Review: Ray Charles - What'd I Say (1959)

Tracks: 1) What’d I Say; 2) Jumpin’ In The Mornin’; 3) You Be My Baby; 4) Tell Me How Do You Feel; 5) What Kind Of Man Are You; 6) Rockhouse; 7) Roll With My Baby; 8) Tell All The World About You; 9) My Bonnie; 10) That’s Enough.

REVIEW

As was already mentioned in the review of Yes Indeed!, 1958 was not a very good year for Ray in terms of commercial success — the best memory from that period lies with his Newport performance rather than his studio recordings for Atlantic. Picking up where we left off, the first single released in the fall of 1958 was ‘You Be My Baby’ — a bit of a novelty throwaway ("you look so tasty, like quick-cream pastry") contributed by the Pomus-Shuman songwriting team, a song arguably more memorable because of the silly-sounding backing vocals of the Raelettes than due to Ray’s own effort. Fun, but we tend to admire Ray for his soul and energy rather than cutesy, shallow pop hooks — at least something like ‘Greenbacks’ could be hilarious (and rockin’!), whereas ‘You Be My Baby’ is, at best, a quirky toe-tapper.

Historically more important was the B-side, where Ray gave the old boy scout campfire classic of ‘My Bonnie’ the full-on R&B treatment — important both for himself, as one more step in his longstanding program of modernizing the old musical traditions for contemporary audiences, and for the overseas, since it is likely, given the Beatles’ overall admiration for Ray’s material, that his version was at least an inspiration for their own recording with Tony Sheridan. Besides, this is where Ray actually goes for some real soul — if only the song weren’t so clichéd and hard to take seriously, Ray’s raspy pleading of "bring my Bonnie back to me" could be really moving. The valiant attempt to turn the song into a soul epic — culminating in the extended last line of each verse, with an intense call-and-response interplay between Ray and the Raelettes — surely deserves a tip of the hat, at the very least. The public was hardly impressed, though.

In Charles’ experimental fashion, the record was followed by a two-part instrumental blues shuffle, ‘Rockhouse’ (curiously, this, not ‘What’d I Say’, was the first of his compositions to be cut up for two sides of the same single). Compared to some of his instrumental work on his jazz-oriented albums, ‘Rockhouse’ is almost defiantly simplistic; the main piano theme is pleasant and cocky, but not technically impressive or sonically inventive. It’s basically something like «Ray Charles Takes A Sunny Morning Walk Through The Neighborhood», nothing particularly «rockhousish» about it at all. If I were Ahmet Ertegun, I certainly wouldn’t have greenlighted it as a single (it is so much more of an LP-only filler track), but who can really know how a record executive’s mind worked circa 1958?

Then the magic finally struck with ‘(Night Time) Is The Right Time’, released just in the nick of time (December 1958) to at least give Ray a well-deserved Christmas hit for the year — but since it would only be included on his next LP, we’ll put it off until then. (The B-side was ‘Tell All The World About You’, a short and not tremendously inspired re-write of ‘Hallelujah I Love Her So’ with perfunctory impressive vocals from Ray and little else). Then the magic quickly settled back to formula with ‘That’s Enough’ (March 1959) — a good, but rigid soul ballad with few surprises — and its B-side, ‘Tell Me How Do You Feel’, a generic piece of jump blues for which Ray switches to organ and echoey production, but deems it unnecessary to add any extra special touches.

And then, finally, come June, Ray Charles provides the world with one more foundation stone for his mausoleum. So much has been said and written about ‘What’d I Say’ — a song that simply begs to be the stuff of myth and legend — that I am at a bit of a loss for words here; but let me just remark, in the context of all those singles that preceded it, how ironic it is that one of Ray’s biggest commercial and artistic successes began life as a simple concert improvisation, and was allegedly never even intended to be shaped into a record until people began asking where they could buy it. Another contextual observation could be that the classic opening Wurlitzer piano melody is not any more sophisticated at all than what Ray played on ‘Rockhouse’ — but nobody remembers, and nobody really needs ‘Rockhouse’, whereas life without ‘What’d I Say’ now feels virtually impossible. Is it just the fast tempo? The dark, blurry tone of the Wurlitzer? The flashy flourish of eighth notes at the end of each verse? The syncopation? All of it together?

