Liner Notes

Ray Charles: Genius & Soul – The 50th Anniversary Collection

$69.98

THE RAY CHARLES STORY
Original LINER NOTES from the 1962 Atlantic album.

Ray Charles is hailed today as: (1) a top vocal star (2) a hit songwriter (3) a leading jazz piano player (4) a great arranger and (5) a strong influence in contemporary jazz development.

He is an acknowledged prime mover in the widely disparate fields of rhythm & blues, jazz, and pop music. He is venerated for having infused into the current jazz scene salutary charges of "gospel," "soul," and/or "funk." Overworked words, but what they purport to mean is nevertheless truly wonderful.

Ray has no parallel. Duke Ellington comes to mind, yes, because, like Ray, he expresses his music in a highly personal fashion through his composing, his piano, and his orchestra. But then Duke doesn't sing, and Ray is a big voice in the land. Both men pile up large LP sales, but Duke has no track record in the hit single business in any way close to Ray's.

Ray stands alone, his story is unique in our music. We propose to tell it here in terms of his records. The records selected cover every phrase of his career. They are his best documentation.

BEGINNINGS: THE WEST COAST R&B SOUND

Ray began recording for Atlantic in 1952, and in his first sessions he neither composed nor arranged. He had made a few obscure sides for a small, now defunct California label, and his avowed models were Nat Cole and the great rhythm & blues star Charles Brown, both West Coast based singers.

His first two Atlantic sessions were with studio musicians, arrangements by Jesse Stone, songs supplied by various songwriters. The resulting sides were good, journeyman r & b, but Ray was still under wraps. Nevertheless, Losing Hand is still a blues masterpiece, and the conversation between Ray's piano and Mickey Baker's guitar is now and always afterhours balm in excelsis.

On balance: because Ray didn't write the songs and only lightly influenced the arrangements -- and because the band was a for-hire studio cadre, the records are only important because Ray sang and played the only way he knew how -- beautifully. And because Ahmet Ertegun wrote him a stomp that is part of the literature today -- Mess Around.

PHASE 2: NEW ORLEANS -- THE FIRST ARRANGEMENTS

In December, 1953, Ahmet and I were in New Orleans to record Joe Turner, then in full cry as a blues star. We ran into Ray at Cosimo's famous small studio, and Ray asked us please (!) to do a small session with him and a pick-up band he was gigging with in and around New Orleans. At this time Ray was close to Guitar Slim, the late blues singer from the bayou country, and was much taken with Slim's perfervid, impassioned, preach-blues style. Without portfolio, Ray had sketched out a head arrangement for Slim's The Things I Used To Do, playing piano at the date and directing things from the keyboard.

This record was to sell a million copies for the Specialty label. Nobody knew it then, but this the breakthrough for Ray -- he had, in effect, written his first commercial hit arrangement.

Cosimo's was booked for the week, and we had to cut Ray in WDSU's radio studios. His band (pro tem, of course), was a group of erstwhile hard-boppers whose cards had been earned on the tin shed rhythm & blues one-nighter circuit. The great result was Don't You Know.

It was Ray's tune and arrangement, and while the side didn't upset the charts, it contained a memorable riff which may be heard any day you care to listen to various of our esteemed jazz groups, genus funk.

This was a landmark session in the growth pattern because it had: Ray Charles originals, Ray Charles arrangements, a Ray Charles band.

It was a non-A & B oriented date. Ahmet and I had nothing to do with the preparation, and all we could do at the session was see to it that the radio technician didn't erase the good takes during the playbacks.

PHASE 3: ENTER THE GOSPEL STYLE -- THE SOUND IS FLEDGED

In November of 1954, Ray called us to Atlanta to dig his new band. We got him in the afternoon at the Peacock nightclub, where he had his band set to play for us. Except for Ray and the band, the place was empty, and as soon as we walked in Ray counted off and they hit into I've Got A Woman and that was it. Zenas Sears, now a successful radio station owner and operator and then an Atlanta deejay and buddy, got studio time for us at radio station WGST on the Georgia Tech. campus (more dues-paying time) and after much confusion we got out with a tape containing I've Got A Woman, Greenbacks, Come Back Baby, and Blackjack (during the session, an announcer was doing a news broadcast from the control room and we couldn't play anything back).

But it had now happened. Ray was full-fledged, ready for fame, and nothing basic has been really added since that day, just more of the same.

This was the sound: Ray sings and plays. The band lays out except for the rhythm section while Ray is singing a phrase. At the end of the phrase, Ray fills on piano, like the great legendary guitar-playing blues singers or the piano blues men like Lloyd Glenn or Amos Milburn or Charles Brown. Here's the kicker: Ray's band doubles the piano figure, voiced to Ray's prescription. The band: two trumpets, baritone sax doubling on alto, tenor sax, drums, bass, piano, no guitar. I've Got A Woman was the archetype tune -- 16 bars, gospel chord progressions.

From then on Ray made a slew of hit records, with songs he wrote and arrangements he dictated with that seven-piece band that was an extension of his own voice. Later, came the Ray-lets and strings, but the basics were there -- especially the mining of the gospel lode that was to result in Hallelujah I Love Her So, This Little Girl Of Mine, Ain't That Love, Tell All The World About You, and so many other marvelous originals. It was in this era that America's great singers began to record Ray's compositions -- the Peggy Lees, the Harry Belafonte's, the Bobby Darins, the Gloria Lynns, the Elvis Presleys -- further ensuring the place of Ray's works in the library of American music.

PHASE 4: BALLADS & STRINGS

From 1954 until 1959, Ray Charles concentrated on his gospel-grooved songs, turning out a continuous stream of hits with the small band. In May, 1959, the famous "Genius" session took place, featuring six sides with strings and voices with Ralph Burns arrangements. Six sides were done with a big band of which Ray Charles' own small band was the nucleus, expanded with a hall-full of Ellington and Basie sidemen, and with arrangements by Quincy Jones, Ernie Wilkins, Al Cohn and others. We had had the "Genius" title ready to go for two years, but there was some reluctance about using it. Two albums came out while we held "Genius" in abeyance. After the May, 1959, session, there was no reason for further diffidence, and we released the album under the title "The Genius Of Ray Charles." A new area of public acceptance was penetrated. Listeners who weren't quite ready for the unvarnished Charles brand of musical truth found the strings-and-voices sound palatable, and they stayed to marvel at Ray's singing and piano playing. In these matters Ray had changed not one iota from his earliest recordings.

Since then, Ray has been mixing them up. He hasn't been writing tunes of recent years, but his records have been finding wider and wider acceptance, and his catalogue of earlier recordings has been in as great demand as his current product. In some quarters, especially in Europe, as well as certain listening segments of this country, there is a marked preference for the early, seven-piece, hard-hitting gospel style.

Regardless of the genre -- gospel, pop, even hillbilly, Ray Charles now has the world for an audience.

JERRY WEXLER
Executive Vice President & Partner
Atlantic Records

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