By the autumn of 1958, James Brown was close to finished. His first single had been a sensation two years earlier, but sensation had curdled into silence: his group had quit on him, his label was losing patience, and nine consecutive singles had failed to chart. The song that rescued him was not a screamer in the mould of Please, Please, Please but a slow, pleading ballad he had picked up from a stranger in a Florida nightclub. Try Me went to No. 1 on the R&B chart, became the best-selling R&B single of 1958, and quite literally kept James Brown in the record business.
Nine Flops and a Fractured Family
The collapse had been building since the triumph. Please, Please, Please had made Brown famous in 1956, but fame exposed every fault line inside the Famous Flames — arguments over royalties, over songwriting credit, and over the humiliation, as Brown saw it, of billing that treated the group’s obvious star as one singer among several. One by one, the original Flames walked away, including Bobby Byrd, the man who had founded the group and given Brown his start. Only Johnny Terry remained loyal.
Brown rebuilt on the run. His new Famous Flames were recruited from members of the Dominions, the vocal group that had backed Little Richard — “Big Bill” Hollings, Louis Madison and J.W. Archer now stood behind him in the matching suits. But the records weren’t working. Single after single for Federal Records came and went without troubling the charts — nine in a row, by the standard discography. Brown was playing the chitlin’ circuit to survive, watching other singers score with the kind of smooth ballads he had never attempted, and Syd Nathan, the King Records boss who had never much liked his voice in the first place, was close to cutting him loose.
The cruel part was that Brown’s live reputation had never been bigger. On stage, the cape routine and the collapsing, begging finale of Please, Please, Please were becoming legend on the circuit; promoters knew the act could flatten any theatre in the South. But record buyers in 1957 and 1958 wanted something else — the smooth group harmonies of the Impressions, the aching tenor of Dee Clark, the orchestrated ache coming out of Chicago and New York. Brown’s singles, chasing the success of his debut with variations on its frenzy, kept missing a market that had moved on without him. He was, in the phrase that would follow him for years, the hardest-working man in show business with nothing to show for it.
A Stranger’s Tune at the Million Dollar Palms
The rescue began, improbably, as a gift. On the way back to Macon, Georgia, after a disappointing West Coast tour, Brown told his guitarist Bobby Roach about a tune he said he had been given by a patron at the Million Dollar Palms, a Florida nightclub. Roach crafted a gentle guitar part for it, and Brown and the new Flames worked out the vocal harmonies together — a soft, doo-wop-inflected plea: try me, and find out that I need you. A demo was cut and sent north to Syd Nathan.
This time, Nathan liked what he heard. Rather than recording in Cincinnati as usual, he arranged a session in New York City with producer Andy Gibson and a team of polished session men. On September 18, 1958, at Beltone Studios, Brown and the Flames recorded Try Me (released under the fuller title Try Me (I Need You)) with jazz guitarist Kenny Burrell, drummer Panama Francis and pianist Ernie Hayes among the accompanists — a noticeably plusher setting than the Flames’ rough-and-ready Cincinnati dates. Despite the tune’s murky origins and the contributions of Roach and the group, Brown took sole writing credit, an early instalment in a lifetime of disputed credits.
Brown knew exactly what he was aiming at. As he explained in his autobiography, “Try Me was really a pop tune. I had heard Raindrops by Dee Clark and For Your Precious Love by Jerry Butler and the Impressions, so I wrote my song to fit between them.” It was a strategic swerve: the wild man of Please, Please, Please would now croon, harmonise and plead in the smooth style the market wanted — while keeping enough ache in his voice that nobody could mistake him for anyone else.
The finished record is a study in restraint from a singer nobody associated with the word. At two minutes and twenty-eight seconds, Try Me unfolds at a swaying doo-wop tempo, Ernie Hayes’s piano rippling underneath, Kenny Burrell’s guitar offering discreet, jazzy replies, and the Flames cushioning Brown’s lead in close, churchy harmony. Brown sings the lyric — a lover asking to be judged not on promises but on proof — with a vulnerability his debut had only shown at its breaking point. Here the desperation is controlled, even elegant, and it made the song playable in places Please, Please, Please could never go: pop radio, supper clubs, and the slow-dance sets where records earned their second lives.
Number One, and a Lifeline
Federal released the single in October 1958, with Tell Me What I Did Wrong on the B-side. It moved quickly where it mattered. Try Me became Brown’s first record to crack the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at No. 48 during a 13-week stay — modest pop numbers, but a breakthrough for an act Federal had nearly written off. On the R&B chart it was a giant: it reached No. 1 in February 1959, the first chart-topper of Brown’s career.
The numbers understated its importance. The song sold over a million copies and finished as the best-selling R&B single of 1958 — remarkable for a record released in the year’s final quarter. More than that, it saved the act. The success of Try Me stopped Federal from dropping Brown and the Flames, re-established Brown with ballad audiences his debut had never reached, and proved he could sell tenderness as convincingly as frenzy. The song anchored two albums in quick succession — the group’s debut LP Please Please Please and its 1959 follow-up, titled simply Try Me!
It also changed Brown’s leverage, and he spent it immediately. Through 1959 and 1960 he pushed for more control over his sessions and his sound, alternating ballads with rhythm records in a deliberate dual strategy: I Want You So Bad and I’ll Go Crazy kept the charts warm, his version of the Five Royales’ Think became a substantial hit in 1960, and when he wanted to cut the instrumental (Do the) Mashed Potatoes and Nathan balked, Brown simply recorded it for another label under the pseudonym Nat Kendrick and the Swans — and watched it become an R&B hit anyway. The balladeer of Try Me was learning to be a mogul. The strategy’s ballad wing reached its commercial peak in 1963, when his string-drenched reading of the old standard Prisoner of Love climbed to No. 18 on the Hot 100 — a direct descendant of the lesson Try Me had taught him five years earlier: that the Godfather could whisper, and the world would lean in.
The Song That Kept Coming Back
Brown never let the song go, and it kept rewarding him. In 1963 he re-recorded it with strings for his album Prisoner of Love, recasting the pleading doo-wop ballad as a lush pop confession. Two years later, on the Smash label, he released an instrumental version of Try Me that charted in its own right — No. 34 R&B and No. 63 pop in 1965 — riding the same year’s torrent of hits that included Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag and I Got You (I Feel Good). A song written to survive 1958 had become evergreen catalogue.
Live, Try Me became the still centre of the storm. It appears on Live at the Apollo and on most of Brown’s subsequent concert albums, the moment in the show where the cape-and-collapse theatrics gave way to something simpler: a man standing at the microphone, asking to be tested. The plea in the lyric — judge me by trying me — doubles, in retrospect, as the story of Brown’s whole career at that moment. The business had tried everyone else. He was asking, one more time, to be tried himself.
Its influence travelled quietly through the next decade of soul. The pleading Southern ballad — a singer baring his throat over slow harmony and begging for one more chance — became a genre unto itself, and its most famous practitioner, Otis Redding, grew up in Macon, Georgia, in Brown’s own shadow, absorbing the older man’s records before fashioning his own monumental pleas. Every slow-burning soul confession that followed, from Redding’s I’ve Been Loving You Too Long onward, owes something to the night James Brown, with his career on the line, stopped screaming and simply asked.
Every James Brown biography divides his life into eras, but they all pass through this bottleneck: no Try Me, no second act — no Apollo triumph, no funk revolution, no Godfather of Soul. The biggest career in soul music hung, for a few months in 1958, on a slow song from a stranger in a Florida club, and on a singer stubborn enough to believe it could save him.