Episode 78: “What’d I Say” by Ray Charles

A History of Folk Music and 500 Songs

by Andrew.

Episode 78

What Did I Say?

By Ray Charles.

When we last left Ray Charles, he had just had a run of hits at Atlantic Records, including several of the songs that became the foundation of soul music.

But as I mentioned at the end of that episode, after that run of hits, he hit a dry spell, and for a few years he was releasing records like Swanny River Rock, which were hardly up to the standards of his best work.

After his first single of 1957, Ain't That Love, which made the top ten on the RB chart, most of his singles didn't chart at all for the next two years, with some bobbling around at the bottom of the RB top twenty.

He was having a tough time in his life, too.

He was addicted to heroin, he had a small child, and he was playing night after night in third class venues.

At one point, several members of the band, including Charles himself, had been arrested for heroin use, and Charles had had to pay a bribe of six thousand dollars to get the charges dropped.

He'd been let out of jail before the rest of the band, and had to record his hit, Hallelujah, I Love Her So, with session musicians rather than his regular band.

I know she'll go with me until the end.

Everybody asks me how I know.

I smile at them and said most of the places he was playing were bad in other ways.

Many were filthy.

He sometimes had to rent hotel rooms to get changed in, because the dressing rooms were unusually dirty.

And in those days, before portable keyboard instruments became commonplace, he had to make do with whatever pianos were at the venues.

He would talk later about how some were so badly out of tune that he'd have to play in C sharp while the rest of the band were in C, just so he could be something like in the same key as them.

This did improve his musicianship though.

He had to learn to play in keys that most musicians would normally avoid, and he became a much more fluent pianist.

But he ended up taking an electric piano with him on the road, so he could be sure it would always be in tune.

Other musicians would make fun of him for this, as the electric piano was regarded at the time as a novelty instrument, not something a serious musician would use, but Charles knew it had possibilities.

So by the late 1950s, Charles seemed to be trying to go more in the direction of becoming a jazz musician rather than an RB one, in an attempt to play more upmarket gigs.

He kept releasing RB singles, but he was increasingly moving in a jazz direction, both in his albums and in his live performances.

In 1957, he played Carnegie Hall for the first time, on a bill which also included Billy Holiday, Zoot Sims, Dizzy Gillespie, Mose Allison, and Chet Baker, along with a performance by Thelonius Monk and John Coltrane, which has itself become legendary.

He was encouraged in his turn towards jazz by the Ertigan brothers, who had founded Atlantic as a jazz label, and who were still very much jazz lovers first and foremost, even as their label was increasingly an R and B one.

And they were encouraged by people like Miles Davis, who kept telling them that Charles was something special and should be allowed to become one of the jazz greats.

At the time there was a keen interest among many jazz musicians in making a new form of jazz that was more influenced by the other musics that black people played, the blues and gospel in particular.

People like Art Blakey and Horace Silver were trying to incorporate these musics into their own, partly because they loved them, and partly because they felt that black people had invented jazz, but it was becoming an increasingly white music.

By incorporating a gospel or blues feel into their music, they could create something based on their own heritage, something which it would be impossible for white people who hadn't grown up in those traditions to copy successfully.

Many of these musicians had started using the terms soul and funk about their music.

And it's particularly notable that someone like James Brown, for example, did not come from a blues background, but from a jazz one.

Brown Brown always talked about his influences being people like Lionel Hampton and Miles Davis, and you can definitely tell if you study Brown's records that he was passionate about 50s jazz.

Ray Charles in the late 50s was arguably the person who was mixing these styles most fluently, doing things like recording an album with Milt Jackson, the vibraphonist with the modern jazz quartet.

But of course, even in the jazz shows, he was still playing his RB hits.

He was a musician who was blurring boundaries, not one who was moving all the way from one genre to another.

On several of his records in the mid-50s, he had been backed by a group of backing vocalists known as the Cookies,

who were the go-to backing vocalists for Atlantic Records, and had also sung with people like Chuck Willis and Big Joe Turner.

Charles invited two of the girls to become two-thirds of a new vocal trio, the Raylettes, and back him on the road.

The Cookies continued with a new line-up, and were to have a few hits of their own in the early sixties.

The Raylettes would go through several line-up changes, largely because they fell in and out of favour with Charles over their personal relationships.

