Ray Charles – Genius & Soul: The 50th Anniversary Collection

When Willie Nelson celebrated his 60th birthday with a televised bash in Austin a few years ago, his musical guests ranged from B.B. King to Bob Dylan to Lyle Lovett. All had come to pay homage to Nelson, but there was one other artist to whom both host and guests obviously deferred. When Ray Charles arrived, the mood in the room changed from celebratory to reverent.

These days it’s hard to think of Charles as a country singer, and his place in the American pantheon would be secure if he’d never come within a country mile of the music. Yet, it is plain from Rhino’s release of the five-disc, career-spanning Genius & Soul: The 50th Anniversary Collection that the singer’s early-’60s transformations of the country & western songbook played a pivotal role not only in his own artistic progression, but in the progression of American music at large.

As Nelson explains in the set’s accompanying booklet, “With his recording of ‘I Can’t Stop Loving You’, Ray Charles did more for country music than any other artist…Ray took country music to the world. And in some way the rest of us country singers are riding on his coattails.”

Adds Buck Owens, whose “Together Again” and “Crying Time” highlight Charles’ country crossover, “Ray didn’t just cross bridges, he built them.”

A little background: Charles began recording in the late ’40s as an imitator of the comparatively smooth piano-trio stylings of Nat Cole and Charles Brown. His major musical breakthrough came with his synthesis of gospel fervor and secular passion on mid-’50s classics such as “I’ve Got a Woman” and “Hallelujah I Love Her So”, songs that were pure church except for the object of the singer’s devotion.

He proceeded to extend his reach with classics ranging from the raucous “What’d I Say” to the standards “Georgia On My Mind” and “Ruby”, each an equal expression of an innate soulfulness that was quickly dubbed genius. It seemed that the man known as the “Genius of Soul” could take any piece of material and make it his own.

Even so, no one was expecting him to try his hand at country music — certainly not ABC-Paramount, which paid big bucks to lure the R&B hitmaker from Atlantic in the late ’50s. Though Charles had enjoyed a little success with his prophetic rendition of Hank Snow’s “I’m Movin’ On”, the last of his hits before the label switch, his new label had little hint that Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music was where Ray wanted to move.

Though the orchestra now sounds way too lush to ears attuned to modern-retro twang, the background singers too saccharine, there’s no mistaking that “I Can’t Stop Loving You” earned the music a far broader audience than it had ever reached before, one that extended from the R&B charts to the urban pop airwaves. For Charles, the Don Gibson tune, and the ones by Eddy Arnold, Hank Williams and Buck Owens to follow, weren’t ventures into foreign territory. They were great American songs — capable of holding their own with the classics he had sung by Hoagy Carmichael, Johnny Mercer or Percy Mayfield — that rewarded the interpretive stamp of such a distinctive American stylist.

In retrospect, “I Can’t Stop Loving You” is as much a signature tune for Charles as “What’d I Say”, as crucial to his musical identity. And it’s hard to imagine a more radical transformation of a standard than the one that Charles gives “You Are My Sunshine”, just as it’s hard to imagine any other artist making the song more his own. (On the other hand, his perky romp through “Bye Bye Love”, with background chirps replacing the gorgeous harmonies of the Everlys, shows that even genius isn’t infallible.)

In an afterword to the set, Dave Alvin writes about how Charles “made me see that the same tough blue soul in a song written by Percy ‘the Poet of the Blues’ Mayfield could be found in one by country singer Buck Owens or Broadway’s Harold Arlen…More than anyone else in the history of American pop music, he had bulldozed the walls separating blues, gospel, country, jazz, R&B, Tin Pan Alley and show tunes.”

In other words, long before the rest of us, Ray Charles recognized that it’s all just American music.