On October 24, 1962, soul singer James Brown gives an electrifying performance on Black America’s most famous stage—a performance recorded and later released as Live at the Apollo (1963). It was the first breakthrough album of Brown’s career—a major step toward his eventual crossover and conquest of the mainstream pop music world.
Brown began his professional career at a time when rock and roll was opening new opportunities for Black artists to connect with white audiences. But the path he took to fame did not pass through Top 40 radio or through "The Ed Sullivan Show" and "American Bandstand." Brown would make his appearance in all of those places eventually, but only after a decade spent performing almost exclusively before Black audiences and earning his reputation as the "Hardest Working Man in Show Business."
Having failed to convince the head of his label, King Records, to record and release the Apollo Theatre performance as a live album, Brown, a man who was famously wise to the value of a dollar, financed the Apollo recording himself. In the end, the show went off not only without a hitch, but with such success that the famously tough Apollo crowd was in a state of rapture. Released in May 1963, Live at the Apollo ended up spending an astonishing 66 weeks on the Billboard album chart and selling upwards of a million copies, giving Brown his first smash hit album and setting him on a course for his incredible crossover success in the mid-1960s and beyond.
