Previously in the book: Nebraskan Hal Neely played in dance bands in the Midwest and California before joining the Army in World War II. After he graduated from college he worked for both Allied Record Manufacturing and King Records where he met the irascible Syd Nathan and the incomparable James Brown.

Someone once said, “Success has a thousand fathers, but failure is a bastard.” James Brown was one of those successes with a thousand fathers. Hal Neely in his memoirs dismissed the claim that Ralph Bass discovered and put Brown under contract Brown. He said he was visiting King that day when a package with a demo record arrived in the mail from a nightclub owner in Macon, Georgia.
It may well be true that the first time Neely heard a recording of James Brown’s voice was in Cincinnati but other music historians say that Ralph Bass heard Brown first while he was at the King branch office in Atlanta Georgia early in 1956. Even he wasn’t the first King employee to hear Brown sing. The office manager Gwen Kesler told Bass he had to hear this.1
“Who the hell was that?” Bass asked. “I had never heard anything like that. It was so different. My theory as a producer has always been: Let me find someone who’s different and at least I have a chance.”2
That chance Bass wanted to take was a young man who “wasn’t supposed to be James, wasn’t supposed to be Brown and wasn’t supposed to be alive. You see,” Brown said in his 1986 autobiography, “I was a stillborn. My mother and father lived in a one-room shack in the pinewood outside Barnwell, South Carolina.”
However, what a person writes in his autobiography often cannot be taken at face value. Critics accused Brown of half-truths, self-justifications and re-writing history.3 For example, James Brown said he was born May 3, 1933, in Bramwell, South Carolina; however, his birthday was also listed as June 17, 1928, in Pulaski, Tennessee, birth records. A Penthouse magazine article listed his birth date also in 1928. The 1933 birthdate has been deemed more likely to be accurate because “if he had been born in 1928 he would’ve been 21 years old when first imprisoned and 24 when released. In fact, he was still legally a minor, under 21, when paroled in 1952.” Some musicologists think he was trying to make himself out to be younger than he really was by releasing to the public birthdates.4
By the time he was 15 years old, Brown had grown proficient in breaking into cars and stealing whatever he could find inside; however, his luck finally ran out and the police caught him in the spring of 1949. Young James was sentenced to eight to sixteen years in the Georgia Juvenile Training Institute in Rome, Georgia. While there, Brown met Johnny Terry who eventually became a member of the Famous Flames. In prison they formed a gospel quartet with two other inmates. Two years later in 1951, he was transferred to the Alto Reform School near Toccoa, Georgia.5
A twist of fate led Brown to meet one of his best lifelong friends at the Toccoa reform school. That friend was not one of the inmates like Brown and Terry, but the valedictorian of the local high school who brought his a cappella gospel singers to perform for the prisoners.
Bobby Byrd was everything that James Brown was not – educated, respectable, religious and an all-around nice guy.6 Byrd’s family vouched for Brown and guaranteed a job for him at a local car dealership which led to his parole in 1952. Brown almost blew this opportunity when he “borrowed” a customer’s Jeep and then wrecked it. Only after further assurances from the Byrd family did the judge agree to let Brown continue on parole.7
Another person—other than Neely and Bass–who claimed responsibility for James Brown’s career was Barry Trimier, Toccoa’s only professional black music entrepreneur in the1950s. He claimed to be the group’s first booking agent and manager. He also ran a café, club and pool room called Barry’s Recreation Center. Trimier worked with the group from 1954-55. 8
Brown’s early career had a major advancement when he and his group met Little Richard at Bill’s Rendezvous Club in Toccoa in 1955. The Flames asked Richard if they could play during intermission. “I could hear them from backstage and what they were doing to the audience. James sang ‘Please, Please, Please.’ I thought they weren’t going to give me my microphone back!” Richard said.9
