Ray Charles: 1930 to 2004
When people compare Charles’ groundbreaking Atlantic stint to his later, longer tenure at ABC/Paramount, the critical nod almost always goes to the earlier work. But the ABC sides can’t be beat for quantity, quality, and breadth of style. Between 1960 and 1973, Charles proved he could play anything: Sinatra-styled saloon standards, steel-drenched countrypolitan, soul jazz that was practically hard bop, Stephen Foster songs, Beatles songs, anything.
Crying Time might well be the best album of his career; it’s certainly his most personal. He made it in 1965, after a Boston heroin bust motivated him to take a year off the road to get clean. Following an earlier drug arrest, in a rare public display of weakness for a man who was otherwise militantly self-reliant, he told reporters, “A guy who lives in the dark has to have something to keep him going.”
Now he turned to the music to keep him going. Crying Time includes some of the most lush, vulnerable orchestral pop of his pop of his career in “Through The Years” and the troubled revelry of “Let’s Go Get Stoned”. The title track is so poignantly delivered it sounds as if Charles stopped just short of sobbing, and on “Goin’ Down Slow”, the deepest, downest blues of his life, he flat out sobs:
Mother, please don’t worry
This may be all in my prayer
Mother, please don’t worry no more now
This may be all in my prayer, in my prayer
You can just say your son is gone down
Out of this world somewhere
Because he died just four days after Ronald Reagan, Charles was denied the parade of tributes he otherwise would have received. For Charles to be robbed of this recognition was bad enough, but it was a particularly cruel coincidence that Reagan was the one who inadvertently did the robbing. Recall that Reagan’s “Morning In America” first dawned in Philadelphia, Mississippi. That small southern town’s only previous time in the spotlight had come when an integrated trio of civil rights workers was murdered there for resisting the state of Mississippi’s right not to register its black citizens to vote. Fifteen years later, Reagan eyed a map of America and chose Philadelphia, Mississippi, to kick off his 1980 presidential bid. “I believe in states’ rights,” he declared.
By contrast, Charles spent the years leading up to the Philadelphia murders fighting, in a fashion, against “states’ rights,” a.k.a. “segregation,” “separate but equal,” and “Jim Crow.” He decided as early as March 1961, for example, that he’d no longer perform for segregated audiences.
Charles more typically let his music do his talking. His public support for civil rights came almost entirely via the records he provided a nation watching, and making, history down south. In 1960, he scored his first #1 pop hit with a version of Hoagy Carmichael’s “Georgia On My Mind”, just as Georgia and the rest of Dixie was on everyone else’s mind, too. The following year, Charles made “Danger Zone” the flip side to his second pop #1, “Hit The Road Jack”. “The world is in an uproar…Just read your paper and you’ll see,” he warns, his voice trembling with dread and hope. Charles recorded the side just a couple months after the Freedom Rides had hit the perilous road from Washington, D.C., to New Orleans, Louisiana.
In 1963, the same month that the March on Washington ended with Martin Luther King Jr. testifying to “the dark and desolate valley of segregation” even while declaring “I have a dream,” Charles was sharing burdens and dreams of his own. On Ingredients For A Recipe Of Soul, Charles chose to record “Over The Rainbow”, “That Lucky Old Sun”, “Ol’ Man River” and “You’ll Never Walk Alone”, as well as Harlan Howard’s “Busted”. The result was another masterpiece, a heart-wrenching song cycle about the frustration of, yet persistent desire for, human freedom.
And there was “I Can’t Stop Loving You”, the Don Gibson-written Kitty Wells hit from Ray’s 1962 classic Modern Sounds In Country & Western Music. For a black man to embrace, at the height of the civil rights movement, the music most identified with white southerners — and, therefore, with white southern racism — sent a statement of defiance and potential unity that anyone paying attention could hardly have missed. His musical miscegenation was an attack on segregation itself. Both the album and the single topped the charts.
Two decades later, Charles performed in apartheid South Africa, and he sang “America The Beautiful” at the 1984 Republican convention and at the second inaugural of Ronald Reagan, the President who had perfected Richard Nixon’s infamous southern strategy by, among other things, threatening to veto an extension of the Voting Rights Act: It had been, Reagan sympathized, “humiliating to the South.” Charles explained himself by pointing to his wallet: “The Democrats wanted me to do the same thing, but they didn’t want to pay.”
At the same time, Charles was continuing to score major hits — except now they were coming on country radio, including “We Didn’t See A Thing”, a duet with George Jones, and “Seven Spanish Angels”, with Willie Nelson. When Charles first broke out with “Georgia On My Mind” and “I Can’t Stop Loving You”, neither were played by country stations, although they would have fit perfectly beside the latest Nashville Sound hits from Patsy Cline or Jim Reeves. Today, however, Charles is second only to Charley Pride as the most successful African-American in the history of the format, a development that reveals how far America has come since the early 1960s. That he remains a ridiculously distant second to Pride, and that there’s no third to speak of, shows just how hard and long a road lies ahead.
This is the context within which Ray Charles must be remembered. He wasn’t merely a giant in American musical history; he was an architect for a better America. Charles dreamed this land might yet achieve its potential, its ideals and promised beauty, and he provided glimpses, as vivid as any we’ve been offered, of what such a world might feel like. He did it by singing the blues, by admitting and enduring the worst we have known and done. By insisting that the only way out of the darkness is straight through it. And by understanding that all we have to light the way are tales “of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph.”
“Hope shines in the shadows that may hide,” Charles advised in “Light Out Of Darkness”, a song he co-wrote for the film Ballad In Blue. “And in the night it bring[s] light out of darkness, and the light will guide you.”
Ray’s blues generated such brilliance that those of us who listened were made to see how each of our lights could shine as brightly. The road from despair to hope and darkness to light, from a dream deferred to one made real — this is the greatest story ever told. Ray Charles told that story as powerfully, perhaps, as anyone ever will. That was his genius.