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"Do I contradict myself?
Very well, then I contradict myself,
I am large, I contain multitudes."
Walt Whitman
CNN announced it under a photograph in the starkest possible
way: "Ray Charles is dead." Not "Ray Charles dead
at 73." or "Ray Charles succumbs to liver failure"
but "Ray Charles is dead." As John Keats once wrote
of truth and beauty, two of the verities Charles dealt with,
"That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
It is foolish to even entertain the notion that we will see his
like again. Sinatra is dead, and Elvis is dead, and Jolson and
Crosby are long gone, but it is entirely possible that Ray Charles
was the most influential singer of the last century.
With the possible exception of the Broadway-based popular
song, that invention of Russian Jews, at which Sinatra excelled,
there was no area of popular music in which anyone could match
Charles. And, when he stepped out onto Sinatra's turf, he often
won. Compare their versions of "Old Man River," "Come
Rain or Come Shine" or "Willow Weep for Me"--
in short, any Broadway song whose composer dipped into the blues.
He has a remarkable recording of "Blues in the Night"
that relies largely on melisma, that technique that reached its
public apotheosis with Whitney Houston's version of "I Will
Always Love You." Melisma simply means the use of more than
one note to sing a single verbal syllable. It is that which links
Bob Dylan to the Indian singer he reveres, Oum Khalsoum. In the
hands of a person of taste, it is used for emphasis: i.e., Ray
Charles' recording of "Blues in the Night.," where
he uses it deliberately every time the lyric calls for him to
sing the word "blues." But, after Whitney Houston,
it was used by one pop diva after another not to express emotion
but to fake it, so that now it is employed by every American
Idol wannabe to come down the pike, culminating in butterball
Ruben Studdard, so that the singer appears as agonized at the
loss of a Choco-pop as of their great love.
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 Forty years ago,
I took a lot of heat for including Ray Charles in a book I wrote called
Jazz Masters of the Fifties. I don't think I would get it now.
Early on, Ray dropped his last name, Robinson, so as not to be confused
with the Champ, but he turned out to be our greatest singer, pound
for pound. Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music broke
him out of the rock 'n' roll niche, even more than The Genius of
Ray Charles, and after that he never stopped. Nothing in music
was foreign to him. It all became grist for his extraordinary sensibility.
He stumbled sometimes -- there is a ghastly album of standards sung
entirely in falsetto -- and he often settled for indifferent arrangements.
But who else could have made great recordings of "The Three Bells,"
"Eleanor Rigby," "Swanee," "Every Time We
Say Goodbye" and "Wichita Lineman," not to mention
a gorgeously simple piano solo with Milt Jackson of the Modern Jazz
Quartet on "How Long Blues"? Even the great magpie Bob Dylan
found a riff in "I Believe to My Soul" to power "Ballad
of a Thin Man." Ray Charles once said, "Nobody can imitate
me because they don't know what I'm gonna do next."
As a final triumph, when Republicans were suggesting Ronald
Reagan for every honor short of sainthood and had already appropriated
Ray's recording of "America the Beautiful," the
New Yorker had him on its cover on the ten-dollar bill, which
bore the legend "In Ray We Trust." What could be more
fitting? After all, it was Queen Isabella of Spain, as portrayed
by Flip Wilson, who sent Christopher Colombus to America to bring
back Ray Charles.
© 2004 Joe Goldberg
Joe Goldberg in the author of Jazz Masters of the Fifties.
Available from Da Capo Press, it is perhaps the earliest recognition
in book form of Ray Charles as a jazz musician.
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