James Brown and Etta James Were on the Same Bill for One Week.

James Brown ran the tightest show in the music business. Every note, every move, every second of a James Brown performance was controlled — rehearsed, refined, executed with a precision that made the intensity look effortless. He fined musicians for wrong notes. He controlled everything. Etta James controlled nothing. She gave the song whatever the song asked for and trusted the room to receive it. She was the opposite of James Brown in almost every way that a performer can be opposite. For one week on a touring bill in the early 1960s, they shared a stage. What the musicians between them saw — and argued about for years afterward — reveals something about the two different theories of soul that these two performers represented, and about which one, in the end, left the deeper mark.