Pop music stars burn up and disappear with increasing speed these days, which has to make you wonder: Why does Ray Charles endure? Is it the gravelly voice, rough as dirt and all the more expressive for it? Is it the Southern-style piano playing, with its buoyant church rhythms and steeped-in-blue harmonies?
Or is it some other, less tangible quality that has made Charles sound perpetually fresh roughly 50 years since he first stepped into a recording studio?
“I’ll tell you something, my friend — music goes through all these fads,” says Charles, whose career clearly transcends them.
“I’m sure you can remember, back in the ’70s, they had disco. Then it was hip-hop, then they got rap,” adds the singer, who will open the Chicago Blues Festival in Grant Park Thursday night.
“But on the other end, when you bring it down, people will always come back to the real thing. And this is the only reason why I’ve been out here so long.
“It’s just like a person who dresses up. Styles may change, but you don’t have to worry about the styles if you’re elegant all the time.
“The fads may come and the fads may go, which is fine, I don’t knock fads, they’re good because they make people more interested in music and the people have a good time and all that.
“But in the end, the real thing is going to be there, and I know that because Beethoven and Rachmaninoff have been dead for years and years and people are still playing their music.”
Moreover, at a time when lesser artists search desperately for the hot new sound, Charles has been digging ever more deeply into his musical roots. Increasingly, he has been performing with the roaring big band that evokes an earlier chapter in his career — and in the history of American music.
And when Charles takes the stage of the Petrillo Music Shell at the Chicago Blues Festival, he’ll be reuniting with jazz instrumentalists who backed him several decades ago, including saxophonists Hank Crawford and David “Fathead” Newman. If ever there were an opportunity to savor the origins of Charles’ music, this is it.
“What we’re trying to do is get that same type of sound for this show, to go back and try to re-create it,” says Charles, who clearly can’t wait to hear those screaming horns driving the band. “And we got the right cats, because all these guys that are going to be on the show with me, along with the Raelets (backup singers), it’s going to make it pretty authentic.”
“Authentic” — perhaps that’s the word that best explains the staying power of Charles’ music. Uninterested in chasing musical fashion or pursuing the whims of fickle pop-music audiences, Charles always has clung to his jazz, blues and gospel roots.
As Robert Palmer noted in his extensive liner notes to “Ray Charles: The Complete Atlantic Rhythm & Blues Recordings, 1952- 9,” “Charles refused to compromise his music with the simpler beat, more adolescent lyrics and smoother singing that white rock ‘n’ roll fans seemed to favor. He continued to write, arrange, play and sing from his soul. . . .”
What’s more, Charles resisted any attempts to present, package or pigeonhole him as a star of youthful pop culture.
On the contrary, “I never considered myself part of rock ‘n’ roll,” he wrote in his memoirs, “Brother Ray.”
“I’ve never given myself a lick of credit for either inventing it or having anything to do with its birth. My stuff was more adult. It was more difficult for teenagers to relate to; my stuff was filled with more despair than anything you’d associate with rock ‘n’ roll. Since I couldn’t see people dancing, I didn’t write jitterbugs or twists. I wrote rhythms that moved me. . . . (My style) requires pure heart singing.”
Artists who embrace their core musical values despite the demands of the marketplace are, by definition, rare. Those who nonetheless achieve wide commercial success are rarer still, which puts Charles in the elite company of such timeless — and uncompromising — performers as Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald and a few others.
Tragedy and music
Perhaps Charles acquired his strength of character from the adversities and harshness of his early years. Born 67 years ago in Albany, Ga., and raised in Greenville, Fla., he did not have the pleasure of the company of his father (who abandoned the family).
As a result, “Even compared to the other blacks in Greenville,” he wrote in “Brother Ray,” “we were at the bottom of the ladder. Nothing below us, ‘cept the ground.”
Things only got worse. His brother, George, drowned in a washtub, a horrific event Charles witnessed, before he lost his sight to glaucoma between ages 5 and 7. His mother died when he was 15, his absentee father a year later.
The young man’s saving grace, however, may have been his love of music and his facility in learning it. Having studied classical music in school and everything else on the local jukebox, “He was reportedly able to arrange and score every part for big band or orchestral music by the age of 12,” wrote Palmer, in the “Atlantic Recordings” liner notes.
