Live at the Apollo

I love the 33 1/3 series of little books, each on a single record album (we have a sizable stack of them in the store), but this one is easily my favorite, even though I had never heard the record it's about before I read it. Live at the Apollo, James Brown's landmark 1962 recording, is only 31 minutes long, but it's packed, and so is this tiny book, which thrillingly and brilliantly connects that single night to a whole web of performers and performances, placing that moment in history, and making history vivid in that moment.