Ray Charles died today at age 73. The news wasn't a surprise given Charles' health lately, but what you took away from every story of the decline was his denial to give in. His last public appearance held the same. "I'm a little weak now, but I'm gonna get stronger," he said.
My generation primarily knew Charles from secondary sources: Diet Pepsi, duets with Kermit the Frog, Blues Brothers. The opener: "Pardon me, but we do have a strict policy concerning the handling of the instruments. An employee of Ray's Music Exchange must be present. Now, may I help you?" Followed by a guncrack and Shake Your Tailfeather.
Even the classics were removed — to a point. The Huxtables lip-synched to (Night Time Is) The Right Time, and Georgia on My Mind opened the Olympics. But as far as the old songs went, they could haul and bring their amplifiers with them. They brought Charles' voice powered and extended by musical history, instead of being changed or consumed by it. The catalog build-up over the last half-century charged against the power of intrinsic amplification, but history only had so much of a shot against soul.
With Charles passing today, words faced the same stumbling block. Nothing conveys drowning in your own tears like the arranged admission itself, and nothing, for many, says love like "hallelujah." And then there's What'd I Say, parts one and two, six-minutes-plus of gear-shifting love destruction and sexual absolution. Piano, drums, horns, and Raelettes, by elements. But nothing says What'd I Say like how Charles says it.
The song of his most recently running through my head was Busted, which I've written about here before and could push anyone from the dusty root cellars of the mind if not the body. The song today I wished I'd written about here was Georgia, which last fall was one of the few songs I've loved that I've ever had to switch off.
The song bound to be written about by everyone this week was probably crowned hours ago: America the Beautiful. Charles played the song at Reagan's renominating convention in '84, and the singer's renditions have probably come as close as any to unseating the national anthem. In Dave Marsh's 1989 The Heart of Rock and Soul: The 1001 Greatest Singles Ever Made, an unranked compilation worth buying, the author found the song to surpass much description. Marsh settled for context then and restfully so.
996 AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL, Ray Charles
Producer not credited; written by Katherine Lee Bates and Samuel Ward
Dunhill 45-002 1987 Did not make pop chartAll the while I was writing The Heart of Rock and Soul, the music industry trade papers were filled with stories about the death of the single. They meant, of course, the death of the 45 RPM vinyl disc, not the death of singles per se.
The question is what will replace 45s. Beyond the status quo (and despite the presence of millions of turntables, the lack of any corporate incentive to update and improve rapidly disintegrating record pressing facilities made the 45's death a certainty), there were three alternatives: the twelve-inch vinyl single, the cassette single, and the CD single.
The vinyl twelve-inch seemed certain to survive only so long as the rest of vinyl; the preferred format for dance deejays (you can't scratch any of the other kinds of single) it never captured much allegiance among the rest of the audience.
The cassette single remains beloved only of those who listen solely in their cars. For everyday use, it has all of tape's usual disadvantages: incredibly ponderous access from one song to another (rewinding is always the longest distance between two points), the tape itself is susceptible to all kinds of bends, twists, stretches, and breaks, and its fidelity is the lowest of the lot. Besides, the cassette single uses neither of tape's big adventages: Its ability to contain very long musical programs and its recordability. But tapes are also the cheapest format to produce and package and therefore they've been the most avidly marketed.
Then there's the CD single, offering digital clarity a song or two (maybe three) at a time, an elegant format with virtually instant access to not only any track but to any point in any track. The ideal sound carrying device. Until you decide that consumers can't distinguish between the new U2 album and its various singles simply by looking at the price, but that they must be given the visual aid of a smaller size, to boot. (With, of course, a consequent diminishment of raw materials and costs. Selling one or two songs for $5.98 is even better than seeling eight or ten for $15.95; do the math.)
Problem was, the CD player was designed to accept only a five-inch disc so playing a three-inch CD required an adapter, a clumsy plastic prosthetic that snapped around the outside of the disc to bring its overall circumference back up to five inches, the opposite of the way you used to snap those ugly little yellow things into the center of your 45s. Naturally, the sensitive layer technology of CD players was likely to misread a disc not centered in its adapter with perfect stability.
God knows why we had to be saddled with this monstrosity, when there's a perfectly acceptable CD alternative — a regular five-inch disc containing less music at a lower price — awaiting only a consumer boycott to become the dominant singles medium.
But in the end, it doesn't matter which format prevails. Singles will always be around because people listen to and remember and love music one song and one performance at a time; they're the way that pop music is most deeply and intensely appreciate, whether on the radio in hourly rotation or at home, picking the needle up and putting it back down five times in a row. What it's about is what's in the grooves (or bits, if you're waxing digital). Music is music and if rock and roll lovers have put up with the inconvenience of fitting a one-inch hole into a 1/8-inch spindle for three decades, we'll certainly adapt to the CD adapter, or even the clumsiness of cassettes, if we have to.
To that end, here is the one three-inch CD single I have come to know and love, Dunhill's reissue of one of the greatest Ray Charles ballads of all time, a 1976 performance. (Back then, "America" was issued as a 45 — Crossover 985, which made the lowest rungs of the R&B charts as Ray's eighty-first entry there.) Gasping and chortling, singing it bluesy and singing it utterly straight, Brother Ray converts this hoary chauvinism into a gorgeous, ironic, sweet-tempered sermon on the land he loves and know a lot more about than the composers. By the end, when he starts to chant "America! America!" it's as if he's trying to secude the nation. And you pretty much have to believe that he could.
At that point, if they wanted to embed the music in your brain cells and charge you for the privilege, you'd let 'em do it.
