(Rhino)
HIGHLY RECOMMENDEDIt seems an unwise decision to try and "explain" a song as immediate and joyous as "Hallelujah, I Love Her So," or one as self-explanatory and felt as "Georgia on My Mind"; Ray Charles' best songs are brilliant because they strike our emotional chords deftly and confidently, and they do this with expertise because that's what Charles, when paying his dues in the '40s, learned how to do. Even apart from his pop success, Charles is the single most important performer in the transitional period between the birth of rhythm & blues and the fruition of rock & roll; few singers, writers, musicians were ever more inventive, more stirringly devoted to an evolving, experimental sound -- all delivered with vocal immediacy anyone else in the world could envy. Charles resisted the "genius" tag, but in the context of 20th century pop music, he's a god among few others. The power of his best work has not diminished an iota over the decades.
Along with the Beatles, Charles embodies a certain conservative ideal of the way in which sheer worth ethic begats creativity; this awkwardly brushes up against the liberal ideal that allows an artist to develop over time, sometimes a great deal of time, which is necessary for a musician like him and is no longer possible in the business -- so if you wonder why we've never had another Ray Charles, that's one important reason. In his early days as a hard-working performer, he was remarkable only for his consistency, like the Beatles in their pre-Hamburg period; history records that he began his career as a remakably consistent and expressive jump blues singer, but not a unique one. He was one among many trying to earn a living.
You can hear a bit of the glimpse of the jump blues Ray Charles, sounding unbelievably young with his gravelly voice yet to be ravaged by aging and vice, on "Mess Around," which also embodies shades of boogie woogie. A smash hit on the R&B charts inaugurating a lucrative decade on Atlantic Records, the cut depicts both a man and a genre of music in transition. You can sense the landscape of soul music beginning to change and open up, but in contrast to so many records of the early '50s, the seams are only there if you try to find them; the music itself remains direct and affecting with no qualification. By the time of "A Fool for You," two years later, Charles is exhibiting
pure soul in his playing and singing, his piano fills delicate and tricky, the dramatic spreading out of the arrangement all operating from a doctrine of honesty and vulnerability raised to a high art. That's soul music, right? And moreover, that's the work of a professional and exquisite creator of grand pop recordings, recordings that encapsulate a kind of miniature history of the American century -- jazz collides with blues collides with gospel collides with R&B -- and Charles' understanding of all of the above is nuanced and cool-headed, a teacher who uses his lessons to quietly (or loudly) deal with his personal agonies.
It could probably be argued that someone like Ray Charles is born with his gifts, and it's probably true that his patience, his gifts and his spirit were his from the beginning. But his unique abilities as a performer and his dogged ambition were an outgrowth of his years of experience working his ass off as a performer in night clubs in Florida and later Seattle. He began to record early, issuing a number of one-off sides on various labels before securing his Atlantic deal; he was constantly learning and empowering himself, and it was for this reason that he appeared from seemingly nowhere on Atlantic and managed to transform the framework in which he was operating. Even at his most conventional (the big band shades of "Greenbacks," the nocturnal melancholy on "Drown in my Own Tears") he was invariably exciting and enthusiastic, the consummate performer now performing for everyone.
Looking over charts and discographies, one finds that it's easy to make a case for any number of Charles' singles as a "breakthrough" moment, but the most frequent song to gather around is the #1 R&B hit "I Got a Woman" from 1955 -- a song whose down-on-its-knees adoration and affection is tempered oddly by both an unusual level of frank powerlessness ("she give me money") and misogyny; it's a placid enough song that subtly reveals ugly, violent ideas. Yet it's wonderful, of course, it just cries out to be followed by Etta James' "Tough Lover." For me, the key single of the first half of Charles' Atlantic deal is the feverish "Lonely Avenue," a gospel-suggestive raw soul, dramatically enunciated so that every word resonates, its rhythm otherworldly and unreal; Doc Pomus wrote the number, but Ray Charles transformed it and made some left-field madness of it that he then rode to the R&B top ten. A remarkable era this was indeed. Great as all the innovation is -- you can hear the virtual invention of the "Motown sound" on "Ain't That Love" -- there is today much to be gained from hearing a relaxed Charles charm his way through pure sleazy blues and beautiful sap, typically with incredibly nuanced vocals like that of "Don't Let the Sun Catch You Cryin'," and without any context necessary we can bask in his glow.
