Ray Charles redux

I saw the biopic Ray a month or so ago, on opening night actually, mostly because I absolutely love Jamie Foxx (he spells his name with two X's; how cool is that?), but also because good biopics about people of color are so rare. I've read that the conventional wisdom in Hollywood is that they do not make much money--I was shocked to learn that Ali didn't make a lot of money for the studio. Nonetheless, these stories need to be told and shared and I wanted to learn more about this man, Ray Charles, who has been hailed as one of the musical geniuses of the 20th century by many.

The movie was pretty good; Ray's story is the classic American dream story, with the added richness of African-American history that makes it even more moving. But what I've come away from it with was a somewhat superficial understanding of Ray Charles as a musician, and how his music was able to help synthesize varied and seemingly disparate veins of Black music in the U.S. into the ubiquitous genres we now call R&B and Soul.

There's one great scene in the film that encapsulates this theme perfectly: Ray is playing in a Black nightclub for a bunch of dancers, his rollicking jazzy bluesy rough stuff that was the norm in that day (this was the 1950s mind you). And then he busts into a new song, based on gospel music, with lyrics like "I've gotta woman / way over town / that's good to me. / She gives me money / when I'm in need / Yeah she's a kind of / friend in deed."
And a couple in the crowd start yelling up at him, "That's the Lord's music! You can't sing Gospel like that!" They are visibly angry, and there is a tense moment in the scene where you think the conflict might come to blows. One of Ray's musicians even leaves the stage because he agrees that Ray is defiling what has until now been a spiritual (not secular) musical form.

And then Ray, in his characteristically smooth way, asks the crowd something like, "If you all want me to keep playing, say 'Amen!'" And of course the crowd yells 'Amen!' in unison, and the couple leaves the club in a huff as the dancers continue to get down.

That integration of gospel with 'torch' songs--about love, sex, desire and other 'vices'--was one of Ray's big contributions to the music world. It resulted in what we now call Soul music.

I bought the 'Ray' movie soundtrack to give myself a more thorough introduction to his music, and I can hear the dissonant yet somehow harmonious blending of blues with jazz with a more insistent rhythm section in some of the songs, such as 'Night and Day' and 'Unchain My Heart'. It's like listening to history in the making.