Fats Gonder, Richard’s band manager, recommended the Flames to Clint Brantley, Richard’s manager in Macon. A casual passerby might mistake him for the janitor of his nightclub, the Two Spot, but he was an influential character in the early years of rock ‘n’ roll. The new arrangement did not seem to bother Trimier. “He was somebody unusual,” Trimier said about Brown. “He had to have people like Clint Brantley to take him further. There was no way in the world that I could go out there and socialize.”10
Brantley immediately began booking the Flames all around Georgia and South Carolina, but the group really took off when Little Richard moved to California and to a new agent after his big hit, “Tutti-Frutti.” The Flames took the contracted dates which Brantley had originally signed for Richard.11
The Flames had been playing their first record “Please, Please, Please,” refining it for two years. Byrd said that the song had evolved into a blisteringly emotional, hypnotic fervent supplication which became a vehicle for Brown’s gripping showmanship.12
One of the demo records, cut at station WIBB in Macon in November 1955, wound up at Southland Record Distributing Company in Atlanta where it was forwarded to the King branch office. “It’s a monster,” Ralph Bass praised the record, according to Brown’s autobiography. “Where can I find these guys?”
Bass said he went to Macon and called Brantley. “Now at eight o’clock you parked your car in front of this barbershop, which is across the street from the railroad station. When the lights go on and the blinds go up and down after they go down you come in,” Bass reported Brantley as saying.13 The reason for such a bizarre request was that the white establishment in Macon did not want strange white people–perceived to be outside agitators–to come into town and have any social interaction with “their” Negroes. “An out-of-town white cat could be in trouble in those days,” Bass said. Brantley was taking precautions for Bass’s safety. Once inside Bass watched James Brown and the Flames perform. He paid Brantley $200 and within a few months the Flames were on their way to Cincinnati and the big-time.14
There are, however, a several other versions—all equally unsubstantiated–of how James Brown and the Flames were signed to a contract with King Records.
In one account, Bass was driving through Atlanta listening to the radio when he heard “Please, Please, Please” and rushed to Macon to close the deal.15
In a second story, rhythm and blues pioneer Henry Stone said he was in Miami when Syd Nathan called him about this hot new record being played on the airwaves around Macon. Before Stone could drive to Georgia, Bass–who supposedly was in Birmingham, Alabama–caught wind of the new sensation and got to Macon first.16
A third report had Leonard Chess of Chess Records mailing a contract to Brantley and announcing that he was flying down to Macon immediately. However a heavy snowstorm kept the plane grounded, and Bass beat him to Brantley bearing an offer that exceeded the Chess contract.17
A fourth version appears in Hal Neely’s memoirs in which he said a Macon disc jockey sent the demo record to Syd Nathan and King Records in Cincinnati, and he was in the room when the record was played. “In my opinion,” Neely remembered Nathan saying, “that’s a horrible record, but that kid singing lead has something, and that song is a hit song.” Neely also said Bass was in the room at the time, and Nathan sent him to Georgia to check the group out. While Bass said he signed James Brown and the Flames to a contract, Neely insisted only Syd Nathan himself could sign contracts for King and its subsidiaries.
We will never know what truly transpired.
As the wise man said, success has a lot of daddies.

Footnotes

1 Rhodes, Don, Say It Loud! My Memories of James Brown, The Lyons Press, Guilford, Connecticut, 2009, 26.
2King of the Queen City, 89.
3Brown, Geof, The Life of James Brown, 5.
4 Ibid., 15,16.
5Ibid., 19.
6 Smith, R.J., The One, The Life and Music of James Brown, Omnibus Press, London, 2008, 50.
7The Life of James Brown, 20.
8The One, 58.
9 Say It Loud, 22.
10The Life of James Brown, 30.
11The One, 67.
12 The Life of James Brown, 39.
13The One, 74.
14 Ibid., 73-74.
15 Say It Loud, 26.
16 Ibid., 26.
17The Life of James Brown, 39
17Say It Loud!, 26.
18The One, 72-74.