You can hear the thing starting to change on the records I put out during the beginning of 1960. I was changing before that, but that’s when you can hear it. “I’ll Go Crazy” came out in January; “Think” and “You’ve Got the Power” were released in May. “I’ll Go Crazy” is a blues, but it’s a different kind of blues, up-tempo, a kind of jazz blues. “Think” is a combination of gospel and jazz—a rhythm hold is what we used to call it. Soul really started right there, or at least my kind did. See when people talk about soul music they talk only about gospel and R & B coming together. That’s accurate about a lot of soul, but if you’re going to talk about mine, you have to remember the jazz in it. That’s what made my music so different and allowed it to change and grow after soul was finished.
Recording “Think” was the strangest thing because the Five Royales were good friends of mine. Lowman Pauling, the leader of the group, wrote the song, and they had a pretty good R & B hit with it in 1957. King Records wanted me to cut it in 1960 at the same session I did “You’ve Got the Power,” but I didn’t want to. I knew that if I did, it would hurt the Five Royales. They were good, but they were still doing straight R & B while I was reaching for a different sound.
I held off until they cut “Please Please Please,” then I decided it would be all right to cut “Think.” The record turned out to be my third million seller and it did even better than “I’ll Go Crazy.” Unfortunately, “Please” didn’t do anything for the Five Royales. It’s a funny thing about that song. Nobody else could ever do anything with it. Tina Turner cut it and Barbara Lewis cut it, but it was like a death song for them—when they sang it, they sang their own epitaph.
“You’ve Got the Power” was a duet with Bea Ford, Joe Tex’s ex-wife. I met her not long after they broke up, and we started dating, but I didn’t know she’d been married to Joe, and she didn’t tell me. That was the beginning of a lot of misunderstandings between Joe and me. He died thinking I’d messed with his woman. Bea stayed with the show for most of 1960, but that was the only time we recorded together.
Really, 1960 was the year my hard work started paying off. I played all those one-nighters around the country, and worked more and more on the stage show, and recorded all the time. In August “This Old Heart” and “Wonder When You’re Coming Home” came out. In the fall, while we were playing gigs in California, we went into United Recording Studios in Hollywood and cut “I Don’t Mind,” “Baby, You’re Right,” “Come Over Here,” “I Do Just What I Want,” “Tell Me What You’re Gonna Do,” and an instrumental of “Hold It.” In November “Please” and “Why Do You Do Me” were re-released, and “The Bells,” and “I Do Just What I Want” came out.
“The Bells,” which the Dominoes did back when Clyde McPhatter was still with them, was my first release on the King label. Everything else for Mr. Nathan had been on Federal. Being on King meant you got more support from the company. Mr. Nathan finally realized I was too strong for Federal, and he had to put me on King.
But the more the music changed, the less some of Mr. Nathan’s people understood it As soon as the band started playing for the first take when we were cutting “I Don’t Mind,” Gene Redd and I got into it about the arrangement. It opens with a 13, goes down to a C9, then goes to a G7 and to the A7. He couldn’t understand that. He stopped us and said, “That’s a wrong note.”
“If you could hear it,” I said, “you’d know it was right. I can hear it, and I’m telling you it’s right. And that’s the way we’re going to record it, or we’re not going to record it at all.”
He backed off, and we went on and did it like we’d been doing it on the road for months, except for the mistake Les Buie made on guitar that sounded so good I made him leave it in.
By the time I went back into the Apollo in December, all the hard work had earned me the headliner’s spot. It wasn’t because of a particular record but because of hard work. Hard work got me there, and I knew hard work would keep me there and maybe take me beyond it.
On that particular bill we also had Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs, who had “Stay”; the Olympics, who had “Western Movies”; Wini Brown; Larry Williams; Sam “The Man” Taylor, the sax man who did a lot of session work on those good Atlantic records; and Pigmeat Markham, the comedian who was best known for his “here come de judge” routine.
For my first time headlining at the Apollo I wanted to do a spectacular finale for each show. I’d been jumping off the piano into a split for a while, but this time I had them move the piano nearer the edge of the stage. Finale came and I got up on the piano and jumped. Everybody thought I was jumping onto the stage. But I cleared the stage and went on and plunged down to the main floor way below the stage. I hit it clean and came up out of it fine, but I didn’t make it back to the stage like I’d planned. As soon as I came out of the split, the people were on me, tearing me apart. The Flames had to come down to help get me out of there.
