LOVING RAY CHARLES

From the NYT this morning, a fitting tribute to Ray Charles:  

Loving Ray Charles
By BOB HERBERT

Published: June 14, 2004



E-mail: bobherb@nytimes.com

ing the song, children . . .

In the summer of 1962, when John Kennedy was president, Ed Sullivan was the C.E.O. of Sunday-night television and the word Beatles still sounded to most Americans like a reference to insects, the airwaves were all but overwhelmed by Ray Charles's soaring country ballad "I Can't Stop Loving You."

It was an amazingly popular song. But it was almost a hit by, of all people, Tab Hunter, not Ray Charles. That's right, Tab Hunter, a champion ice skater and one of the blandest pop stars it's possible to imagine.

Charles recorded the song first, on the now-legendary album "Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music." But neither he nor the executives at ABC-Paramount Records, which put out the album, expected the song to be a hit. For one thing, an earlier version by Don Gibson had gone nowhere. But disc jockeys started playing it, people loved it and Tab Hunter pounced. He put out a single that copied the Ray Charles album version almost note for note.

ABC had to scramble to put out its own single. In his book "Ray Charles: Man and Music," Michael Lydon described ABC's frantic effort to shorten the album version and get it distributed as a single. He quoted the arranger Sid Feller:

"If Tab Hunter's record had gotten any more head start, Ray's record would have been lost. Even though Hunter was copying us, people would have thought we were copying him."

Once Ray's single was available, said Feller, "Tab Hunter was finished."

I was in a taxi in Boston last Thursday, heading to Logan Airport, when I heard on the radio that Ray Charles had died.

For someone who had grown up with his music, as I had, who had gyrated to it in moments of fierce adolescent ecstasy, and listened to it with the volume turned low on some of those nights that no one should have to go through, it was like hearing about the death of a close friend who was both amazingly generous and remarkably wise.

Even as youngsters in the late-50's and 60's, my friends and I knew that Ray was special. He had a shamanistic quality. We understood that his music, like life, was both spiritual and profane. And we reveled in the fact that it was also unquestionably subversive.

"I Got a Woman," which debuted in the Eisenhower era and remained a force in the popular-music culture for years, had an irresistible gospel feeling that moved with tremendous power toward a culmination that couldn't be anything but sexual.

Whether he intended to or not, Ray had opened fire on two very distinct cultures at one and the same time: the white-bread mass culture that was on its guard against sexuality of any kind (and especially the black kind), and the black religious community, which felt that gospel was the Lord's music, and thus should be off-limits to the wild secular shenanigans that Ray represented.

But here's the thing. Ray Charles's music has touched so many people so deeply for so many decades precisely because it is religious. Listen to the way he transforms "America the Beautiful" from an anthem to a hymn. Listen to the joyous call-and-response of "What'd I Say?" or the slow majestic lament of "Drown in My Own Tears."

Ray's music envelops the willing listener in a glorious ritualistic expression of the sweet and bitter mysteries of life without the coercion, hypocrisy or intolerance that is so frequently a part of organized religion.

It transcends cultures. It transcends genres — gospel, rhythm and blues, jazz, rock 'n' roll, country, pop. At its best, it is raw and beautiful and accessible, a gift from an artist who bravely explored regions of the heart and soul that are important to all of us.

Comparing himself to the early rock 'n' rollers, Ray said, "My stuff was more adult, filled with more despair than anything you'd associate with rock 'n' roll."

Maybe that's why so many people were surprised to hear last week that he was only 73. In the obituary in Friday's Times, Jon Pareles and Bernard Weinraub wrote, "Even in his early years he sounded like a voice of experience, someone who had seen all the hopes and follies of humanity."

My friends and I all felt we knew him. He seemed as familiar as someone who'd actually hung out with us. An old friend. And it's hard whenever an old friend slips away.