Regardless of the reasons for this magical effect, the objective truth is that before ‘What’d I Say’, this kind of sound simply did not exist — and after ‘What’d I Say’, its variations and reverberations would become so commonplace — like, for instance, when you listen to the Beatles’ ‘I Feel Fine’, you’re really listening to ‘What’d I Say’ — that it is as hard to imagine a world without ‘What’d I Say’ as it is hard to imagine a world without Internet memes. One often hears references to the song as a key link in the evolution of soul music, but somehow I keep feeling that discussions of Ray Charles as one of the progenitors of «soul» should rather be held around ‘I’ve Got A Woman’ or ‘Hallelujah I Love Her So’, if only because those songs are actually sung with «soul»; ‘What’d I Say’, even if some of its roots also lie in the gospel plain, is all about pure lust, mischief, and rock’n’roll. It was certainly not for its «soul» that it would later be covered by Jerry Lee Lewis...

The smash success of ‘What’d I Say’ — Ray’s first #1 on the R&B charts since 1956, and his first and only Top 10 entry in the overall pop charts — was a strong signal for Atlantic that another LP had to be rushed out as quickly as possible, and they weren’t wrong: when issued four months after the single, What’d I Say became Ray’s first ever LP to register on the charts as well. Unfortunately, there was a bit of a problem: Uncle Ray was not in the mood to get off his lazy ass and record any new material — meaning that most of the album would have to be assembled from the above-mentioned singles, none of which could even hope to approach the excitement level of ‘What’d I Say’. Well, ‘(The Night Time Is) The Right Time’ probably could, but they apparently felt that it deserved its own LP, so that was precisely the song they left off.

To pad out the record, they had to reach as far into the backlog as 1952-53, from where they fished out two decidedly old-fashioned tunes: ‘Roll With Me Baby’ is a typical old-school slow-moving R&B romp, and ‘Jumpin’ In The Morning’ is an utterly generic, if admittedly energetic, 1940s-style jump blues number you’d expect from somebody like Wynonie Harris — particularly anticlimactic, if you ask me, when it becomes the second track on the LP, directly following the title track. It’s almost like a bugle call of «okay, boys, fun is over, now we’re getting back to the tried and true!».

To complete the picture, the album includes ‘What Kind Of Man Are You?’, the original B-side to ‘Talkin’ ’Bout You’ that was probably not included on Yes Indeed! because it only features Ray on piano — all vocal duties here are handled by the Raelettes, including Mary Ann Fisher on lead vocals. It’s quite a decent track, actually — not just from a feminist pers­pective (considering Ray’s well-known sexist attitude to his singing ladies, it is at least nice to know they were allowed to «retort» in this specific manner), but from a musical as well, with a fun and quirky vocal arrangements where Fisher feels like she’s being carried up and down on the waves of her colleagues’ voices (and the vocal harmonies are apparently seductive enough to have the song later been remade by the Hollies as ‘What Kind Of Girl Are You?’). However, it is clearly also a piece of filler in this context, as nice as it is to not have it disappear completely out of sight.

In short, if there ever was one album in Ray’s classic repertoire clearly centered around one track and one track only, it is this one — most of the casual listeners probably won’t even recognize any of the other song titles on here. But at least it does roughly correspond to a certain chronological chapter in Ray’s life: if you throw out the old 1952–53 filler and arrange everything else in chronological order, then what you get is an informative look at the «lull» of late 1958 / early 1959, followed by the smash «awakening» of ‘What’d I Say’ — still a pretty curious and intriguing musical journey, especially for the much-maligned «interim period» between the first wave of rock’n’roll and the British Invasion.

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