There was a rather unpleasant, but not totally unfounded, joke that went around that if you wanted to be a Raylette, you had to let Ray.

But the original line-up was Margie Hendrix, Pat Lyles, and Gwen Berry.

And Charles would always say that Margie Hendrix, the trio's leader, was at least the equal of Aretha Franklin or Eta James.

But the ray lets caused a lot of controversy.

A lot of people had already been upset by the way that Ray Charles appropriated gospel music and turned it into pop songs.

They felt that that style of music was sacred, and he was defiling it, though his own argument was that he never sang about God, and if he had a bit of gospel feeling in his voice, that was just how he sang.

And after all, while he had been one of the first to do this, he wasn't the only one.

There was Clyde MacFatter, and Sam Cook, and James Brown, all doing the same kind of thing.

But adding the raolet made his performances seem, to many critics, like he was copying the call-and-response vocals in Pentecostal services.

And certainly, a record like Yes Indeed seems deliberately to be invoking the church at points.

But the record that would see him turn away from jazz and start his period of greatest commercial success was one which took that church music and turned it to extremely earthy concerns.

And it came about at what he intended to be one of his last low-class dance gigs playing for the RB audience.

Charles's normal method of working was to record songs before going out on the road with them, and to have tight arrangements written for the recordings by people like Jesse Stone or Quincy Jones.

He always knew what he was going to do on stage and didn't like to mess around with new things in performance.

But one night he had mistimed the length of the show he was playing and found himself on stage at one o'clock in the morning, with another half hour to go of the night's show, and no more songs rehearsed.

So he said to the group, Listen, I'm going to fool around, and you'll just follow me.

He started playing some riffs on the electric piano, following a standard twelve bar blues structure, and improvised a few lyrics, mostly about dancing.

Just as he had on his first Atlantic hit, Mess Around, he took inspiration from an old boogie woogie classic.

This time, Pinetop Smith's Pinetop's Boogie Woogie.

Hey, little gal, you stand there with the red dress on.

You come right up here where Mr.

Pine Top is.

Now, face the audience.

And when I tell you to hold yourself,

you get ready to stop

and don't move a peg.

And when I say get it, I want you to shake that thing.

Call yourself now.

After a few minutes of this, he told the raylettes to just copy him, and started a call and response section, where he'd make moaning noises, and then they'd repeat them.

The song went on for several minutes, and he thought of it as just a relatively successful way to fill out an underrunning show, so he was quite surprised when audience members came up to him afterwards and asked him where they could get a copy of the record.

So over the next few nights he played the riffs he'd improvised and did the call and response section and slowly built it up into a properly structured song.

And every time the audience went wild.

He called Jerry Wexler at Atlantic and told him he was coming to him with a new song to record.

And it's pretty nice.

Normally he didn't like to build up the songs he was going to record in advance.

He thought that it was better for him to let the music speak for itself.

But this time he thought it was worth giving it a bit of a build-up.

So, it's pretty nice.

What Did I Say was a far more technically innovative record than it's normally given credit for, and one that was largely built in the studio.

As well as being Charles's first record to really show off his electric piano playing, it was also one of his first to be recorded on an eight-track machine.

Tom Dowd, Atlantic engineer, is someone who is acknowledged by almost everyone he worked with as one of the great recording engineers of all time.

He'd actually started as a physicist, working on a cyclotron at Columbia University, which he attended from the age of 16, and he had been working towards his degree when he was called up for World War II and put to work on the Manhattan Project.

When the war was over, he'd planned to continue in physics, but his war work was top secret, and so not useful for getting a qualification.

And after working on the development of the atom bomb, there was nothing he could learn in an undergraduate physics degree, so he'd switched careers and become a recording engineer instead.

In the early years at Atlantic, he'd worked miracles with terrible equipment and recording spaces.

In those early years, Atlantic's recording studio had also been its offices, with the desks and chairs cleared out of the way when it came time to record.

He'd constantly pushed Atlantic forward, insisting on recording on tape when everyone else was recording on acetates, and recording in stereo when people were still only buying records in mono.

And he'd recently got hold of an eight-track recorder, the second one in existence, after the one that Les Paul had built for himself.

The song that Ray Charles brought into the studio, What Ad I Say, was clearly something with commercial potential, but it was a song designed to stretch out for a long time, to fill up time in a show.

