I REMEMBER RAY

At just 22, Lester wrote a respectful reverie on Ray Charles’ repertoire, recalling how stirred he was hearing his hits “What’d I Say” and “I Got a Woman” as a teenager—and how he still gets chills. He’s rocked and awed with each piercing wail, whoop, and growl, praising the sizzling keyboards and impeccable arrangements, from “boiling blues” and groundbreaking R&B to gospel, swing, and jazz—Ray defined soul.

He waxes rhapsodic in this survey of dozens of recordings, noting milestone albums from the Atlantic catalog, simply stating: “Get it!” This testimony speaks to Lester’s range of musical tastes, flaunting his far-reaching knowledge of Ray’s prolific repertoire. This affecting deep dive goes beyond a discography of a pioneering icon, known as the “Genius.” Lester’s compelling descriptions emotionally capture the tenderness, radiance, and fierce dynamism of Ray’s music, with lyrics that make the songs vault off the page. Here Lester is unexpectedly heartfelt and sincere, yet with flashes of signature Bangsesque flourishes, sneering at Ray’s forays into country tunes and standards while hailing his ability to steer clear of the “swamp of schmaltz.” He addresses his influence on Cocker, Morrison, Redding, and countless others, praising his contributions as important and transcendent, even crediting Ray for creating everything that would happen in popular music. Perhaps he relates intimately with Ray’s distinctive style, Olympian talents, and genre-spanning mastery. Lester was under his spell and moved, taking the cue to emulate the legend, inspired to capture all the intensity and dynamism. It’s as if he’s writing of his aspirations for his own future canon.

--ROBERTA CRUGER

Roberta Cruger is a journalist and founding editor of the media section of CREEM magazine. She worked in programming at MTV in the 1980s and has since written for an array of publications including Smithsonian, Salon, and Los Angeles Times Magazine.

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I saw Ray Charles singing “Eleanor Rigby” on the Glen Campbell Show the other night, and for a few moments his music held all the passionate intensity of old. “Arggh, lookit all them lonely people,” Ray growled, “where in the world do they all come from?” Lunging over the piano with his angular shades gleaming, Ray looked for a moment like some strange lord peering down from a turret on all the lost and lonely crowds of humanity.

And in a way we all are his subjects, though it is almost equally certain that we have been losing him for a long time. His brand of boiling blues was a mainstay of my own adolescence, and I arrived late, in 1960. Just a year later he released the album called Modern Sounds in Country & Western Music, a record which sold several million copies, started a trend which has avalanched ever since, and marked a turning point in Charles’ career, away from the almost painfully authentic blues and ground-breaking gospel-infused R&B which he had pioneered almost a decade before into the much more lucrative (but less musically rewarding) realms of schmaltz and vitiated “big-band” stylings.

But there is a solid backlog of powerful recordings on Atlantic which capture Charles at his most intense, from the throbbing sexuality of “What’d I Say” (what a prominent jazz critic once described as “tasteless vulgarity”) to the soul-racked articulation of his deepest ghetto blues. You might have to search some dusty record bins to find them now, but it would certainly be worth the effort if you’d like to hear some of the most moving blues on record and dig where almost all the Black music and many of the white heroes of the ’60s, from the whole Stax/Volt style to Alan Price and Joe Cocker, came from.

Trying to pick three or four “best” Ray Charles albums from his prolific body of recorded work is a real challenge, because all of it on Atlantic is so fine that you tend to get lost just listening. The first thing to remember, though, would probably be not to bother with any of his work on ABC-Paramount, the company which made him rich by euphemizing his sound. They have a double-record Ray Charles Story, for instance, which is a pale and shoddy imitation of the great Atlantic set of the same name; not only is the copy’s packaging inferior, but the live versions of “I Got a Woman” and “What’d I Say” therein, recorded in the mid-’60s, bear saddening testimony to a tired Charles still able to turn out hits but almost completely divested of the surging vitality of the originals.

