D.F. on Ray Charles

Ray Charles: 1930-2004

     No exaggeration: with the death of Ray Charles, we come to the end of American culture as we have known it. By alchemically combining elements of the sacred and the secular - basic country blues, club blues, country and western music, black gospel, the bebop of Charlie Parker and the canon of American standards - Brother Ray, musically speaking, solved the mind-body problem.
     Ray’s first models were the slick, popular trios of Nat Cole and, especially, Charles Brown. After a brief period of mimicry, Ray shook off  Brown’s twee,  club-style delivery and found his own confident physicality that combined the Chicago cool of Cole with the passion of the black Baptist church. In otherwords, he decided to be Ray Charles. This could not have been that obvious a move for an ambitious black entertainer in 1952. At any rate, Ray brought the soul out of the closet.
     At a recording session on November 18, 1954, Ray famously hijacked a gospel tune and, as he used to put it, “replaced God with a woman.” The result, I Got A Woman - followed by Drown In My Own Tears, Hallelujah I Love Her So, What I Say and so many others - rescued a generation from the deadly, neurotic suppression of feeling that had afflicted the nation after the second World War. Two years later, I Got A Woman appeared on Elvis Presley’s first album. Elvis wasn’t the white Ray Charles, though. Tennessee Williams, maybe, comes closer.
     The Ray Charles Effect was not limited to popular music. Ray’s big and small bands (Ray did the arrangements, singing each man his part) had a huge influence on the direction jazz was to take in the fifties, a movement the unimpressed French critic Andre Hodeir used to call the “funky hard-bop regression.” Horace Silver, Count Basie’s “atomic” band, Charles Mingus, every funky artist on Bluenote, they all owed Ray Charles. Quincy Jones was a Seattle teenager when Ray moved to that city in 1948:
     “Ray showed up, and he was around 16 years old [actually, Ray was at least 18 by then] and …he was like God, you know! He had an apartment, he had a record player, he had a girlfriend, two or three suits. When I first met him, you know, he would invite me over to his place. I couldn't believe it. He was fixing his record player. He would shock himself because there were glass tubes in the back of the record player then, and the radio. And I used to just sit around and say,  ‘I can't believe you're 16. You've got all this stuff going.’ Because he was like…a brilliant old dude, you know. He knew how to arrange and everything. And he… taught me how to arrange in braille, and the notes. He taught me what the notes were, because he understood.”
     Ray’s soul revolution ran parallel to, and interacted with, the civil rights movement of the 50s & 60s. In the more militant 70s, the funk of James Brown and Sly Stone took over to provide a more obvious soundtrack. Ray’s attempts to jump on the funkwagon were half-hearted. The new black sound was colder and right up in your face, based, in fact, on a smaller division of the beat.*  James Brown, Issac Hayes and Barry White seemed less interested in pleasing a woman than in collecting body parts. In contrast, Ray’s sage interpretation of America the Beautiful (1972) was at once a taunt, a healing gesture, and a blind man’s dream of the Promised Land. Perhaps a eulogy as well. Ray’s work, even in decline, was always wiser, subtler than that of the new breed. It was music for adults.
     For me, though, and a generation of suburban boomers, Ray was the Professor of Desire, and Georgia On My Mind - square-ass backup singers and all - just may have been the most beautiful three minutes and thirty-nine seconds in all of twentieth century music.

D.F.

* Not unlike the complex relationship of bop to the jazz that preceded it.