A Tribute to Ray Charles
Schermerhorn Symphony Center, Nashville, TN
September 21–23, 2006

If there's a spirit of genius that's particular to America, it lies in the refusal to recognize boundaries. From the earliest exploratory drive westward to the latest expansion of free trade zones, Americans have always been loath to accept the idea that there are borders that can't—or shouldn't be—crossed. We are, after all, a nation of immigrants, of border-hoppers, and while we may have invented niche marketing, the best of us have always refused to stay in our assigned seats. As Walt Whitman sang in an early, expansive cry, "I am large, I contain multitudes." The greatest American artists have always been crossover artists.

This genius has its dark side, of course—talk to any Native American about our inability to recognize borders—but now and then, it produces a Ray Charles, a man who, in his music as in his life, managed to effectively obliterate any borders drawn around him. Born poor in a land that privileged the rich, black in a South still in the grip of Jim Crow, and raised blind in a world where sight was assumed, he operated with the confident assurance of a fully sighted man, insisted that his music could cross all color lines, and amassed riches as a result.

Like many innovators, though, Charles started his career in imitation, alternating between the gentle, jazzy ballads of Nat King Cole and the bluesier growls of Charles Brown. It was no doubt inevitable that he would end up outside that box, but it's to the credit of his Atlantic producers Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler that they pushed him to discover his own style, much as his mother had pushed him to greater independence as a boy.

For Charles, independence always came from turning within himself, and in this case that meant tapping the musical streams that had nourished him as a child: blues and gospel. Since the Song of Solomon, at least, poets have been using the language of earthly love to speak of spiritual ecstasy, but Charles turned the equation around. By adapting church gospel to sing about physical desire, he suggests that salvation on earth might be possible, at least for a few hours, if we could only find the right partner. (Conversely, the pangs of abandonment and loss—which Charles knew so well from his early life—can seem like hell itself.)

The combination created an uproar. An old saying goes that the blues and gospel are as close as Saturday night and Sunday morning, but that still leaves a few hours between them. Charles, as blind to those few hours as he was to night and day themselves, saw no reason not to marry the two. "I Got a Woman" reworks a gospel song heard on a late-night tour of Indiana with lyrics by his trumpet player Renald Richards, and it carries the full, joyful charge of Charles's new romance with his future wife, gospel singer Della Beatrice Howard. As one of the first songs to connect the two opposing poles of African American life, though, it also launched a shower of sparks that continues to illuminate American music.

Charles went on to release more albums in the same vein, along with darker ballads, novelty songs, and even jazz—not just by tossing in a few seventh chords to create a jazzy feeling, but by holding his own on both piano and alto sax with vibraphonist Milt Jackson and his own sax player, David "Fathead" Newman.

It was by crossing into country and western music, though, that Charles really showed his astonishing range. He'd grown up in Florida listening to the Grand Ole Opry, and one of his first jobs in the late forties was with a guitar-and-fiddle group called The Florida Playboys, but this early gig as a backing pianist couldn't predict the surprising success of Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music.

By 1962, Charles had moved on to ABC Records, where his custom of having full control of his music was written into his contract. That, and his stature as a label money-maker, helped convince his skeptical producers to record Modern Sounds. "Who wants country music from Ray Charles?" they thought, but later admitted that on first hearing, "We went out of our minds."

From the opening blast of horns in "Bye Bye, Love" to the high, closing "meeee" of "Hey, Good Lookin'," Charles's take on country and western is unlike anyone else's. As critics noted at the time, the album lacks a single trace of mandolin, banjo, pedal steel, or any of the other instruments traditionally associated with C&W. In their place, Charles substitutes punchy horn sections, sweeping strings, and the honeyed singing of the Raelets, his usual backup singers.

Nonetheless, Charles located in country's sad laments and joyful celebrations a mirror of his own experiences, and though he did the music his way, he did it with such deep emotion that no one disputed his right to it. As one biographer notes, he expanded country's spectrum without distorting its essential shades, and country songs became an essential part of his repertoire from then on. It's worth noting that Modern Sounds was not only one of the biggest selling black albums up to that time, it was also one of the biggest selling country-and-western albums.

Through his contributions to rhythm and blues, soul, gospel, jazz, and country, Ray Charles has become an icon of American music, and like any icon, it's easy to reduce him to a caricature: the boxy eyeshades, the raspy Southern voice speaking hipster slang, the face turned upward as if toward some invisible sun. In the same way, his music can be reduced to a few iconic elements, too—the syncopated piano, the sudden stop-time breaks with lyrics trailing over them, the gospel-tinged call-and-response with his backup singers.

Yet this sort of imitation only scratches the surface of what constituted Ray Charles. As Reba McEntire has said, "You can sing a correct note, but if it doesn't come from your heart and soul, then the person listening can't feel it. And that's the way it was when Ray Charles would sing it. You would feel it, not only hear it."

In other words, you can't do justice to Ray Charles's music without putting your own self into it, the same way he did, night after night for decades of touring and recording. Tonight's singers represent a wide spectrum—Ellis Hall has worked with Charles himself, Abby Burke is a jazz singer in Nashville, while Bobby Caldwell is the country singer/songwriter behind "What You Won't Do For Love" and " Next Time I Fall"—but it's no wider than the spectrum Charles himself represented. And like Charles did, they plan on making the music their own.

Branford Marsalis on Ray Charles:

"I would have loved to sit him down and talk with him about what he knew about music, because he was a serious scholar of music. You can tell that when you listen to him. There was a depth to his music that only comes from serious scholarship. When he did Modern Sounds for Country and Western Music, he was sincere. It wasn't a gimmick.

"At the same time, what Ray Charles plays is always in the moment. He never tried to be anything he wasn't. That's why he never sounds ancient or arcane. You can tell from the quality of the recordings that they're old, but never from the quality of the music. Songs like 'Lonely Avenue' still work in a way that a lot of music from that time, even Elvis, doesn't. When you immerse yourself in everything that's around you, when you accept that polyglot culture and you play from it, you're never old."

© Edward Batchelder
(from InConcert)