After the first show, Pigmeat came to my dressing room and told me how much he liked the jumping off the piano. Then he came up with the idea that for the midnight show I should swing out over the crowd on a wire like Peter Pan—a thin wire so that the audience wouldn’t see it. Make it look like I was flying. I said no, that really would be using tricks to get over.
Pig was one of the greatest entertainers to hit the stage. He had a lot more material than the judge routine, but that’s the one everybody saw him do later on Ed Sullivan. Like a lot of comedians, Pig was a serious man offstage; it was like night and day. He did all that wild vaudeville stuff, and when he came off he was very self-possessed. I think he must have been educated, too, because he was very well-spoken. I was honored to have him on my show because as a kid I had seen him in movie shorts and always admired him.
The next week I met Louis Jordan, another idol I had seen in the movies. He was following us into the Apollo, so I stayed over for a day to see him. It was the first time I’d ever watched him live. He was a very sick man, but he still put on a great show. Afterwards, I got a chance to talk with him for a few minutes and told him what he’d meant to me as a performer. Told him that, beginning when I was a kid, I’d probably sung “Caldonia” almost as many times as he had. He was a good man, and he still hasn’t gotten his due.
Less than three months later I was back at the Apollo again. In the meantime, I recorded “Lost Someone,” “Dancin’ Little Thing,” “You Don’t Have to Go,” “Night Train,” and “Shout and Shimmy.” All of those tunes were recorded on one day, February 9, 1961, in the King studios. With “Lost Someone” I was trying to get a pop hit; I based it on the chord changes of Conway Twitty’s “It’s Only Make Believe,” which was popular at the time. The next day I recorded five more tunes at King. We really had a groove going, and I didn’t want to stop. When we were ready to cut “Night Train,” Nat Kendrick, the drummer, said he had to go to the bathroom.
I said, “Naw, I got the feel and I want to cut now.”
“But, man, I got to go,” he said.
“All right,” I said, “you go on, and I’ll play drums.” He stepped out, and I cut it with me playing drums and singing and that’s the version that became a hit.
It didn’t become a hit right away because we had so many tunes in the can that some of them wouldn’t be released for a year or more. “Night Train” didn’t come out for thirteen months. Consequently, a lot of times I’d find myself with a big hit a year or two after I cut it and several years after I wrote it and first put it in the show. It didn’t make any difference; no matter when they came out the records were still ahead of their time. Matter of fact, I also released “Bewildered” during this time, the tune I had cut on the “Try Me” session and hid from Mr. Nathan for a long time.
The engagement at the Apollo was in place of Jackie Wilson. A lady fan had shot Jackie in a hotel room in New York; he was hurt pretty bad and had to stay in Roosevelt Hospital for a while. When it looked like he wouldn’t recover as fast as they thought he would, Mr. Schiffman booked us in there. By this time Jackie had left the Dominoes and was doing well as a single. He had “To Be Loved,” which Berry Gordy wrote, “Lonely Teardrops,” “That’s Why,” and “I’ll Be Satisfied.” He had a pretty good stage show, too, but I don’t know why anybody would say he influenced me. He didn’t influence me. Jackie tried to copy from me. I got nothing from him; he had nothing for me to get from him. He was singing pop stuff, and I didn’t want to do that.
I used to come by and see Jackie when he was working, but it caused too much tension. See, I had caught up with Jackie real quick. And he knew that. I knew more about music than he did, I had more of a gospel background than he did, and I wrote all my own material. It intimidated him when I came around. He got shaky and couldn’t perform.
What got Jackie through was his complexion. During that time, if you were light-complexioned, you had it. I was the one who made the dark-complexioned people popular. It’s like Ethel Waters and Lena Horne. Ethel Waters was more popular with black people than Lena Horne, but Ethel was dark skinned and dark-skinned people couldn’t make it. Eventually dark-skinned people did make it, but it took a long time for the change to come about. It started happening with Louis Armstrong, and Nat King Cole probably did more for the dark-skinned man than anybody of his era. After I came out in 1968 with “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud,” it was all over. The dark-skinned man had all of a sudden become cosmopolitan.
But I loved Jackie. He was a nice person. I liked him ever since I saw him singing with the Dominoes. The best one to come out of that group, though, was Clyde McPhatter, not Jackie, but Clyde was too dark.