So the Atlantic Ray Charles Story (in four volumes, with the first two also available as a double album) is probably the broadest representation of his manyfaceted talents. It ranges wide, from his earliest work, with its swingand bop-influenced piano and primitive vocal cries over the familiar gospel piano triplets Ray might as well have patented; documenting his pioneering rock ’n’ roll of the mid-’50s, such as “Hallelujah I Love Her So” and the anthem-like “Yes Indeed”; touching lightly on his equally Olympian talents as composer, arranger, and player of jazz on both alto sax and piano; tantalizing with tasty extracts from his incendiary concerts of the late ’50s and early ’60s; marking the evolution of Ray’s ever-firmer command of the mis’ry blues to which he always returned, and which I feel is his greatest work; and culminating finally in the experiments with various admixtures of styles and instrumental settings which produced one masterpiece album, The Genius of Ray Charles, but set the stage for later mush like “Born to Lose.”

When Ray Charles sang about pain, anguish, poverty, and loneliness, the result was such a realistic reflection of these darknesses that it was almost too much to take.

Well, that’s The Ray Charles Story, and it’s a fine survey. But a much more powerful listening experience, as well as a good survey of Ray’s most important work, can be heard on three separate albums which were milestones not only for Ray but for the development of modern popular music: The Genius of Ray Charles, The Genius Sings the Blues, and The Greatest Ray Charles.

We should begin with the The Genius Sings the Blues because this is the music of Ray’s emotional core, from which all his other styles radiate. The Genius Sings the Blues is probably one of the most deeply moving albums ever released. That is not hyperbole— when Ray Charles sang about pain, anguish, poverty, and loneliness, the result was such a realistic reflection of these darknesses that it was almost too much to take. Few musicians anywhere understand suffering as deeply as blind Ray Charles, and I can’t think of any rock or jazz musician working anywhere, unless it be Charles Mingus, who has so effectively translated his personal tribulations into a carefully controlled yet shiveringly impassioned statement bespeaking not mere travail but self-transcendence.

Take the opener, “Early in the Morning” (which incidentally bears no relations to other songs by that title); churning brass, crisp bongos, Ray’s electric piano rocking tartly as the Raelets, who were THE original Chick Vocal Group and should have recorded on their own, enter with a circular pattern of a few simple notes and endlessly rising and falling like rushes of liquid fire. But when Ray finally comes in, it’s all over: “Early in the morning I can’t get right now/ Had a little date with my baby last night now/I went to all the places where we used to go/I went to her house but she don’t live there no more/I went to her girlfriend’s house but she was out/I knocked on her father’s door and he began to shout: ‘Get away from here, boy!’/Early in the morning, yeah/Ain’t got nothing but the blues.” That song haunted me many a morning through seven years when I’d lost track of this record, and it’s still a tremendously affecting piece, highlighted (although every facet of the performance is an equal “highlight”) by a moving David Newman sax solo whose shifting, musing hesitance is a perfect expression of the protagonist’s grieving confusion.

But “Early in the Morning” is not the most moving performance on The Genius Sings the Blues. Up-tempo laments such as it and Ray’s classic version of “I’m Movin’ On” (which largely defined the approach taken to the song by later artists, from the Stones on down) and the churning, gloriously (and precisely, the mathematical precision of knowing just how far to let the delivery slide and tip without losing the imperative rhythmic heartbeat) sloppy “The Right Time”—all these serve only to complement the deep, intensely personal slow blues numbers, which are simply overpowering. I have generally hated slow blues jams on albums by rock groups, and even much of the “real” stuff as done by people like B.B. King. They seem so pedantic and monotonous and essentially onanistic, and part of the reason for that reaction, I believe, lies in an early exposure to those great Charles sides, against which precious little heard since has seemed to measure up.

“Hard Times,” for example, is a classic piece of Ray Charles poetry featuring brilliantly conceived dynamics; it starts out rather mildly, with Ray playing pure gospel piano and crooning softly: “My mother tole me/’Fore she passed away and said, ‘Son, when I'm gone/Don’t forget to pray/’Cause there’ll be hard times’/Hard times, oh yeah/Who knows better than I?”

Another chorus in this ineffably sad but restrained tone, then a brief, mournful David Newman tenor solo, but when Ray reenters, his voice has a new power, a fierce crackling anguish that wails and growls through steadily mounting intensity until he sounds by the song’s end like a man at the breaking point: “Yea, Lord, yeah/One of these days/There’ll be no more sorrow/When I pass a way/There’ll be no more hard times...”