There was no way it could be a single at the length that Charles played it.

It was also so obscene at points that it was very unlikely to get played on the radio.

But Dowd put together several different edits of the track, recorded on his new eight-track machine in what was, for the time, astounding sound quality.

He took the seven and a half minute track that they recorded, cut it down to five minutes and seven seconds, and then split it into two so it could go over both sides of a single.

The result is one of the great masterpieces of dynamics in pop music.

It It starts with Charles playing solo just with his left hand, a simple 12-bar riff on the electric piano.

Then his right hand comes in, while the drummer plays a Latin rhythm, mostly on the hi-hat.

Then, for the bulk of what became part one of the song, Charles sings disconnected verses over this backing.

Then, at the end of the first part, the horns come in, answering Charles as he sings the song's title.

me what I say, yeah.

Tell me what I say right now.

Tell me what I say.

Tell me what I say right now.

Tell me what I say.

Tell me what I say, yeah.

And I wanna know.

I wanna know right now.

And I wanna know.

I wanna know right now, yeah.

And I wanna know.

The song comes to a sudden stop, and the band pretend to complain about the unexpected ending of the song.

And then for part two, we get a call and response, with the railet answering him, along with the horns on the choruses.

One

But also the bit of the track that caused the most controversy.

Several breakdowns with Charles and the Raylets sighing and moaning in an almost pornographic way.

As Charles himself said in his autobiography, I'm not one to interpret my own songs, but if you can't figure out what I say, then something's wrong.

Either that or you're not accustomed to the sweet sounds of love.

Many radio stations banned the song, although Charles noted that when later white artists like Bobby Darwin, Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis Presley recorded cover versions of it, those versions weren't banned and said, that seemed strange to me, as though white sex was cleaner than black sex.

None of that stopped it becoming a hit, though.

It went to number one on the R ⁇ B charts and number six on the Heart 100.

becoming his biggest hit up to that point.

But even more than its chart success, it was a record that had influence in all sorts of places.

Many people consider it the first soul record, though we've already looked at several songs in this series which I would consider soul.

But it was certainly one of the ones that defined the genre, and it was the record that single-handedly turned the electric piano from a joke instrument into one that was as respectable as any other.

Atlantic followed up the single with an album he'd recorded earlier, a big band record made with various members of the Count Basie and Duke Ellington bands, great players like Zoot Sims, Paul Gonsalves, Clark Terry, and Fathead Newman, playing arrangements written by Quincy Jones.

The lead-off track of that album, a cover version of Louis Jordan's Let the Good Times Roll, was only a minor hit, but it's now one of the records most identified with Charles.

I don't care if you're young or old.

You all are getting together and let the good time roll.

That album introduced another aspect of Ray Charles' legend.

The record was called The Genius of Ray Charles.

Charles himself always disliked the term genius being applied to him, but Jerry Wexler thought it appropriate, and it stuck.

Over the next few years, there would be albums like The Genius Sings the Blues, The Genius After Hours, The Genius Hits the Road, and Genius plus Soul equals Jazz.

As it turned out, it was also the last album Charles recorded for Atlantic, though he'd recorded enough of a backlog that they could release four more albums over the next couple of years.

His contract with them was up for renewal in October 1959, and while it seemed at first as if that was a pure formality, he ended up going to another label.

ABC Paramount wanted to expand into the RB market and came to him with an offer that no other artist had ever had from a label.

He'd get complete artistic control over his recordings.

He'd get 75% of all profits made once the label had recouped their costs.

He'd get a guarantee of $50,000 per year against his royalties.

And remember that three years earlier, when RCA had paid $35,000 for Elvis's contract, that had been the most any label had ever paid.

And best of all, after five years, the ownership of the masters would revert to him.

He'd own his own work, rather than the label owning it.

Charles took the offer to Atlantic and gave them the chance to match it, because he did like recording for them.

But they said there was simply no way that they could come close to it.

So he moved to ABC Paramount.

And a strange thing happened.

For a few few years he flourished artistically as he never had before, but as a performer, and not as a songwriter.

In fact, from that point on he almost completely stopped writing songs, and concentrated on other people's material.

The first album he did for ABC Paramount, The Genius Hits the Road, is Apache Affair, a collection of old songs about places in America, like Mississippi Mud, Alabama Bound, and New York's My Home.

