5) The Knight Brothers: Tried So Hard to Please Her (1968)



The charts of the 1960’s contained a number of acts called Brothers. Some were real, like the Isley Brothers or the Chamber Brothers. Some weren’t, like the Righteous Brothers or the Walker Brothers, who could have been a 'brother' duo but added a non-singing drummer who strangely turned out to drum neither on their records or at live performances. One of this latter group were the Knight Brothers, a duo from Washington DC comprising Richard Dunbar and Jimmy Diggs who had sung together in a doo-wop group the Starfires in the late 1950s, with Diggs also singing for a group called the Carltons.

Their sound was not dissimilar to the Righteous Brothers, with the baritone  Diggs singing lead  and writing some of their material and the tenor voice of Dunbar taking the higher harmonies, but  with a more intense  sound . Their best known track was the Diggs composition Temptation ‘Bout To Get Me, which was a minor national hit in 1965 on the Chess label. It was a powerful and wrenching song with  an anguished performance by the Knight Brothers showing an obvious gospel influence. It also had the additional bonus of backing vocals by a then unknown Minnie Riperton. Though never really a soul singer, Minnie’s distinctive voice can be heard on a number of the Chess recordings of the mid to late 60’s, including Fontella Bass’s big hit Rescue Me, Billy Stewart’s Strange Feeling and Ol’ Man River and the Radiants’ Hold On.

They had little further commercial success and their final release in 1968 was another Diggs composition, Tried So Hard To Please Her, with Iceman Jerry Butler producing. It is another impassioned performance, with an interplay of Diggs and Dunbar  foreshadowing the harmonies of the Chi-lites. There is also something of resignation in Diggs’ vocals as he realises that nothing he can do will make the object of the song happy, leaving the listener to wonder if he had been going out with a  1960’s version of Naomi Campbell. The tone seemed  prophetic as the duo split up shortly afterwards. Dunbar joined the Orioles and Diggs left the music business, became a Muslim, changed his name to Mustafa and apparently earned his living for a while playing the flute on street corners and subways. They left, however, a set of performances of such power  that , as one commentator has suggested, they made Sam and Dave sound like Chad and Jeremy. Quite an achievement.




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