Country crossover

The Modern Sounds of Ray Charles

by Douglas Wolk

Consider the position Ray Charles found himself in at the beginning of 1962. He was a vastly popular entertainer who'd recently expanded his group to a big band but hadn't recorded them yet. He was starting to leave behind the small-scale R&B world that had brought him years of hits; now he was trying to reach for a bigger audience, though the deep well of American popular song that was his favorite source of material was being replaced on the charts by a series of ultra-lightweight twist hits. And he must have known that his free ride with the public was almost over: in November 1961 he'd been arrested for heroin possession. He had to do something big, and quickly, or his career was going to crash down around him. So he made a country album.

Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music -- and isn't that a perfect title, with its suggestion that everybody else just had to catch up? -- surrounded Brother Ray with a huge band, drizzling strings, and white-bread choirs and gave him a dozen country hits, standards, and unknowns to go to town on. He sang for his life. The combination of his deep-blues voice, the very white orchestrations, and the universal sentiments of loss caught on and then some: Modern Sounds became the #1 album in America (knocking West Side Story off the top of the pop charts), and the weepy, string-drenched single "I Can't Stop Loving You" was a #1 pop and R&B hit. Charles had instantly become the king of crossover recordings, so naturally he came up with a Volume Two six months later, and it did almost as well. The man was on to something, and he's been including country in his deep bag of songs ever since.

The Complete Country & Western Recordings 1959-1986 (Rhino) is a four-disc set of this odd by-way in his long, massive career. (That "1959" is in there thanks to a bouncy little cover of Hank Snow's "I'm Movin' On" tacked on at the beginning of the second disc; it's one of the few tracks here with the spirited drive of Charles's older R&B material -- and without the over-lush production that can make a lot of the box tough going if you have a low tolerance for muzak.) The '60s recordings find Charles drawing on an odd but purposeful cross-section of country, concentrating on a few writers -- Ted Daffan, Buck Owens, Don Gibson -- whose songs adapted themselves well to his persona of a man beaten down by life and singing from the depths of despair.

Yet after the Modern Sounds albums (which occupy the first disc in their entirety), you can hear Charles becoming more interested in modern sounds -- with good results for the recordings, since they're not drowning in quite as much orchestral goop, but to the occasional detriment of the songs. Two Buck Owens numbers from 1965 get his daffy "swingova" treatment (a backwards bossa nova beat accompanied by two full choirs), and so does the imperishable "Blue Moon of Kentucky" -- originally a Bill Monroe bluegrass number, later turned into rock and roll on Elvis Presley's first single, and swung over to soul here. By the early '70s, he'd evolved from the great interpretive singer he used to be into a sort of Ray Charlesifying machine, appropriating familiar lyrics and melodies as grist for a few standard paradigms: "Ring of Fire" and "Down in the Valley" and "Take Me Home, Country Roads" all turn into fabulous-sounding mid-tempo soul workouts, with vocal pyrotechnics that don't have a whole lot to do with what they mean as songs.

The last disc and a half are pretty much a washout. Charles hasn't recorded much of significance for the last 25 years or so -- it's sad, but true. He tried to recast himself as a full-time country singer in the '80s (following a 1981 South African tour that managed to piss off what was left of his black audience), with some success -- the duets album Friendship spawned a handful of country hits, including his first country #1, "Seven Spanish Angels" with Willie Nelson. By then, though, the Nashville hit machine was running too much on automatic to let him do much good: the songs were schlocky, dull, and all but totally generic. (Anybody remember "Little Hotel Room"? "Woman Sensuous Woman"? And they were the singles.) Charles was phoning in his performances, and even when he showed signs of life, the cookie-cutter arrangements could have had anyone else's vocal slapped on with the same effect.

At his best moments -- and there are a bunch of them in this box -- Charles is a tremendous vocalist, with an unerring ear for hits and obscurities that lets him work his magic (it's hard to imagine anyone else turning the country tearjerker "The Three Bells" into a soul recording this striking). And he helped to introduce a country repertoire not just to the soul circuit but to the white listeners he'd crossed over to earlier. His insistence on populism, and the blandness it's sometimes made him embrace, is his greatest failing, but it's also what makes his strokes of genius possible.