Forty-seven years ago, at a radio station in Macon, Georgia, five young men stood around a microphone and sang a song. One played guitar, another played piano, but the station's recording equipment picked up the instruments so faintly that the tape they made that day is often recalled as an a-cappella performance. The lead singer was shorter than the others. He had to stand on an overturned Coca-Cola crate to get his mouth level with the mike. When the tape started rolling, he cried out the word "Please" with an immensity of feeling that might, more conventionally, have been reserved for a song's climax. Then he cried out again, "Please," and again and again, "Please, please," at heartbeat intervals. With each repetition, he invested the monosyllable with a different emotional accent and stress—prayer and pride, impatience and invitation—and although there was ache in his voice, he did not sound like a man pleading so much as commanding what was rightfully his. After his fourth "Please," the rest of the group filled in softly behind him, crooning, "Please, please don't go," until the lead singer's colossal voice surged back over theirs: "Please, please, please." (...)

(...) He was twenty-two years old, a lithe, rippling sinew of a man, on parole after three years in the state-penitentiary system. He had been locked up at the age of fifteen for stealing from parked cars in Augusta, where he was raised in a whorehouse run by his Aunt Honey. (...)

(...) he insists on being addressed, has described himself as "the Napoleon of the stage," and, like the French emperor, he has a compact body, with a big head and big hands, and a taste for loud, tightly fitted costumes. (...)

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