But it had one standout hit: a version of Georgia on My Mind that 60 years on is still considered the definitive version of that song.

Still in

peaceful dreams, I see

the road that leads back

to you.

That went to number one on the charts, and earned him four Grammy Awards.

It looked like the move to ABC was a successful one, but the next album, dedicated to you, was a bit of a misfire.

It was a similar themed collection, this time of songs based on women's names, but it didn't have anything like the highs of Georgia on my mind.

Luckily, the album after that, Genius Plus Soul equals Jazz, was a return to form,

another album of funky jazz with the Basie band and Quincy Jones, which gave him another top ten hit with the instrumental One Min Julep.

little bit of soul.

To follow that album, he put together a big band of his own for the first time.

A 17-piece group that could play the Quincy Jones charts the way they sounded on the records.

His career seemed to be going from strength to strength.

He recorded Hit the Road Jack, which became his second number one on the pop chart.

I guess if you say so,

I'd have to pack my things and go.

That's right, hit the road, Jack.

And don't you come back no more, no more, no more, no more.

Hit the road, Jack, and don't you come back no more.

What you say, hit the road, Jack, and don't you come back no more, no more, no more, no more.

An album of duets with Betty Carter, which included their version of Baby, it's cold outside, now generally considered the definitive version of the song.

There's bound to be done

to take over my

lifelong sorrow.

At least there will be plenty implied.

If you caught pneumonia and I

really can't stay, get over that old now.

Our butt is cold.

And then he made another move which seemed bizarre to everyone, recording an album of country songs, modern sounds in country and western music.

The idea of Ray Charles doing an album of songs by people like Don Gibson and Hank Williams made no sense to anyone except Ray Charles, but he had the right to make whatever records he felt like.

And as it turned out, that became his greatest album, and possibly the peak of his career.

While the songs were all country songs, Charles did them all in his own style, with either orchestral or big band backing, and with no concession either in his vocals or the instrumental backing to country genre elements.

The lead single from it, Don Gibson's I Can't Stop Loving You, went to number one on the Hot 100, the RB chart, and the Adult Contemporary chart.

But my favourite track from the album is the second single, Eddie Arnold's You Don't Know Me, which may be Charles's greatest performance ever, and went to number two on the chart.

That album confirmed that Ray Charles could make any kind of music he wanted, rock and roll, soul, big band, jazz, or country, and have it sound like no one else.

It solidified him as the most important musician of his generation, a link between all the disparate threads of American music.

He had nothing left to prove, and so from that point on his artistic development stalled.

His next albums were Modern Sounds in Country and Western Volume 2, a good album but not as essential as the first,

Ingredients in a Recipe for Soul, an album mostly consisting of old standards, and Sweet and Sour Tears, a collection of songs themed around Craying.

All are thoroughly enjoyable albums, but none of them reached the peaks of his very best work.

And after one further album, Have a Smile on Me, a weak album of alleged comedy songs, he was arrested again for his heroin use and spent a year on probation unable to work.

He got clean and never used heroin again, but on his return to music, while he made many fine records, a spark was lost.

Now, I want to be very clear here that I am not saying that stopping using heroin made him a less interesting musician, or any of that nonsense.

I have no interest in romanticising addiction.

It's just that in the first thirteen years of his career he was constantly finding new things he could do, pushing his music in different directions, and discovering what Ray Charles' music really was.

For the last forty years he was working within the boundaries he had set in those initial years.

But then, it can be argued that in that time, entire genres of music were also contained entirely within the boundaries he had set.

He kept working almost up until his death.

His final album, Genius Loves Company, was recorded when he knew he had terminal liver cancer.

It's an album of duets with singers who had been influenced by him, like Van Morrison and Elton John, plus his contemporary, William Nelson.

From the brim.

The album was released two months after his death in 2004 and became his first number one album since modern sounding country and western music more than 40 years earlier.

It went triple platinum and earned nine Grammy Awards, as much as a recognition of the esteem in which Ray Charles was held as of the quality of the album itself.

It's safe to say that at the time he died, there wasn't a musician alive in the fields of rock, RB, soul, and country music whose career hadn't in some way been influenced by his.

And as long as recorded music exists, people will still listen to Ray Charles.

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