Just before we went into the Apollo this time, we’d gotten five specially tailored new uniforms I designed for me and the Flames. They cost $500 apiece, which was a lot of money for stage uniforms. When a newspaper columnist found out I had insured the suits for $2,500 for the week-long engagement, he wrote that I must not trust my Harlem fans. I guess he was saying that I thought they’d steal the suits, but he didn’t realize that when I jumped off the stage and got down in the audience, they’d tear at my clothes, like audiences have done to a lot of entertainers. He was trying to make the whole thing into an insult because he didn’t understand the kind of love audiences can have for entertainers.
By this time Bea Ford and I had broken up, and she’d left the show. She was replaced by Sugar Pie De Santo, who had been part of a duo called Sugar Pie and Pee Wee. Etta James was on that Apollo bill, too. Etta had been big in the mid-fifties, then had quit recording for about five years because of some personal problems. But she’d come back big with tunes like “All I Could Do Was Cry,” “My Dearest Darling,” “At Last,” and “Trust in Me.” She was always a dynamic performer, and a beautiful woman, too. A lot of times, though, her personal problems got in the way of her performing. Promoters and club owners always told me how much trouble they had with her; they couldn’t count on her to be in shape to go on. They couldn’t handle Etta. Nobody could talk to her but me—she believed in James Brown. On the first show of the week she wasn’t able to get through but one number. I took her to my dressing room and talked to her for a long time about what she was doing to the show and what she was doing to herself. For the rest of the week she didn’t have any problem.
When we weren’t playing the theaters, we were doing the one-nighters, traveling all the time. You see a lot of the country that way; you see it but you don’t see it. You often don’t know what’s really going on in a particular city. In May 1961 we were doing a lot of southern gigs that it was easier for me to drive to than fly to. One day I stopped with Byrd, Bobby Bennett, and one or two others to eat at the Trailways bus station in Birmingham. Black entertainers traveling around the South frequently ate at bus stations. Their cafeterias were segregated, so you knew where you stood—you knew you could get something to eat without any hassle.
We walked into the “colored” side, sat down, and started eating. Pretty soon we heard hollering and cursing coming from the white side. We stood up and looked over the little partition separating the two sides to see what was going on. All these black people were standing around the door waiting to get a seat on the “white only” side. Most of ’em looked like they might be college kids, and there were a few whites with them. Byrd and I recognized one white boy who had been president of a fraternity the original Flames had played for. One of the white men sitting at the lunch counter got up and left in a hurry. You could see he didn’t want any part of whatever was going to happen. As soon as he got up, a black kid went over and sat down. The white man next to him said, “What’re you doing sitting here, nigger? You can’t sit by me. What do you think you’re doing?” And then bap, the white man knocked him off the stool. The minute he was knocked off, another came over and sat down. Then all hell broke loose. People started beating up the kids, throwing things, tearing up the place.
We took off for the car. Outside, there were all these people who had come down on the bus. Turned out they were the Freedom Riders. The college kids inside had come out to help them integrate the diner. We didn’t know what a Freedom Rider was; all we knew was that there was a bunch of bleeding and beat-up people staggering around, trying to get back on the bus, and a whole bunch of white folks was coming after ’em with clubs.
We jumped in the car and pulled out onto the street. The bus pulled out right behind us, getting right on our tail, honking and trying to get around us. We moved over and let it go by, then we looked around behind and and saw why it wanted to get around us so bad: Chasing the bus were trucks and cars full of white folks waving axe handles and baseball bats. Now we were between them and the bus, and we knew they weren’t going to care which side of the cafeteria we were sitting on. Now we were right on the bus’s tail and trying to get around it. The trucks were on our tail trying to go through us. Soon as we had a chance we turned off and got away, and kept on going until we were sure none of the trucks had turned off after us. We found out later that they caught the bus, burned it, and beat up the people real bad.
It’s hard to believe, but we didn’t encounter much racial trouble back then, except when we were out on the road with white groups. Then we ran into discrimination at hotels and places to eat, but because we were in show business, I think people mostly just left us alone.
As soon as we finished playing all over the South, we were up North again and into the theaters. In the last week of September we were headlining at the Apollo again on a bill with Ben E. King, the Spinners, Lee Dorsey, and Pigmeat. Ben E. King left the Drifters the year before and already had hits with “Spanish Harlem” and “Stand by Me.” The Spinners was a new group, put together by Harvey Fuqua, the one who had the Moonglows; Lee Dorsey had a song called “Ya-Ya” that was taking off for him; and Pigmeat did his thing. Sugar Pie De Santo was still doing her spot as part of my show, but she was about to leave. She was under contract to another record company, and I couldn’t cut her on anything with me, so it was best for both of us for her to go on her own.