There are so many other tracks deserving of mention, like the classic “I Believe to My Soul” (“Last night you were dreaming/And I heard you say: [breathless chick] ‘Oh, Johnny’/When you know my name is Ray...”) whose basic dolorous piano chords were borrowed later by Dylan to make his diatribe against “Mr. Jones” that much more ominous. And there are the rocking Jimmy Yancey chords of “Mr. Charles’ Blues,” a perfect musical and lyrical evocation of the experience of being down and out in Chicago, set to a piano accompaniment in the style developed in Southside Clubs by giants like Yancey, Memphis Slim, and Pete Johnson 20 years and more ago. Ray sings: “It was way last winter, baby/And the ground was covered with snow/I didn’t have no money in my pocket, darlin’/Child, and I didn’t have no place to go/Well, it seemed like I was goin’ crazy sometimes/ Baby, I didn’t know what to do...” The song’s wintry feel is a tangible sensation, especially the crisp warmth of the piano, which contrasts with the snowdrift streets of the lyrics like the cheery intimacy of a club.

This is an album which you simply cannot afford to be without if you care at all about American Black music, the blues, rock, or any kind of transcendently moving artistic experience. Get it.

My second all-time favorite Ray Charles album is The Greatest Ray Charles, which was originally called Do the Twist With Ray Charles and had Twist dance steps on the back, even though the music inside had nothing to do with the fad riding high when it was released: it was hot, boiling R&B recorded live (and, I think, live in its entirety) at a concert in an unknown city where Ray did nine of his most driving songs in some of their best versions ever. “What’d I Say,” for example, throbs relentlessly for 6V2 minutes, augmenting the original’s volcanic melange of cracklingly percussive piano, sharp cymbals, and magnificently prurient cries with a fierce, slamming piano solo in the opening instrumental section that gives Ray’s vocal entrance added force. “What’d I Say” is sexually arousing in a steamingly effective way that great art can be but pornography cannot—instead of the essentially ashamed coldness of the pornographer, we have Ray and those sizzlingly fertile Raelets celebrating the primal joy of unfettered lust swooning and whooping in a molten coalescence of voices. It’s healthy, it’s religious, it’s the most totally and unabashedly sexy song I’ve ever heard.

The album also contains a bright, buoyant performance of the famous “long” version of “I Got a Woman,” featuring Ray’s great vocal improvisation. In a brilliant and far-reaching innovation, Ray starts to stretch out the notes, syllables, and tonalities of the song, bending its raw material into unpredictable flash floods of sound that undulate and shift amoeba-like through growls, almost Caribbean-sounding yips and chants, rhythmic syllable-crunchings (“I say ah-hunh, ah-hunh”), distended melodic scraps, and shimmering cries of pure glossarial joy. “Scat” vocalists had presaged it in less adventurous terms. I don’t know of anyone conceiving a vocal performance in this way before Ray Charles, though the devices used have been utilized widely in the ’60s, in “serious” electronic music (where it is often most abused as a means to a melodramatic effect) and much rock, from Bobby Plant’s psychedelic simulated orangutan orgasms in Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” freak-out, to Lou Reed’s series of modal croons and barked imprecations in the Velvet Underground’s trailblazing “Sister Ray.” Once again, Ray was there first.

None of the other songs on The Greatest Ray Charles fall below this standard of excellence, and all of them seem to have been infused with that little extra drip of catalytic urgency that pushes them just a gasp and a snort past the already brimming intensity of the originals. “Leave My Woman Alone” is a V-8 threat gunning its engines menacingly, backing the Don Juan interloper into quivering defeat with its implacable assertion of absolute property rights on the mate (“If you don’t want you don’t have to get in trouble/You better leave my woman alone/Well, I know you are a playboy/And you’ve got your women all over town/But listen, buddy, if you ever sweettalk my little girl/I’m gonna lay your body down”), primitive quintessence of the male chauvinist badass snarling other pack members away, gunning his Red and va-rooming off up that endless highway with the girl huddled cowering in the back seat like a heap of baggage. A classic urban ’50s folksong.

