Country Style! Ray Charles Edition

David looks at some classic Brother Ray albums, just reissued

[“Country Style!” is an occasional series devoted to that subgenre where a presumably “non-country” artist records an album full of country standards and then, often as not, titles it something like So and So Visits the Country! Or …Sings Golden Country Hits or …Sings Country Style! Please think of these entries more as notes for further study than definitive statements.]

Here’s a small, good thing from these trying couple of weeks… Ray Charles’ first four country music-themed albums have been reissued in all the usual formats by Tangerine Records, Charles’ ongoing imprint from back in his ABC days. You’re likely familiar with the first two of those projects, Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, Volume 1 and its sequel, Volume 2, both from 1962. The next two, pictured above—1965’s Country and Western Meets Rhythm and Blues and 1966’s Crying Time—aren’t nearly so well-known these days because they’ve mostly been out of print for decades. (Tangerine has also just released a new 13-track Charles sampler, Best of Country & Western.) My long-simmering take is that while the Modern Sounds albums were excellent, and groundbreaking besides, Charles’ less-heralded pair of country follow-ups were either just as strong or, in Crying Time’s case, even better.

To get the obvious out of the way first… Ray Charles’ Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music is one of the most consequential albums in country music history—and among the more important mid-century albums in all of American pop. Brother Ray wasn’t the first black artist to cut an entire album of country numbers: The year before Modern Sounds…, The Mills Brothers released San Antonio Rose and, as I discussed in an earlier “Country Style!”, Tommy Edwards released Tommy Edwards Sings Golden Country Hits. But while he wasn’t first, Charles was far more high profile—having just recently scored No. 1 pop hits with “Georgia on My Mind” and “What’d I Say”—and, therefore, taking a bigger risk: A superstar soul-singer daring to integrate himself into white country songs and white country sounds during both the popular peak of the Nashville Sound and the height of the Civil Rights Movement amounted to staging a kind of musical freedom ride. Just a year and a half after the Nashville sit-ins and but a few months before James Meredith enrolled at the University of Mississippi, Charles’ hits “I Can’t Stop Loving You” and “You Don’t Know Me” echoed the sounds of countrypolitan crossovers by Patsy Cline, Brenda Lee and Skeeter Davis, Jim Reeves and Ray Price and so many more. “My country, too,” Charles seemed to insist.

Nashville stuck to its “whites-only” sign. “I Can’t Stop Loving You” was a pop No. 1 for five weeks, an Easy Listening No. 1 for five weeks too, an R&B chart topper for ten, but… a total no-show at country radio, even though it was a sonic doppelganger to much of that moment’s country music. Nashville’s segregationist move did not stop it from drafting on Charles’s success, however. Trade organization the Country Music Association actively used Charles’s sales and airplay to promote country fans to advertisers as a demo with middle-class tastes and cash in its pockets; to establish itself more firmly as major-recording center “Music City, U.S.A.”; and to grow its publishing industry by way of a new, Nashville-centered Great American Songbook. The first volume of Modern Sounds was the key accelerant for the explosion of all those “Country Style!” albums from non-country artists that exploded throughout the rest of the decade, many of them (though hardly all) cut in Nashville studios with Nashville producers and session cats while working country music publishing.

Going forward, one of the most prominent of those ostensibly non-country acts would turn out to be… Ray Charles. Charles followed up on Modern Sounds’ success in the spring and summer of ’62 by releasing Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, Volume 2 that October. As I once noted for Rolling Stone, the lead single off Modern Sounds’ sequel, Brother Ray’s desegregated “You Are My Sunshine,” sat atop the R&B charts the very week George Wallace delivered his villainous “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” speech.

Charles went “Country Style!” again a few years later, but it’s important to note that neither Country and Western Meets Rhythm and Blues nor Crying Time sound like a Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, Volume 3. For one thing, the original Modern Sounds album wasn’t really all that modern. As we’ve seen, its most successful singles were much more in line with contemporary sounds in country music while several other tracks (including the ones that frame the set, “Bye Bye Love” and “Hey, Good Lookin’”) were arranged as big-band swing, already an old-fashioned mode back then although a still popular one: In ‘62, Charles’ old friend, Quincy Jones, was a couple years away yet from writing the arrangements for Frank Sinatra and Count Basie’s It Might as Well Be Swing, which included a by turns swaggering-and-shrugging, and no doubt Charles-inspired, rendition of “I Can’t Stop Loving You.” The closest to “modern” element of Modern Sounds was its delivery of country music-associated songs via undeniably soul-identified vocals.