During this round of the theaters we were on a bill with the Chantels at the Uptown in Philadelphia. One of the young ladies singing with that group, Yvonne Fair, impressed me by how hard she worked. I could see she was conscientious, always on time, always ready to go on no matter what happened. I really dug that because the bigger the revue got, the more problems there were. A lot of people think that what’s hard is when you’re first starting out and playing all the little juke joints and everything, but it’s not so. It’s a lot harder when you have a big organization to run. Somebody who’s reliable is a big asset in that situation, so I asked Yvonne to join my show. She finished up her work with the Chantels and joined the revue about two weeks later in Phoenix. I also added the Hortense Allen Dancers to the show, and they joined us in Phoenix, too; later on I renamed them the Brownies.
While we were in Philadelphia that time, the Flames and I appeared on American Bandstand for the first time. I was glad to make American Bandstand; it was going to be my first time on national television, and I was nervous. Dick Clark did everything he could to make us comfortable. He said, “Now that you’ve gotten used to playing big places, does it bother you to have people standing close to you while you perform?”
“Nosir,” I said. “After all the small clubs I played, it makes me nervous when they’re not crowded in on me.”
We lip-synced “I Don’t Mind” and “Baby, You’re Right” with no band, and they had a few couples dancing close while we did it. The lip-syncing was easy, we’d done the songs so often, but I was still nervous inside, saying to myself, “Lord, let us be a hit.” We were still worried when we got through because some of the fellas had gotten behind the lyrics and some had gotten ahead, and we were afraid it would look bad. Then we saw the tape. All the little hand gestures the Flames did went across their faces, so it was all right.
We talked to Dick. He was a good man, always has been. A real gentleman. He was concerned about the kids who danced on the show going straight home afterward. He said sometimes the parents called, and he felt responsible. That’s the kind of man he is.
We introduced ourselves to the little girl who had given “Try Me” a high number when everybody else low-rated it. We gave her tickets to the show we were doing that night in Philadelphia, and we took her, her mother, and her little brother to dinner.
In January 1962, after the western swing, I cut Yvonne at Dukoff Studios in Miami on a song called “I Found You.” It’s practically the same song I had the hit on in 1965 called “I Got You (I Feel Good).” When I cut it myself, I just changed the lyric slightly. She did a good job on the song, right down to the holler.
In the spring the revue played all around California again. In Los Angeles we were at the Shriners Auditorium on a bill with Aretha Franklin, Tito Puente, Chico Hamilton, and several others. I met Aretha for the first time. She had a real strong gospel background—her father was the Reverend C. L. Franklin—and she could really sing from the first. At that time she had hit with “Rock a Bye Your Baby to a Dixie Melody.” We became close after that show. What I liked about her right away was how smart she was; you could tell just talking to her once. I guess you could say that she was my girlfriend for a while, but it was hard for us to get together because we were both working all the time. We managed to see each other only about three or four times over the next year or so.
The same show, with all the other acts, went over to Long Beach, where it was picketed by the Muslims. Whenever they felt there were enough good black acts to fill out a show that had white acts, they picketed. I think they objected to the Latin acts on this particular show. I knew about the Muslims from back when I was growing up around them in Augusta, so I didn’t let it bother me. I just ignored it and went on about my business. Whenever we were around the L. A. area we always counted on the Five Four Ballroom for a booking, but the Muslim thing was really getting heavy. They had a shootout with the police in front of their mosque on South Broadway near the Five Four. One Muslim was killed, and several Muslims and police were wounded. The city closed down the Five Four for a while, so we lost the gig.
We worked our way back east and wound up the tour at the Apollo the last week in May. The Olatunji Troupe, with singers, dancers, and drummers, was on the show. Yvonne did her solo spot. The Sensations, the guitarist Curley Mays, and Pigmeat with Edna May Harris, and Chuck Thompson were the rest of the bill.
The show went real good—“Night Train” was finally out and was a big hit, and the audience was better than ever—but I wasn’t satisfied. Even with all the shows we gave every day for a solid week there, only a limited number of people could get in. People who couldn’t get to one of my shows, especially an Apollo show, missed that special thing that always happened live. I guess some of the people who did get into the shows missed that special thing when they listened to the records. I knew there was a lot more to what I did than could be recorded in a studio anyway. By the time we wound up the week there, I knew I wanted to do a live album so that people could at least hear what kind of a show I had. I started hinting about the idea to a few people, to get them ready for it. Except for Byrd, everybody told me I was crazy. That’s when I knew I had something.