“Tell Me How Do You Feel” has always been a Charles favorite of mine. It has a fine bitterness (“Tell me, how do you feel when your baby’s lovin’ your best friend?/Do you feel like goin’ crazy?/Or do you feel you’ve always been?”) complemented by a full piped organ solo that somehow retains its sense of acidulous irony even as all those billowing cottony notes are trembling down. One thing about Ray Charles and this was a characteristic he shared with Bob Dylan and Van Morrison, among others, was that he was never afraid to write a negative song or retreated in the face of “questionable” emotional content. In fact, he sometimes seemed to summon his fiercest powers for bitter, resentful, agonized, and just plain misanthropic songs like “I Believe to My Soul,” “Leave My Woman Alone,” “Early in the Morning,” or “Tell the Truth,” which is a terse epistle to a deceitful lover sung here in blistering tandem with Marjorie Hendricks, the gravelly-voiced goddess whose great gross cries, almost more like the booming bleat of some surrealistic beast than human “singing,” helped make “The Rigid Time” such a classic.

The last choruses filled me with a horde of ghostly chills that swirled through my innards and lingered on a precious moment after Ray's last pristine note.

One of Ray’s most unusual albums is The Genius of Ray Charles, which appeared in 1960. Gone were the primitive poems about hard times, as well as the boiling rhythmic yawp. Ray decided to move into a new area and try for a Class album according to traditional Broadway/Tin Pan Alley standards, yet without relinquishing the soul. So for one side’s sessions he gathered together a showcase set of musicians from the Duke Ellington and Count Basie bands, with Quincy Jones arranging, while the second string orchestra and a small chamber jazz group featured Bob Brookmeyer on trombone. He did songs as far from his Georgia roots as “It Had to Be You,” “Am I Blue,” and Irving Berlin’s “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.”

It was a risky project, artistically speaking. A musician of lesser talent or weaker authority than the Ray Charles of 1960 could easily have ended up swamped in schmaltz. But such was the unifying force of Ray’s musical vision that the whole thing jelled beautifully, a brilliant stylistic crossbreed where Tin Pan Alley met the blues and the blues triumphed and even made material as lame as “It Had to Be You” palatable.

The sides with Jones and the big band are more exciting, of course—the album opens with a classic blast called “Let the Good Times Roll” (again, no relation to rock hits with that title) which begins with a brilliant brass eruption handy for reminding anyone left queasy by Blood Sweat & Tears that there was a time when the phrase “big band” meant a powerful, vital musical entity. Ray rides in on the crest of the wave: “Hey, everybodyl/Let’s have some fun!/You only live but once/And when you’re dead you’re done!/So let the good times roll...” He means it. Another whooping fanfare from the brass, a typically great David Newman tenor solo, and Ray rolls out this rearing party’s back door with the brass cheering him on: “Hey! No matter whether/Rainy weather/ If you wanna have a ball you’ve gotta get yourself together!/Whoa, get yourself under control—let the good times roll!” If you can listen to that song without breaking into a grin from its infectious joy, you’re made of sterner stuff than I.

The big band side also features two ballads. I resisted “It Had to Be You” at first (sullen grimace: “Sounds like something Bing Crosby would sing”), but Ray’s marvelously funky yet perfectly appropriate piano solo and his falsetto whoop at the end finally won me over. Ditto “When Your Lover Has Gone”—Ray Charles would’ve made a great torch singer, and I almost wish he had gone further into this moody stuff instead of all those limp C&W routines. Penthouses far above the traffic, lonely cocktails at afterglow—never my favorite anachronistic fantasies, but somehow even the strange adult pop of the ’50s made sense when Ray tackled it.

And then there is the great one: “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” in another bursting brass rave-up, with Ray swinging out front with all the genial ease of a great grinning bandmaster, even succeeding in putting across lines like: “They can play a bugle call like you never heard before/So natural that you wanna go to war.” The trumpet solo in the middle has the shrill, wayward flavor the wild New Orleans street bands of 1910 must have had, and the whole song is so good that you just never get tired of it. It’s been 10 years since I got this album, and this track still sets me into a stomping glee each playing.

The second side is equally successful in mixing radically different Black and white idioms, but here the achievement is more impressive because of the way it curbs the tendency of angelic hosts of strings to get mushy. With piano solos like these threading their way through those resin forests, all those Ray Conniff/Percy Faith riffs take on a new dimension, bringing them as close as they’ll ever get to the soil. Ballads that would have been vapid anywhere else take on a strong tenderness as Ray’s basically grainy voice steers clear of saccharine slush, even when he has to sing lines like: “How can I forget your starry eyes?/Your hair when it’s lit by the moonlight skies?” That’s genius.

