James Brown's Live at the Apollo (33 1/3)

Wolk does several interesting things in this book. He traces where James Brown's repertoire borrows and steals from earlier songs in the R&B tradition. He pokes gentle fun at some of the accounts of the Live at the Apollo period in Brown's two autobiographies, pointing out their inconsistencies from documented facts. He encourages closer listening, second by second, to the album, noting details from bum notes in the horn section to shouted exchanges in the audience. He looks forward from Live at the Apollo to future developments in James Brown's career, for example in how It's a Man's World later took over the centrepiece "protracted-ballad" role in JB's set that Lost Someone holds in this album.