Review: Ray Charles - Ray Charles (1957)
Tracks: 1) Ain’t That Love; 2) Drown In My Own Tears; 3) Come Back (Baby); 4) Sinner’s Prayer; 5) Funny (But I Still Love You); 6) Losing Hand; 7) A Fool For You; 8) Hallelujah, I Love Her So; 9) Mess Around; 10) This Little Girl Of Mine; 11) Mary Ann; 12) Greenbacks; 13) Don’t You Know; 14) I’ve Got A Woman.
REVIEW
Although Atlantic Records could hardly be accused of spoiling their artists with too many LP offers, it still took Ray Charles a staggerin’ five years in between his first 45" record for Atlantic and his first LP for the same label — in between which he’d already become one of America’s best known musical names just on the strength of several big R&B hits: ‘Mess Around’, ‘I’ve Got A Woman’, ‘A Fool For You’, ‘Drown In My Own Tears’, ‘Hallelujah I Love Her So’... all of which are assembled on this LP and, consequently, make it the single best Ray Charles LP ever made. Because even if he did go on to vastly expand his vision, carry out several important cross-overs, write and perform many more hook-filled tunes, give us ‘Hit The Road Jack’ and ‘Georgia On My Mind’, etc. etc., it is really with these early Atlantic records that he truly shook up the musical world, just like Elvis had his single biggest impact with the early Sun-era recordings. In the mid-Fifties, Uncle Ray invented a whole new musical genre — soul — and in the forty minutes allocated for this LP, you may and will not only witness that birth, you might even want to admit that none of the adepts of the Father of Soul could take better care of the Father’s baby in the half century that followed.
Somewhat ironically, the first of these big hits was also the least innovative — it is ‘Mess Around’, «written», or, more accurately, ripped off by Atlantic’s president Ahmet Ertegun from a fairly old boogie-woogie / jump blues melody that goes all the way from Cow Cow Davenport in the 1920s to Big Joe Turner’s piano player Pete Johnson in the 1930s. However, it took Atlantic’s modernized production values, its hyper-energetic rhythm section, and, most importantly, Ray’s aggressive playing style to turn the tune into something genuinely wild — topping it off with the brass players, whose parts slide in and out of the general fury like chainsaws slicing in and out of a tree trunk. And then there is that voice — Ray’s unmistakably mysterious «old man’s voice trapped inside a young man’s body», announcing the birth of a raunchier, more exuberant and less restrained style of dance music than the R&B of the previous generation as represented by Big Joe Turner (ironically, Big Joe himself only started recording for Atlantic one year prior to Ray, but, of course, he’d already been a big star of the jump blues circuit since the 1930s).
As awesomely fun as the fast boogie of ‘Mess Around’ is (and only the Animals could ever do the tune sufficient justice with their own cover), Ray truly made the grade one year later with ‘I’ve Got A Woman’, his first #1 hit on the R&B charts and the textbook example on the birth of soul — all you have to do, as it turns out, is to take an old spiritual and replace gospel lyrics with secular ones. Could the song have enjoyed comparable success if he sang "it must be Jesus" instead? Never in a million years. That said, its «novelty» aspect should not, and did not, detract from the power and precision of the arrangement, or from the unique qualities of Ray’s voice: in this particular case, the only other cover version that mattered was Elvis’, whose voice quality was no slouch either. However, Elvis delivered most of his lines in a gruff, brutal manner, so much so that his "never grumbles or fusses, just treats me right" became an assertion of (toxic?) masculinity — Ray, on the other hand, still preserves the spiritual roots of the tune, with far more softness and admiration in his voice for the ladies to swoon over. (Which is hardly to suggest that Ray and Elvis held seriously different opinions on the fair sex — after all, the song does declare that "she knows a woman’s place is right there in her home", and there is no reason to think that either of the two ever doubted the truthfulness of this statement. In the end, smoothness and gruffness are two sides of the same coin).
As if to drive that point even further home, two years later Ray repeated the formula and made it even more obvious with ‘Hallelujah I Love Her So’, whose title just screams blasphemy!, especially since Ray Charles in 1956 could hardly have been suspected of pushing forward the idea that Jesus might have been a woman. The difference from ‘I’ve Got A Woman’, though, is that the tables have been turned: the music now is purely secular (similar in style to Ike Turner’s ‘Get It Over Baby’), while the lyrics clearly evoke religious imagery all the way ("when I’m in trouble and I have no friends, I know she’ll go with me until the end"). Had anybody, prior to Ray, ever confessed his love for his girl so loud and proud to the whole wide world the exact same way one would express his love for the Savior? Even if they did, Ray still did it better, because whoever you are, you can only do it worse than Ray.