And side 2 has two performances that are among Ray’s best ever: “Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Crying” (again leagues removed from Gerry & the Pacemakers schlock which probably ripped off its title) is a put-down of an unfaithful lover, delivered with an understated bitterness whose malice comes through much more clearly than it would have in the much more obvious approach of self-righteous histrionics. Ray just lays it on her with chilling calmness: “Don’t let the sun catch you cryin’/Cryin’ at my front door/Daddy’s salty/’Cause baby, you made him so sore..../You can cry, cry, cry/Yes, baby, you can wail Beat your head on the pavement/Till the man comes and throws you in jail... ” A finely acerbic little song of wounded pride and revenge delivered with a beautifully subtle terseness that makes it unique in my experience of pop ballads.

But the album’s real masterpiece is “Come Rain or Come Shine” (Johnny Mercer, “Moon River,” and Harold Arlen, “Over the Rainbow”). But Judy Garland never sounded like this. Opening with a loose, funky Bob Brookmeyer trombone lament set to lulling woodwinds, the song finds Ray in such absolute vocal control that he seems to veer between a languorous tenderness and perfect blue notes sliding clearly up from Ray’s customary throaty growl to a tremulously beautiful Impressions soprano high note with absolute smoothness. What a range the man had, and what a profound understanding of its possibilities. The choruses are especially moving: Strings sweep up and down in bittersweet echoes of Porgy & Bess harmonies, Brookmeyer blows soft slurred blues below, and Ray sings with a heart-swelling involvement as total as that of his rawest blues: “Days may be cloudy or sunny/ We’re in or we out of the money/But I’m with you always.. .I’m with you rain-er shiiiine, yeahhh,” bending the final “shine” into a glistening bluesy benediction trembling like a banner in the skies with supremely delicate strength. Kinda music sometimes mists your eyes unexpectedly. I remember in 1960 when I first got this record, a harried 12-year-old just introduced to the flesh-rackings of puberty. I sat one night in front of my record player, head bowed, listening to this song with all the fierce self-immolative concentration of some arcane monk. The last choruses filled me with a horde of ghostly chills that swirled through my innards and lingered on a precious moment after Ray’s last pristine note. At the time Ben and I had just begun to read DownBeat magazine and were fascinated by all the pages advertising albums of “soul jazz” (the big hype of that year) by the likes of Cannonball Adderley, Gene Ammons and Arnett Coleman. We had never heard of them, nor were we hip yet to jazz’s blues roots, so we racked our brains trying to figure out what that strange “soul jazz” could sound like. Well, that night after Ray’s last note had trembled into silence and the chills had ebbed away, I raised my swimming head, opened my eyes, and, in a glazed distant stare, breathed softly: “Wow. That’s it. That must be it, because what could be more soulful than that? So that’s soul. ” These chills have never quite left me.

The Genius of Ray Charles is a remarkable album on several counts. It may seem somewhat anachronistic today, and maybe it is, but that’s all the present’s loss. What’s certain is that there is nothing quite like it elsewhere, no attempt to fuse Black soul and white pop so uniquely successful (most of them have been flatulent abortions). It compares more than favorably with all those Motown soul-with-strings albums, for instance, any of which should dream to beast a shadow of the deep feeling and compelling synthesis herein. I see it as a bridge album musically spanning two increasingly hostile cultures—the Black/young get-loose contingent and the entrenched society of white middle-class adults.

Perhaps this was Ray’s first step on the path that led down to later schmaltz, but if he were to return today and pick up where he left off after this album, why, he just might outdo Dylan with a genuine crosscultural self-portrait whose clarion tones would ring from the polished consoles of Middle America to the land of joints and headphones and finally Bring Us Together most truly. Judgment day, heaven on earth, and no one more eminently suited to preside over these newly United States than Ray Charles.

