Capturing Brown's popular stage show for the first time on record, the album was a major commercial and critical success and cemented his status as a leading R&B star.

[note 1] Although not credited on the album cover or label, Brown's vocal group, The Famous Flames (Bobby Byrd, Bobby Bennett, and Lloyd Stallworth), played an important co-starring role in Live at the Apollo, and are included with Brown by MC Fats Gonder in the album's intro.

[20] Many record stores, especially in the southeast US, found themselves unable to keep up with the demand for the product, eventually ordering several cases at a time.

[citation needed] In a retrospective article for Rolling Stone, music critic Robert Christgau said that Brown was a "striking but more conventional performer" in the show than on his contemporary studio recordings and wrote of the album: Recorded in 1962 and barely half an hour long, it lacks the heft we associate with live albums, relegating major songs to the same eight-title medley as forgettable ones.

But not only did it establish Brown as an r&b superstar and a sales force to be reckoned with, it's a time capsule, living testament of a chitlin circuit now defunct.

[22] MC5 guitarist Wayne Kramer cited Live at the Apollo as the inspiration to Kick Out the Jams[23] "Our whole thing was based on James Brown.

As Harry Weinger writes in the booklet of the reissued Deluxe Edition (featuring remastered sound and several alternate mixes) in 2004: "Finding the primary master, not the readily available copy, became a mission.

It was tough to find, since the original LP didn't index individual tracks, meaning its song titles would not be properly listed in a database.