Country and Western Meets Rhythm and Blues features Charles’ distinctive vocals, too, of course, but it tinkers with its arrangements compared to the Modern Sounds albums, its beats specifically. Either charmingly busy or just all herky-jerky, I can’t quite decide, Ray’s covers of Buck Owens’ “I’ve Got a Tiger by the Tail” and Bill Monroe’s “Blue Moon of Kentucky” are driven by a “swingova” rhythm. The original liner notes describe that as “a reverse, or backward, bossa nova,” a description I will just have to take Ray’s word for.

The album includes three additional Buck Owens numbers. “I Don’t Care” is twangy, guitar-and-drums roots rock, “Don’t Let Her Know” is misery taken to country church, “Together Again” is supper-club country, piano-with-strings. All three covers are country soul. After Charles’ similarly arranged country-soul version of “Crying Time,” yet another Buck song and the title track to his next album, went Top 10 pop and R&B, “Together Again” was belatedly released as a single—and the entire Country and Western Meets Rhythm and Blues set was re-released under the title Together Again.

The original album title (and its goofily charming cover image) said C&W was meeting R&B. That turned out to be referring less to genre synthesis than distinct communities sharing the same space: Integration! Beyond the country songs, then, the rest of the album leans hard into the kind of R&B Ray had been perfecting for years. Important point, though: Ray Charles’ kind of R&B, particularly his pop-embracing balladry, was itself making steady headway, back in the day and ever since, into country music proper. Think of fellow piano men Charlie Rich, Jerry Lee Lewis, Mickey Gilley and Ronnie Milsap, and even Floyd Cramer at his most elegant, each of whom simply wouldn’t exist as know them without Charles’ model. Consider, too, his intensely soulful but easy-listening-friendly discography, with 1960’s “Georgia on My Mind” most exemplary. On Country and Western Meets Rhythm and Blues, Ray’s “I Like to Hear It Sometime” is a grown-ass novelty here about love’s discontents that you could imagine innumerable country acts succeeding with. Ditto for “All Night Long,” where the strings swing and sway Brother Ray through a sleepless night. Best of the bunch, and among the best sides he ever did, is “Light Out of Darkness,” a string-bejeweled and twinkling piano ballad he wrote for the soundtrack to his star turn in Ballad in Blue. He clearly pulled the lyric from experience: “Men without hope or love… They don't really see / Ah, you know those men are not me.”

In 1966, Charles released his next album, Crying Time, assembled from his first studio work since taking most of a year off to get clean of his heroin addiction. Alongside only his final Atlantic release, The Genius Sings the Blues, and his 1963 Modern Sounds- follow up for ABC, Ingredients in a Recipe for Soul, Crying Time is on the short list of Charles’ very greatest albums. It has no competition at all for the title of Charles’ darkest release. The Buck Owens title track establishes the miserable tone, and “I have no friend,” he moans in “No Use Crying.” He swears he’d trade his money, stardom and Caddy for some “Peace of Mind.” When Howlin’ Wolf does “Goin’ Down Slow,” he leans into all the fun he’s had, counts all the money he’s spent. When Charles sings it here, his life is sanded down until there’s nothing left but his clothes being sent home to his mother. Swirling silver screen strings remind him of the lover who’s had to go, and his piano provides the “Tears.” The title track aside, none of this is country, strictly speaking, but it’s all moving that direction.

The black experience in country music, and not just Charles’, has always been not only as a performer of country songs but as a driver of country futures. I wish Roger Miller, say, had covered “Let’s Go Get Stoned.” I dream of a world where maybe Charley Pride could have twanged up the menacing Percy Mayfield protest song “You’re in for a Big Surprise.” “I call you ‘Mister,’ I shine your shoes,” Ray snarls. “You go away laughing while I sing the blues… But you’re in for a BIG surprise.” For our “Country Style!” purposes, let’s just say that Charles’ better-very-late-than-never 2022 induction to the Country Music Hall of Fame only scratched the surface of the surprising paybacks.

[Want more “Country Style!”? Check our previous entries on Tommy Edwards, Duane Eddy and Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme.]

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