Tracks: 1) Hardhearted Hannah; 2) Nancy; 3) Margie; 4) Ruby; 5) Rosetta; 6) Stella By Starlight; 7) Cherry; 8) Josephine; 9) Candy; 10) Marie; 11) Diane; 12) Sweet Georgia Brown.
REVIEW
The year 1961 was extremely prolific for Ray — no fewer than six different LPs appeared over but a 10-month long stretch in between the ABC, Atlantic, and Impulse! labels, albeit all of the Atlantic releases were, of course, pulled from 2-3 year old archives. Over that stretch, fans would refresh their image of Ray as a blues man, a soul man, a jazz man, a Vegas man, a ladies’ man, and, overall, a total Renaissance man — someone who saw it all, felt it all, and could offer musical guidance to just about anybody.
Unfortunately, every silver cloud has a dark lining, and quantity rarely, if ever, aligns with quality. Both The Genius Of Ray Charles and The Genius Hits The Road had confirmed the sad truth that «kings» and «geniuses» usually produce their best work before they begin to be regularly addressed as «kings» and «geniuses», or, at least, prior to becoming fully comfortable with the idea. As both of thos albums stormed up the charts, Ray himself and his labels could not have left unnoticed the obvious: Uncle Ray as a glitzy bandleader, all dressed up in flash and bombast, attracted the record-buying public much more than Brother Ray as a deep soul practitioner, hunched over his piano in an age-old voodooistic haze. And what the record-buying public likes, the record-buying public gets: I do not think there was too much disagreement between Ray and his music industry bosses when it came to that maxim. Brother Ray was no hermit, after all — he liked his money, his women, his good food, and his fancy clothes.
Consequently, there is no shirking off the artistic responsibility for Ray’s first (and, alas, far from the last) openly bad album of his career. The concept behind Dedicated To You was nowhere near original — for instance, Bill Haley’s Chicks from 1959 had already been constructed around songs that mention twelve different girls by their names, and I’m sure there were others as well. But apparently, it felt sort of natural to follow an album that namedrops 12 different states with one «dedicated» to 12 different ladies — and there is even a slyly intelligent link between the two in that ‘Georgia’ has made a crossover from the state of Georgia to a woman’s name (‘Sweet Georgia Brown’). Alas, this is pretty much the only genuinely smart thing about this sorry excuse for a concept album.
All of the songs here — all of them — are decades-old Tin Pan Alley standards, ranging from the 1920s to the 1940s, and all of them are arranged in two different sub-styles only: (a) the glitzy-bombastic-in-yer-face loungy Vegasy showtune, with big fat horns and bulky booming drums competing over whose size matters the most; (b) the sweet syrupy sentimental orchestrated ballad, with fluffy strings and angelic choirs competing over who gets to be more seductive for Uncle Ray. They are very evenly distributed (six tunes in each category) and regularly interchanged, rather than split up to make a «hard» and «soft» side; unfortunately, this still means that there are only two different moods set through the entire album — the sleazy-playful-by-day and the starry-romantic-by-night — and truly, once you’ve heard the first couple of songs you can safely turn the album off because that is all you’re gonna get.
At least The Genius Hits The Road, when it came to its best songs (‘Georgia On My Mind’ and ‘Carry Me Back To Old Virginny’, primarily), still had traces of what made us all adepts of the St. Ray Church — a gospel-shaped batch of deeply emotional vibes. Visions of paradise and redemption, «return» as «repentance», that sort of thing. Lowbrow mixed with highbrow in such a way that the latter could make the former a little more tolerable by its very presence. Dedicated To You, on the contrary, does not have even one whiff of the highbrow; it is 100% about vaudeville entertainment and corny sentimentalism. It has about as much depth as Sinatra at his worst — in fact, it is hardly ever trying to be anything other than Sinatra at his worst. And the last thing we might all need in our lives is Ray Charles trying to sound like Frank Sinatra.. although, obviously, mainstream American public circa 1961 would disagree.
Both of the album’s moods were perfectly illustrated by the accompanying single. The A-side was ‘Ruby’, the theme song from a 1952 King Vidor movie with Jennifer Jones that was apparently much more dark and disturbing than its musical theme; perhaps the tiniest of tiny hints at this darkness is given by the opening strings, but in about fifteen seconds the song straightens itself out and becomes just a ballad, good enough for those who love schmaltz or who faint at the very sound of Uncle Ray’s sexy rasp but hardly for those who would want to continue to hear those things that Uncle Ray does better than anybody else. This stuff is as generic as it comes.
The only advantage that ‘Hard Hearted Hannah’, the B-side, has over the A-side, is that it «rocks» — in a big band, Vegasy sort of way, of course, to which we add a bit of playful humor... straight out of 1924, that is. I don’t understand what it is that Ray adds to the song that everybody from Lucille Hegamin to Ella Fitzgerald have not already added. At least he gets to add a piano solo — short, sparse, not one of his best.
And there is absolutely nothing I could add to these non-descript descriptions: the other five vaudeville numbers all sound like ‘Hard Hearted Hannah’, and the other five ballads all sound like ‘Ruby’. Oh, ‘Josephine’ is actually an instrumental, with about two minutes of Ray soloing over a relatively quiet jazzy background, so I suppose that it is, by definition, the best song on the album, even if it’s not saying much.
Of course, «opinions are like assholes», and yours might theoretically align more comfortably with the rave write-up offered on the It’s All About Ray Charles website: "Ray achieves his most stately, profound music yet... his voice just sounds so emotional, drawing in the listener, that one begins inevitably – happily – to see things his way. The arrangements are a major reason that Dedicated To You manages to enrapture the listener, who is invited into the mysterious and sonorous world of Ray Charles’ soul". While I am generally happy with the fact that art is not science and does not even pretend to believe that there is only one correct way to reach the truth, sometimes the idea that it is always possible to write the most gushing and over-the-top evaluation of the most generic piece of musical twaddle and get away with it brings on a whiff of sadness. But, of course, do not take my word for this — try out a couple of pieces of this «mysterious and sonorous world of Ray Charles’ soul» to see for yourself if it manages to enrapture you or not.
Only Solitaire reviews: Dedicated To You
That’s the issue with Ray Charles. I love his music (mainly the Atlantic stuff) very deeply, but he records so much shitty sappy slop and glop that the idea of hearing his whole discography makes me nauseous. Thankfully, The Genius Sings The Blues will be coming up fairly soon, yes?