Try Me

Try Me: The Record That Proved James Brown Could Sing

Before the Screams, There Was the Ballad

Most people who know James Brown know him as a force of nature: the shrieking, cape-dropping, split-executing Godfather of Soul, the man who basically invented funk by stripping a groove down to its hardest rhythmic components and then daring anyone to stay still. What gets obscured by that titanic later reputation is that in the beginning, James Brown was a balladeer. When he first walked through the door of Federal Records in 1956, he was a young man from Augusta, Georgia with a voice that could do things most voices could not, and he spent his first years as a recording artist demonstrating its range rather than its volume. Try Me was the record that proved the point to the American public.

The Record and Its Construction

Recorded in 1958 and built around a slow, aching tempo, Try Me is a gospel-drenched love appeal. The Famous Flames, Brown's backing group, provide the call-and-response vocal cushion that grounds the performance in the church tradition even as it aims directly at the pop market. Brown's voice on this recording is supple and controlled; he is not yet pushing the limits of his instrument in the way he would on the ecstatic live recordings that later made him famous. He is persuading. He is negotiating. He is doing something that requires patience and precision rather than explosive energy, and he is very good at it. The production keeps the arrangement simple, letting the voice carry the full weight of the emotion.

Number One on the R&B Charts

The commercial story of Try Me is straightforward and significant. On the R&B charts, it was a number one hit, Brown's first chart-topper and the record that established him as a commercial force rather than just a regional draw. On the Billboard Hot 100, the single debuted on December 15, 1958, entering at number 80, and spent 12 weeks on the pop chart while climbing to a peak of number 48. That pop crossover performance confirmed that Brown's appeal extended beyond his core R&B audience, a fact that would become increasingly important as his career evolved.

The Career It Launched

Without the success of Try Me, the subsequent story of James Brown becomes more difficult to tell. The R&B number one gave him leverage with his label and with promoters, and it gave him the audience base he needed to begin building the touring operation that would become the most disciplined and demanding live show in American popular music. The Famous Flames were already known as a hard-working road band; Try Me gave them a hit to take on the road and a reason for audiences to show up in larger numbers. The live recordings that would later document Brown's extraordinary stage performances grow directly from the commercial foundation this single laid.

A Different Kind of Classic

When critics assemble the James Brown canon, the entries tend to cluster around the mid-1960s funk recordings and the explosive live performances. Try Me occupies a different kind of important position: it is the record that got him in the room. Hearing it now, you can appreciate both what it does (sustain a gorgeous vocal performance over a slow, gospel-influenced framework) and what it anticipates. The control and intensity that Brown brings to this ballad are the same qualities, expressed in a different emotional key, that would eventually produce everything that followed. Put it on and listen to a career beginning. The patience and precision of the performance are their own reward; you do not need to know what came afterward for the record to work completely on its own terms. But knowing what came afterward changes what you hear, layering the recording with a kind of retrospective poignancy. This is the James Brown who had not yet figured out he was going to change American music several times over; he just knew he had a song and a voice and something to prove. That combination was enough.

“Try Me” — James Brown And The Famous Flames' singular moment on the 1950s charts.