by Kevin Burton
Whether in jazz, blues, pop or country, the late great Ray Charles was not just comfortable but masterful.
Somebody asks you, “quick who was Ray Charles?” You’re probably going to say he was a soul singer. You wouldn’t be entirely wrong but he didn’t see himself that way.
He saw himself as a singer without a specialty.
In an interview with journalist Bob Costas, who is known to be a huge baseball fan, Charles used a baseball analogy, describing himself as a utility guy. “I play first base, second base, shortstop and third base, I can even pitch some for you.”
“But you always hit cleanup,” Costas said, cracking up the musical genius who said. “I try to.”
For those of you who don’t know baseball, a team’s cleanup hitter is the main man. That was Ray Charles.
“His playing is so superb. He’s just so good,” blues legend B.B. King told a Time/Life documentary. “I can’t pin him down to saying ‘this is church or this is (whatever). Ray does it all.”
“Ray Charles was the Michael Jordan of music,” said singer-songwriter Jerry Butler. “He could do anything, and everything and make it believable.”
“I always wanted The Band to make a record as good as Ray Charles,” said drummer/vocalist Levon Helm. “He always made the best records as far as I was concerned. And had the best band in town at the same time. Anything to do with ray Charles was all right.”
“Ray doesn’t follow others. Ray is an innovator,” said uber-producer Quincy Jones, a childhood friend of Charles, quoted in the Billboard Book of Number One Hits.
Charles’ signature song is Georgia On My Mind, a song written in 1930 by Hoagy Carmichael (music) and Stuart Gorrell (lyrics). So Georgia is the second stop on the Page 7 rock and roll road trip we’re calling Coast to Coast.
Ray Charles was born in Albany, Georgia in 1930. He began losing vision at age 5 and was completely blind by age seven. He never let blindness or anything else slow him down, let alone stop him.
“I was born with music inside me Like my blood. It was a force already within me when I arrived on the scene,” Charles said.
Charles left Atlantic Records when his contract expired in 1959. He immediately delivered Georgia On My Mind for ABC-Paramount. It topped the charts the week of Nov. 14, 1960. He decided to record the song after his driver suggested it, because Charles often sang it while in the car.
Dozens of artists have recorded the song both before his version (including Carmichael, Billie Holliday and Eddy Arnold) and after (including The Righteous Brothers, Tom Jones and Jackie Wilson), but it is the Ray Charles version that is most associated with the song. Google it and you get Ray.
Of the other versions I have heard, I like the Tom Jones version best. Georgia is such a beautiful song it leads some performers to oversing it, flexing their vocal muscles, forgetting that the song is the real star.
“It has been asserted that Hoagy Carmichael wrote the song about his sister, Georgia,” reads the song’s Wikipedia page. “But Carmichael wrote in his second autobiography Sometimes I Wonder that saxophonist Frankie Trumbauer told him he should write a song about the state of Georgia.”
“(Georgia on my Mind) won Grammy awards for Best Male Vocal Recording and Best Pop Song Performance in 1960,” according to SongFacts.
The state of Georgia adopted Georgia On My Mind as the official state song in 1979. He performed the song at the Georgia State Capitol for the occasion.
If Georgia was Charles’ signature song, his most important may be 1954’s “I Got A Woman.”
“I remember the first time I ever heard Ray Charles he was singing ‘I got a woman way over town, she’s good to me,” Butler recalls. “My mama said ‘now that’s a shame. This man has taken this gospel song and turned it into the blues.’”
Butler’s mother was not alone in her displeasure.
“The only time people ever got bent out of shape because of my music was when I first did I Got A Woman years ago. They thought that was anti-religious or something,” Charles said.
Music historians point to this as a seminal moment because of the blending of gospel and R&B. Charles has an additional recollection.
“What I did was I became myself. That’s more of a fair way to put it,” Charles said, explaining that up to that point for his whole career he had been trying to sound like Nat King Cole. “I told myself ‘Ray, go on and be yourself. Be what you are.’”
He does agree that the song marked a turning point in music.
“I think it was a heck of a thing. I hate to say that, only because it sounds like I’m blowing my own horn,” Charles said. “But I think I Got A Woman was the beginning of what became eventually, soul music. Because after I did what I was doing for a while, other people started doing the same thing. You had other artists coming out of the church.”
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