That brings us to Brother Ray. I’m working my way through my latest purchase, the 5 CDs that make up “Singular Genius: The Complete ABC Singles.” Ray’s recording career is characterized by these leaps, but the period of 1957 to say, 1961, was particularly fertile. Ray was leaping on a regular basis. “What’d I Say” is an easy and obvious place to start this discussion, but I suggest his wholesale conquest of Hank Snow’s “I’m Movin’ On” is both more interesting and more important. Here we have the driving rhythm and electric piano of “What’d I Say,” but also a bit of steel guitar and, most significantly, a lyric that both “country and western” and, dare I say, chic. Lyrically, the song gets to imagery unlike the places Ray tended to go on his own: “Mister Engineer, take that throttle in hand, take me back to that Southern Land!” And take a Donkey with you!
This foray into “country and western” music was an unforeseeable leap from “What’d I Say,” and, perhaps even more so, from, say, “Swanee River Rock,” recorded just 2 years earlier in May of 1957. So now I’m sitting, standing, grooving, alternately shouting and weeping my through the ABC recordings. Things start strange, and slow. In the liner notes, Billy Vera writes that Ray’s first ABC single, “My Baby (I Love Her Yes I Do)” b/w “Who You Gonna Love” is no better than a couple of Ray’s Atlantic-era B-sides. Vera is wrong. Ray’s Atlantic singles were consistently double-As, and ABC single No. 1 would not have made the cut. Both sides of the single are, in light of everything that came before and everything that would come after, just good, even a bit boring. They do sound like Atlantic-era recordings, and that may well be the problem. Ray had already declared that he was movin’ on.
It’s the third single that changes everything, and we all know what it is: “Georgia On My Mind.” Drawn from Ray’s first session of the 1960s, and his second session for ABC, only Ray could have seen this coming – and that is not a cheap Ray Charles joke. The big, swingin’ R&B horns and Fathead’s honkin’ tenor – gone, exchanged for…strings? The Raylets – gone, exchanged for…a men’s chorus? If I had read about this in the trades I would have resolved that Ray had lost his mind, not to mention his soul, and decided not to bother.
Purely for the purposes of the legend, it would have been better if Brother Ray’s fourth single, “Them That Got,” had been his first. It is drawn from that first, late December 1959, session for ABC, and it is a perfect distillation of RC’s ABC R&B – the Hank Crawford brass section and arrangements; Fathead front and center; the lyric – imaginative, original, funny – but not trite; Ray doing amazing things with his phrasing; and the major-label string orchestra in just the right places. “Them That Got” was a hit, a high water mark, everything that ABC could have hoped for out of Ray, and next to it “Georgia” is still astounding.
As I write this, Sunday before Thanksgiving, I’m working my way towards the end of Disc Two. which covers the 11 singles released between November 1962 and November 1964. The two biggest hits of Ray’s ABC years – Georgia and “Hit the Road Jack” – have already been had, but here’s what arrives during this period: “Your Cheatin’ Heart” b/w “You Are My Sunshine”; “Don’t Set Me Free”; “Take These Chains From My Heart” b/w “No Letter Today”; the majesticly overwhelming “Without Love (There is Nothing)” backed with the soulful late-night burner “No One”; “Busted,” which staked out new territory in Ray’s ownership of “country-western” material; the heartbreaking “That Lucky Old Sun”; “Baby, Don’t You Cry”; and “Smack Dab in the Middle.”
Three discs to go. No reason to believe it will let up. I’ve got much to be thankful for.
Stay Donkey!
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