The night James Brown attempted to assassinate Joe Tex
Despite being one of the most natural entertainers and influential funk and soul singers of all time, James Brown was not without his critics. Often known as ‘The Hardest Working Man in Showbusiness’, Brown released nearly 60 studio albums during his life, and was famed for live performances that often extended far beyond the three-hour mark, but his toil was often overshadowed by his explosive temper and legal issues.
Brown had numerous scrapes with the law throughout his career, with many of them relating to drugs, weapons and battery charges. While he used to operate a strict zero-tolerance policy for drugs and alcohol within his band and admonished those who disobeyed his requests, by the 1980s, he had seemingly gone against his golden rule and was regularly abusing PCP, causing him to act irrationally. However, his substance use wasn’t solely to blame for his intense outbursts – he had been something of a loose cannon long before that.
The singer served three years in a juvenile detention centre at the age of 16 after he was convicted of theft, and this was only the first in a long line of convictions that he received throughout his lifetime. However, one alleged incident for which he was never reprimanded is arguably one of his most heinous acts of recklessness, and it all unfolded in the middle of a concert in 1963.
Prior to this, Brown had already established something of a rivalry with R&B singer Joe Tex, but it was far from a healthy battle for stardom. After beginning their careers by releasing their music via imprints of King Records, Tex would leave the label in 1960 and record the song ‘Baby, You’re Right’ for Anna Records. Brown chose to cover the song a year later, but due to the fact that he substantially altered the lyrics and composition of the song, he earned himself a songwriting credit alongside Tex.
Understandably, this would have irked Tex a great deal, and to rub salt in his wounds, Brown would also enter a relationship with Tex’s ex-wife, Bea Ford, and record the duet ‘You’ve Got The Power’ together. It was at this point that it turned from simple one-upmanship into a bitter feud, with Tex calling out Brown by name in the song ‘You Keep Her’, in response to Brown’s wife-stealing antics. Calling Brown out in song was one thing, but mocking him during a live performance was apparently taking things too far.
When Tex decided to lampoon Brown’s live routine by getting himself stuck in one of his trademark capes during a performance in Brown’s home state of Georgia, the ‘Godfather of Funk’ saw red, and was seemingly out for revenge of the most severe degree. After following Tex to an aftershow party, Brown allegedly burst into the room armed with two shotguns and began to fire at will. While eyewitness reports of the incident all seem to tell their accounts differently, the story supposedly goes that Brown ended up shooting seven people, but none of those were the intended target of his rival.
According to Tex’s trumpet player, Newton Collier, Tex had “made a mockery of Brown,” and that in the aftermath, “James did most of the shooting, and Joe was running back behind the trees and bushes.” Guitarist Johnny Jenkins also claimed that “a guy went around later, and I think he gave each one of the injured $100 apiece not to carry it no further.”
Seeing as Brown was never charged for the incident, it would appear that the hush money that was alleged to have been dished out along with the additional cash that was forked out by his agent did enough to “make the situation disappear”, as biographer RJ Smith attests. However, the legend of the night their feud came to a head has managed to go down in infamy, and is a despicable tale of when a rivalry can go too far.
