I Remember Ray

I saw Ray Charles singing “Eleanor Rigby” on the Glen Campbell Show the other night, and for a few moments his music held all the passionate intensity of old. “Arggh, lookit all them lonely people,” Ray growled, “where in the world do they all come from?” Lunging over the piano with his angular shades gleaming, Ray looked for a moment like some strange lord peering down from a turret on all the lost and lonely crowds of humanity.

And in a way we all are his subjects, though it is almost equally certain that we have been losing him for a long time. His brand of boiling blues was a mainstay of my own adolescence, and I arrived late, in 1960. Just a year later he released the album called Modem Sounds in Country & Western Music , a record which sold several million copies, started a trend which has avalanched ever since, and marked a turning point in Charles’ career, away from the almost painfully authentic blues and ground-breaking gospel-infused R & B which he had pioneered almost a decade before into the much more lucrative (but less musically rewarding) realms of schmaltz and viviated “big-band” stylings.