Ray Charles also recorded 12 other albums for Atlantic, all of them worth getting while they’re still around. The first two, Ray Charles (now titled Hallelujah I Love Her So) and Yes Indeed, show the fire of the later Charles in a rawer state. The 1959 What’d I Say was his first great album, with consistently excellent songs and a great cover showing Ray recording, his face constricted into intense lines all seeming to lead to his sunglasses, in whose lenses shimmered a chiaroscuro reflection of his hands on the piano keys. A possible milestone in modern music, and definitely worth picking up.

Of his other live albums, Ray Charles in Person is considered by many to be one of his greatest works, with its incredibly moving rendition of “Drown in My Own Tears,” and Ray Charles at Newport was equal parts vocal hits and wild big-band instrumentals, which is where the action is in this one: “Hot Red” sizzles with hopped-up squealing glee tastily reminiscent of the great honking Illinois Jacquet-Flip Phillips Jazz at the Philharmonic sax jams of 1949, and “Blues Waltz” is a charging arrangement with an angular theme that'll haunt you. One of my personal favorites.

The heart of Ray’s non-vocal jazz, which is just as distinctive and important as his R&B, lies in two of his instrumental albums for Atlantic. Soul Brothers, with the great vibraharpist Milt Jackson of the Modern Jazz Quartet, is an absolute masterpiece, highlighted by a rare and emotion-charged Charles solo on alto sax in “How Long Blues.” My favorite instrumental Charles album is The Great Ray Charles, a warm, genial set featuring the classic trio blues “Sweet Sixteen Bars,” a deceptively simple gospel statement that seems to distill all the ethos of Black American church music into four shining minutes. The new listener, though, might do well to pick up on the recently released sampler The Best of Ray Charles, which included choice cuts from all five of his instrumental sets.

If there is still such a phenomenon as the “stereo nuts” in existence (you remember the type—circa late ’50s and early ’60s, obsessively balancing “woofers” and “tweeters,” spouting obscure technical jargon, always buying albums of race cars and windows smashing and super orchestras augmenting hundreds of instruments with sound effects, the covers invariably bearing some code that sounded like a gasoline additive: “These 360-meter quadrisonic sound tapes have been specially treated with ZarexQj-P-5 and reprocessed by computer for optimum possible sound reproduction and the pristine silence of demure grooves!”), then The Great Hits of Ray Charles: Recorded on Eight-Track Stereo is undoubtedly the album to go for, since Atlantic utilized some sort of super-secret electronic prestidigitation to get decently balanced stereo out of tracks originally recorded only in mono, as opposed to the cheap trick of slithery echoes with which most companies “reprocess” vintage tapes. The set also has a little paragraph under each song title telling exactly where each instrument is positioned in each channel, and a long technical rap on Atlantic’s recording equipment: “Transfer from master tapes to master lacquers is made on...Westrex 3C Feedback Cutterhead with Haeco Stereo Driver.” Fascinating! And even the layman might find the record an ideal purchase if he only wants to get one because it contains 13 of Charles’ greatest in their original versions or improvements thereon, such as the six-minute live version of “What’d I Say.”

Finally, the albums on ABC-Paramount, with the exception of occasional isolated tracks like “Let’s Go Get Stoned,” are almost uniformly worthless. The rip-off Ray Charles Story has “You Are My Sunshine,” the great R.C./Marjorie Hendricks duet poignantly reminiscent of the fire of the old days, and two albums from the transition period before ABC found him a formula are perhaps also worth picking up. The Genius Hits the Road is an uneven but mostly respectable collection of songs selected either for references to travel or geographic place names in the titles. A perfect example of record industry imagination at work, helping a promising but directionless talent like Ray Charles, who only needed a little molding and a firm producer, to find himself. But it does have the so-touching “Georgia on My Mind” and the entertaining but relatively insubstantial “Hit the Road Jack.” Much better is Genius + Soul = Jazz, one of the first releases on ABC’s prestigious and gorgeously packaged Impulse jazz label. A sensitive production from Bob Thiele, Basie men wailing again, and Ray laying down some of the most sizzlingly incisive organ work ever, plus two withering vocals which somebody should rip off and give to Atlantic so that they could join his other all-time greats. A terrific album, and one of the last good ones he did. If you can find it, get it. Everything else on ABC is archetypical schlock, a pure bacterial culture—but as least he’ll never scuffle again.

Published October 1970