As a teenager, Charles ventured, on his own, to Seattle, a town with a bustling nightlife scene that nurtured him.
“It was real nice, the town was very open,” remembers Charles, “and, of course, the clubs, most of them, didn’t open until 12 o’clock at night, you know.
“I went to work at 1 o’clock and worked until 5 in the morning. It was great; it was a good learning experience for me, because I had my own little trio and we had our own crowd, and it was our first real good gig. Man, I was making $125 a week, and that was a lot of damn money in those days.
“Plus the tips. When people came up they’d give you $5 and I would play a song (they requested). And right upstairs, above where we were working, they had a private club and they gambled up there. And a lot of those guys would come down and leave $20 in the kitty.”
But Charles was earning that money in a way that he soon would find unacceptable: He was baldly impersonating a great singer-pianist from Chicago, Nat “King” Cole.
“I ate and breathed and slept and did everything Nat Cole,” says Charles. “I loved him to death, I did my best to emulate him. And that’s how I got a lot of jobs, because I could sound just like Nat Cole. I could sit at my microphone and lean into it in such a way that my voice would be just heavy enough to sound almost identical.
Nobody knew his name
“But I kept noticing, nobody was calling me by name. They kept saying, `Hey, kid.’ `Hey, kid, you sound just like Nat Cole.’ `Hey, kid.’
“My name was `kid.’ One morning I woke up and I just started saying, `Don’t nobody even know who I am. I’m just `kid.’ If I’m ever going to do something, I’m going to have to stop sounding like Nat Cole.’
“Which was a tough decision,” he adds. “because, remember, I was getting jobs sounding like Nat Cole, so it was tough on me, but I told myself, `Hey, you’re going to have to grow out of that.’ “
Did he ever. By dropping the Nat Cole act and singing music as he heard it, Charles hit on a sound that, to this day, remains unique to him. Others may try to mimic his pungent mixture of blues laments with the fervor of black church music, but no one does so with half as much authenticity as Charles.
So startling was Charles’ blending of the sacred and the secular, in fact, that it inspired a backlash from many listeners. No less than Chicago blues master Big Bill Broonzy, for instance, said, `He’s mixing the blues with the spirituals. I know that’s wrong . . . he should be singing in a church.”
Undaunted, Charles hired a female backup quartet and christened it the Raelets, further evoking the sounds of gospel.
“Again, it goes back to the church thing,” says Charles. “I always liked to hear females backing up male singers in the church, where they had singers like James Cleveland and the Caravans, and I wanted that same type of sound. . . .
“A lot of people were put out, but, see, what they didn’t realize was that this was not a put-on, I was just being what I was.
“But eventually they came around to it, especially after some other people started doing the same thing and they started calling it `soul music,’ ” adds Ray, bursting into laughter at the new label that had been affixed to him.
“That’s funny, but I didn’t care, man. I’m really not into politicking in music.”
Nor did he need to be. Charles’ music was so distinctive that as early as the ’50s he had acquired the nickname “The Genius.”
“We started calling him that simply because we genuinely thought of him as a genius,” Atlantic co-founder Ahmet Ertegun once said. “His whole approach to music has elements of genius in it, his concept of music is very, very different, his style of piano playing and his style of singing are very personal to him.”
And they remain so. If there’s one dream that Charles is still reaching for, it’s to cut a jazz album featuring several legends of the art form. In that way, Charles would complete a circle, performing with the jazz giants who first inspired him.
“I want to do it because, let’s face it, a lot of the original people that did this, we’re all getting old and dying out, man,” says Charles.
“Dizzy Gillespie’s gone already, you know what I mean? Buddy Rich is gone already, you understand me?
“So what I want to try to do is hook up some of these people while we’re still here. (Vibist) Milt Jackson and (tenor saxophonist) Illinois Jacquet, people like that who really can still play their rear off.
“I’d love for the kids to be exposed to this music throughout the United States and throughout the world. That’s what I want to happen.
“Believe me, when I get through with it, I think you’re going to be proud of Ray Charles.”
We already are.