But innovation knocks on the door and won't leave -- who can say whether Charles' sexually charged magnum opus "What'd I Say" was intended to be as world-shaking as it turned out to be, a breathless rock & roll mission statement that renders irrelevant all memories of Bill Haley and, hell, some memories of Elvis. For six minutes (spread over two sides of a 45), after one of the most distinctive and beautiful intros in all recorded music, Charles travels farther afield from his conventional background than ever, leading his band and singers in a reenactment of -- alarmingly enough -- an on-stage
improvisation that begins as a lively and half-formed blues then blasts off into some heaven of shapeless fury, periodically breaking the tension for a few moments of call-and-response orgasm noises (the ultimate fusion of secular and sacred) followed by, of course, "you made me feel so good." This is one of the first rock & roll records, along with Mickey & Sylvia's "Love Is Strange," that can convincingly be called avant garde. It was also, bemusingly enough, his first crossover pop hit, reaching a remarkable #6. Such a strange record affecting such a wide swath of people seems surprising until you remember all those years Charles spent playing in clubs, learning what hit people hardest and in the greatest numbers. It was, indeed, the ecstatic response of the crowd to the set-closing improvisation that led "What'd I Say" to be recorded -- a true populist accomplishment.
Ray Charles jumped to a new label, ABC, in 1960 and took the lessons of "What'd I Say" with him. Putting aside for a moment that he managed a top ten hit with an instrumental as chaotic as "One Mint Julep" and a nightclub tune as bare and stark as "Them That Got," he scored a #1 hit with one of the most ruthless call-and-response tunes ever recorded, an enlivening of a 1960 obscurity called "Hit the Road Jack," brief and head-spinning -- Charles doesn't provide himself with the hook, only the enthusiastically embittered verses and brilliantly performed one-liners like "you don't
mean that, and the record's power and brevity seem designed to leave destruction in their wake. The hits continued to spawn after that with increasingly unusual, adventurous material -- "Unchain My Heart," forecasting Marvin Gaye's late '60s singles, is a nearly atonal expression of pain, a refining of the pop-blues fusion. "At the Club," despite its frivolous plot, is nasty spoken-word noir that expertly irons out the kinks in the earlier wet-streets number "I've Got News for You"; both tunes are sumptuous yet disquieting, funny yet broken ("you phoned me you'd be late / cause you took the wrong express").
"Don't Set Me Free," a minor hit in 1963, encapsulates the high drama evident in so many of these records, but by this point Charles' greatest asset had become his increasingly expressive singing, which inflicts a faraway look in the listener's eyes on "No One," "Crying Time" and the soul deconstruction of "You Are My Sunshine." In the '60s, the great lesson of Ray Charles' work starting with the great
Modern Sounds in Country & Western music was, indeed, the power in the straightforward -- just after he essentially proved the opposite. The schmaltz on his emotional later records is schmaltz indeed, but it's also undeniably affecting, direct, immersive. Sentimentality exists for a reason, after all, especially when it's tackled with the intelligence and grace of as brilliant a singer as Ray Charles. These songs mean to make you cry, and they're more than capable.
This compilation sinks toward the end into Charles' '70s and '80s work, mostly exercises in country nostalgia that don't really work unless your appreciation of his vocals far outpaces your resistance to bland, Huey Lewis-like arrangements that cop out by refusing to go all the way with their Beautiful Music persuasions or to let Charles sit unaccompanied; sadly, most of the records he made in the last three decades of his life have aged poorly and aren't much use now, which is a pity because as a singer and piano player he never really lost his grip. Luckily,
Ultimate sticks to a few token selections (though their choices are so awful one wonders if there might have been better options lurking someplace), and it's handy to be reminded of Charles' now almost completely forgotten second career as a consistent minor hitmaker on country music stations.
Plus we don't get to that point before receiving not just an instance of Charles' raw power as a singer elevated to surprising patriotic effect on a version of "America the Beautiful" that doesn't overreach, but two of his absolute masterpieces from the '60s. First is "Let's Go Get Stoned," a huge R&B hit that did nothing on pop radio and was really the last hurrah of Ray Charles the ceaseless innovator. It's the point when his ability to put the full scope and magnitude of
pain in his music is matched up at last with the spare, gut-wrenching arrangements of his '50s records, tremendous backup singing and all, and the pained wit of his crossover hits. Beautifully composed by Ashford & Simpson with Josephine Armstead, it's everything great, provocative, and forbidden about Ray Charles in one recording.
But best of all, I suppose, is the 1968 rendition of the Beatles' "Yesterday." The Paul McCartney composition is really quite brilliant, its melody and lyrics both striking, but the original recording is deeply flawed -- the string arrangement is poor and hollow, and McCartney's rote recitation of the vocal is absent of any convincing pain. That's what Ray Charles brings in, and his agonized revision runs circles around the Beatles', the way that the Beatles themselves so often redefined and reshaped the songs they covered. "Yesterday" is for the first time not just an intellectually impressive pop song but a raw and wrenching, believable document of the very sorrow its lyrics purport to express. Charles' frayed voice has the sort of impact any singer should long for -- and he knows the effect he's having. He also knows that he's making Paul Mccartney's day by doing this; it's a tip of the hat across an ocean, because each performer knew more than anyone in his audience how hard the other had worked, day and night, for his great success.
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SEE ALSO:]
Genius + Soul = Jazz (1961)
Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music (1962)
