Why Ray Charles Matters - Page 2

What so many people don’t understand is that before Charles, a great deal of this music wasn’t known to the world, and denied to millions of Americans via the destructive nature of racial prejudice. The Reverend Thomas Dorsey, an old bluesman who was doing R. Kelly when R. Kelly was a twinkle in his grandaddy’s eye( his single " It's tight like that" sold 7 million copies), founded modern gospel in the early 30’s by fusing the spirituals and work songs with Blues and jazz musical structures. Mahalia Jackson, Sister Rosetta Tharpe and the Clara Ward singers earned iconic status with each of their million selling 45's. But it was Charles, a walking musical encyclopedia built on the rudiments of gospels fundamentals, who brought it to a world by fusing it with secular themes. When you look at Ray's art, you have to start with his voice, that unmistakably original acid on velvet mid range growl which could rise to a joyously shrieking falsetto that sounded like the living embodiment of a lust for life, then sink to a hoarse baritone that sounded straight out of the exact place between purgatory and hell. That voice was part preacher, part field hollerer, part love man, part con man, part blues man, part dead man, whose vocal leaps were, to paraphrase Ellison's description of Jackson,

" An art which depends on the employment of the full expressive resources of the human voice-from the rough growl employed by blues singers, the intermediate sounds, half cry, half recitative, which are common to eastern music; the rough edged tones and broad vibratos, the high shrill and grating tones which rasp ones ears like the agonized flourishes of flamenco, to the gut tones, which remind us of where the jazz trombone found his human source"

But it was the staggering, nearly byzantine ambition that encompassed Charles’ musical mind which is the foundation for his art. You can hear it in his first imprint on the pop music world, 1955's I Got A Woman. The shuffling big beat borrows from Louis Jordan’s big band fusion, the backbeat is 2/4 gospel. The arrangement is lucid, not quite jazz, not quite blues, definitely not rock and roll but something sophisticated altogether. The emotions are feral, but not quite the primitiveness of rock and roll. It is the sound of life, a place where there is an ever flowing river of cool. It, you might ask? Rhythm and Blues, Ray Charles' invention.

Article Author: Robert Lashley

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