comes this guy, crawling on his stomach, going from table to table, wherever a pretty girl was sitting, singing, 'Please, Please, Please.' "

This guy was James Brown. He was twenty-two years old, a lithe, rippling sinew of a man, on parole after three years in the state-penitentiary system. He had been locked up at the age of fifteen for stealing from parked cars in Augusta, where he was raised in a whorehouse run by his Aunt Honey. He was a middle-school dropout, with no formal musical training (he could not read a chart, much less write one), yet from early childhood he had realized in himself an intuitive capacity not only to remember and reproduce any tune or riff he heard but also to hear the underlying structures of music, and to make them his own. He had started singing in church, not long after he began walking, and the hand-clapping, stomp-and-shout, get-all-the-way-down-on-your-knees spirit of the Baptist gospel pulpit formed the bedrock of his musical impulse. But his attunement to the sacred never inhibited his appetite for the profane. He claims to have mastered the harmonica at the age of five, blowing "Lost John," "Oh, Susannah," and "John Henry," and one afternoon, when he was seven, he taught himself to play the organ by working out the fingering of "Coonshine Baby." Before long, he was picking up guitar licks to such songs as "(Honey) It's Tight Like That" from the great bluesman Tampa Red, who was dating one of Aunt Honey's girls. By the time he was twelve, the young prodigy was fronting his own group, the Cremona Trio, and winning talent shows with a romping rendition of Louis Jordan's "Caldonia (What Makes Your Big Head So Hard?)." In reform school in the tiny north Georgia town of Toccoa, his nickname was Music Box, and he returned to singing for the Lord, forming a gospel quartet that made its own instruments: a paper-and-comb harmonica, a drum set of old lard tins, a broomstick-and-washtub bass. The warden was impressed, as was a young gospel singer in Toccoa named Bobby Byrd, who'd heard him sing at the prison gate, and offered to give him a home and find him a job if he could win his release. "I want to get out and sing for the Lord," James Brown wrote to the parole board, and although these words suggest an act of a rather different order than the one he and Byrd eventually put together with the Flames, nobody could deny, as he slithered among the ladies on night-club floors, that he sang as if he'd burn in Hell if he stopped.