Charlie Rich – Feel Like Going Home: The Essential Charlie Rich

Charlie Rich was always such a humble singer. He never showed off or drew attention to himself at the expense of the song. He caressed his lyrics; he worked his one-of-a-kind voice over the words so carefully, the better to feel their meaning, and then he let loose his discoveries in singing that was nothing short of raw emotion made audible: husky, smooth and sure in one line, then unexpectedly yelping, fierce or vulnerable in the next.

There’s a moment on Feel Like Going Home: The Essential Charlie Rich , a new two-disc retrospective of his 30-year career, when he’s playing one of his own songs in 1973. It’s the title track of this collection, and his own piano is his only accompaniment. His voice sounds absolutely weary. No, it’s more than that; it’s completely beaten down, given up altogether. Yet Rich still comes off as quietly confident too, so he’s able to grant the lyrics a kind of personal transcendence, a feeling of empowerment through acceptance, that’s so exquisitely humble it’s almost impossible to hear. One reason why Feel Like Going Home truly is an “essential” collection is that it’s filled with 35 more moments that are every bit as perfect.

Born in 1934 in Colt, Arkansas, Charlie Rich grew up adoring the music of Stan Kenton and Count Basie more than the blues and country that were the hot sounds around him, but he loved all of these musics deeply. He absorbed each of them into his soul, into his own piano playing, into his gorgeous voice. In the late ’50s, he was squeezing in small club gigs around his farming schedule when his high school sweetheart, wife and favorite composer, Margaret Ann Rich, took it upon herself to take a tape of his stuff to Sun Records across the river in Memphis.

Over the years, that label’s main man, Sam Phillips, has frequently called Rich as talented an artist as any he ever knew, and on those Sun recordings you can hear why. Rich could do it all, and did. From these early years, Feel Like Going Home includes, among others, a country & western weeper (the classic “Sittin’ And Thinkin’ “), a rhythm & blues ballad (“Who Will The Next Fool Be”, another standard recorded by everyone from Bobby Bland to Mark Chesnutt) and a flat-out rocker (“Lonely Weekends”, a #22 hit in 1960), all three Rich’s own compositions. But he never found the success at Sun that his more famous, and arguably less gifted, peers had found, so he spent the ’60s bouncing from label to label, producing excellent but largely ignored music at all the stops along the way. He released two great albums for RCA/Groove in the early sixties, two more masterpieces for Mercury/Smash in the middle of the decade, and then recorded a charming album of soul-inspired Hank Williams covers, Charlie Rich Sings Country & Western, for Hi Records in 1967. It was all marvelous. But with the exception of “Mohair Sam”, a 1965 novelty hit, it all bombed.

Rich’s ’60s recordings defy categorization, the reason most often cited to explain why they failed to chart. While he was clearly genre-hopping in his Sun years, trying to find a niche, the records for Groove, Smash and Hi couldn’t be pigeonholed so easily. You can’t tell where the country, blues, pop and jazz leave off long enough to say precisely where the soul, gospel and rock ‘n’ roll begin; it’s all of these sounds at once and, therefore, none of them. It’s just American music, as good as any ever made. But besides Elvis Presley, whose late ’60s and ’70s work was clearly influenced by Rich, hardly anyone seemed to be listening.

Billy Sherrill was one of the few. He’d first worked with Rich back when they were both at Sun’s Phillips International imprint, so he knew what the singer could do. When Rich had seemingly run out of options, Sherrill signed him to Epic, where Sherrill was just beginning to score the first examples of his signature countrypolitan style. As the ’60s became the ’70s, the pair collaborated on three great full-length albums — Set Me Free in 1968, The Fabulous Charlie Rich in 1969, and 1970’s Boss Man, all recently reissued by Koch — which, while a bit more polished than what he’d done before, generally continued in Rich’s sophisticated, indefinable style. The epitome of this sound is the straightforward and earnest “Life’s Little Ups And Downs” (a Margaret Ann Rich composition off Fabulous). Like all his recordings from this period, the arrangement on the song is spare (no strings, regardless of Sherrill’s reputation). There’s not really much more here than the rhythm section, Rich’s piano fills and his voice — guilty, resigned and, finally, humbly grateful for the woman still standing by his side.

Still, despite the magic Sherrill captured and helped create on these albums, success eluded Rich. It wasn’t until Sherrill brought out the heavy artillery on the Behind Closed Doors album, including the countrypolitan crossover smashes “The Most Beautiful Girl” and the title song, that Rich finally earned the acclaim he’d deserved. Feels Like Going Home confirms that, despite their reputation, these string-heavy arrangements were actually subdued and purposeful, always working to highlight Rich’s painfully sincere vocals.

The line on Rich has always been that his work was simply too all-over-the-board for the industry, or any one particular audience, to accept. So perhaps the greatest strength of this collection, the first to cover the entire breadth of his career, is that it shows just how unified Rich’s vision was all along. Partly this is due to purposeful track selection; if his Sun-era, Sinatra-style swing number “That’s How Much I Love You”, or any of the Booker T-sounding cuts from Charlie Rich Sings Country & Western, had been included, his eclecticism would have been easier to identify. But even then, the similarities would have been more striking than the differences. It’s good to have Rich’s 1962 version of “Sittin’ And Thinkin’ ” on the same disc with his early-’70s crossover hits to remind that the strings and backing choirs of the later Sherrill years weren’t a betrayal of the man’s genius. These had been effective elements of Rich’s sensibility all along.

After the Epic crossover hits, Rich was rarely the same again. He stuck with Sherrill for a few more ’70s chart successes, on which Sherrill’s penchant for overproduction, and for only recording songs he owned the publishing rights to, finally bore its predictably sad fruit. Then he headed off to a largely forgettable ’80s output on United Artists and Elektra. Artistically, it looked like it was all over.

But when he finally recorded what turned out to be his final album, the jazz-blues-pop Pictures And Paintings in 1991 (two of its haunting tracks are included here), Rich showed what he was still capable of, and what was lost when he passed away in 1995. That reminder is also the real gift of this collection. Whether it’s the gentle swing he uses on 1991’s “Pictures And Paintings”; or the chamber strings, tinkling piano, and devastating vocal of 1966’s “No Home”; or the great restraint on 1970’s pleading “Have A Heart”; or the destitute regret on the 1965 recording of his wife’s “Down And Out”; or the bitter, over-the-top grandeur of 1972’s “Peace On You”; Feel Like Going Home makes it clear that Charlie Rich was one of the greatest singers we’re ever likely to hear.