And yet again, though, even if it was this fast style of delivery that made Ray Charles into a household name, you do not truly begin to «get» Ray Charles until you get into the slow, moody, soul-searching stuff — songs like ‘A Fool For You’ and ‘Drown In My Own Tears’. To properly appreciate the latter, listen to it in the original recording by Lula Reed — a nice, but not particularly impressive piece of blues-pop. Why? Because the singing does not even begin to properly explore the emotion inherent in the lyrics: Lula Reed sings that she’ll drown in her tears but feels rather as if she is quarreling with a customer while waiting on tables — and it doesn’t help that the accompanying piano and guitar are just lazily spinning chords in circles in a casual everyday manner. Cue Uncle Ray, who somehow saw through the facade to open up the song’s true potential — and turned it into a true anthem of heartbreak from the opening lines. This is friggin’ method acting here, as the man genuinely lives through each line, making it meaningful. Just savor that little nasal crack of "...into my e-e-eyes", where it seems he just got detracted by having to wipe one of those tears off, or the little extra terrified determination he brings into the word "realize" (because he just began to realize!), or the epic importance he gives to the line "my pouring tears... are runnin’ wild"... you could probably write a whole psychological treatise around the emotional spectacle he gives us in this song, and I have not even mentioned the piano playing: sparse, laconic, with heavy punchy emphasis on each chord that suggests a heavy, gloomy attitude, rather than mere background lounge entertainment. To top it off, the Cookies (one of Atlantic’s girl groups that provided backing vocals for Ray prior to the formation of his own «Raelettes») enter almost at the very last moment to steal the song title out of Ray’s very lips — to his "I guess I’ll..." they add their own "drown in my own tears!" from somewhere up in the air, like a supernatural Greek choir mediating between man and gods. At this point, entertainment crosses over into the world of high art, even if not everyone realised at the time.
And these are just the hit singles — the tracks you are most likely to know through greatest hit compilations or through such classy retrospectives as Atlantic Rhythm And Blues 1947-1974. But what makes this self-titled LP truly outstanding is that its «deep cuts», i.e. the less successful singles and B-sides are just as strong — in fact, out of the 14 tracks included here there is not one I could describe as filler, though, admittedly, some of them are melodically similar to some of their bigger brethren without sharing the same grip on the listener. For instance, the melodic and emotional flow of ‘Ain’t That Love’ clearly exposes it as a lesser companion to ‘Hallelujah I Just Love Her So’ (but it does have extra girl harmonies!). And the B-side to ‘I’ve Got A Woman’, the slow-burning, passionately-pleading ‘Come Back (Baby)’, is a slightly more old-school generic predecessor to ‘Fool For You’ (but is still totally worth it if only for the gut-wrenching, throat-gurgling yeeeaaaah before the final "let’s talk it over, one more time"). And ‘Don’t You Know’ would later be remade better with a big band arrangement as ‘Let The Good Times Roll’, but it is still nice to hear this «home demo version» with just a few horns and Ray chillin’ at his piano in between all the turn-your-lamp-down-low rhetorics.
Yet there is at least one downright terrifying masterpiece among these deep cuts: ‘Sinner’s Prayer’, a cover of an older blues tune by Lowell Fulson and Lloyd Glenn which Ray had, once again, elevated to epic status with a wave of his hand — more precisely, by squeezing the darkest emotion possible out of the bass end of his piano, and by engaging the instrument in a call-and-response session with his voice which all but mimicks the dialogue between a tired, tormented man and his inner conscience, or perhaps even God himself. I remember first hearing the song as a cover on Eric Clapton’s From The Cradle, where it was one of the many highlights (and had the advantage of Eric’s own God-voice in the carefully picked menace of his guitar chords) — but the double punch of Ray’s piano and singing was and is unbeatable, not back then, not ever. Next to this performance, everything else on the record feels a bit light and shallow.
Then again, speaking of light and shallow, nothing is wrong with light and shallow if it produces mini-gems such as the Latin-influenced dance number ‘This Little Girl Of Mine’, or, especially, ‘Greenbacks’, the comic tale of Ray’s imaginary (or was that real?) meeting with a lady of the night which ended in a major disappointment — probably the funniest number in the man’s catalog and a good reminder that he could really be anything and anyone you wanted him to be, even Louis Jordan when and if the time called. Trivia note: The song is credited to Renald Richard, Ray’s trumpet player and informal musical director, who also co-authored ‘I’ve Got A Woman’ and is said to have later left the band in protest of Ray’s rampant drug usage — so if you want, you might actually read a subtle warning against abusing life’s temptations into the lyrics of ‘Greenbacks’, even if its subject matter is loose women rather than drugs. Whatever it is, though, the lines "I left the place with tears in my eyes / As I waved Lincoln and Jackson a last goodbye" beat out Leiber and Stoller as the funniest verbal shit to hit the pop market in the Fifties.
In the end, compilation or not, this is song-by-song one of the most fabulous LPs of the decade — if I really wanted to, I could rant about these numbers for ages. It really condenses all the main sides of Ray into one package — the playful and exciting, the sweet and sentimental, the serious and the tortured — and provides a major insight into the birth of a whole new musical direction. And it simply has no equal. For rock’n’roll, you would be very hard pressed to pinpoint just one album from the Fifties as essential — Elvis, Little Richard, and Chuck Berry all capture different sides of the genre which have to be added up if you want something comprehensive. But in the sphere of soul music, Ray’s only competition back then might have been James Brown, who (a) came much later and (b) performed almost exclusively «body music», putting him in a very separate category (I’ve always found the «Godfather of Soul» nickname inappropriate — more like the «Godfather of Libido», if you ask me). At the very least, if you limit Fifties’ soul to Atlantic Records, it is clear that nobody who worked with Atlantic in the 1950s came even remotely close to producing an LP of such quality and intensity. Be sure to hear and digest every song on it, not just the stuff that ends up on best-of packages.
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