Long Time Leaving (30 page)

The crowd liked it well enough, but I came home from the library unsatisfied. Worked up another sonnet, starting off this time with the first line of Shakespeare's Sonnet 7:

I
've been trying to write up Ray Charles since I interviewed him in 1983. We were in his dressing room at Lincoln Center, where he was to appear in the Kool Jazz Fest. As we shook hands, he felt up my forearm, his way of getting a first impression. “If you're a woman,” somebody told me, “he'll keep going up till you stop him.”

It was his way—since he couldn't look you in the eye—of checking the cut of your jib. He didn't say anything about my arm. “What would you want Ray Charles to say about your arm? I didn't expect anything like “Yeah! The boy has
got
it”—as he says to Jamie Foxx in a bonus track on the DVD of the movie
Ray,
after they play on separate keyboards till Foxx gets the signature harmonics right. Anyway, he gave no sign that he found my arm lacking. “We had a pretty good chat, although he got distracted. “What he was distracted by is one reason I've never managed to write him up. Another reason was the slush he had lately been recording.

“Where's Ray Charles?” I had asked the woman in the record store. “I can't find Ray Charles.”

“Ray Charles,” she said, “is Easy Listening.”

And there he was, tucked away with Tom Jones and Engelbert Hump-erdinck. Maybe that didn't bother him, but it did me. I could remember, from my teens, the first time I heard “What'd I Say.”

Ohhhh. Uuunh.
From deep down in the pool whence springeth everything from gospel to boogie-woogie.

It was 1959, the year I graduated from high school. Rock and roll had not bowled me over. (I still say that after Bo Diddley, everything is commentary.) Elvis was somebody trying too hard to impress the girls. But my jib never started coming into its own until I heard “What'd I Say.” Since time immemorial people had been singing about misery and about jelly roll, but this was getting down to the things themselves, together, redeeming the one with the other,
in church.
This was what Jesus, the Founding Fathers, and Big Mama Thornton had been getting at. Ray

Charles hit it on the nose, and there was something profoundly
droll
about it, the way he did it. “Wasn't tending toward the overwrought, like that Marvin Gaye song “Sexual Healing.” Ray was singing
well
Well, well, well. And then I came to find out he could play jazz. He could sing
country.

Easy listening? I didn't want to
grumble
about Ray Charles. So I didn't write anything.

Now he's dead, but the biopic has restored him to his prime. “Oh, I see, now,
yes,”
I have heard several people say, whose teens are ten or twenty years more recent than mine. Now maybe I can write a little something.

First of all, who came up with the title “What'd I Say”?
What'd?
What kind of arhythmic unpronounceable clogged contraction is that? Slipped that in on a blind man. He's not singing-shouting, “What
did
I say?” It's “What I'm
saying,”
with a self-delighted touch of “What
am
I saying?” It's a piece he improvised (as dramatized in the movie) with the original Raelettes, most notably the sublime Margie Hendricks. In
Brother Ray
his excellent autobiography written with David Ritz, which Ray meticulously proofread in Braille, it's always “What I Say,” and Ritz states explicitly that Ray meant it to be that. So let's get that straight from now on.

Now, about Margie. In the movie, she is played with feeling by Regina King, who has said, however, that she had a hard time getting a sense of the character because so few images of her survive. When, in the movie, the news of Margie's death by overdose comes to Ray over the phone, you know it's awful. But you don't know how awful until you hear and see the real Margie singing. You can do that now, on a recently released Rhino DVD:
Ô-Genio: Ray Charles Live in Brazil.
It was recorded in 1963, one day before he turned thirty-three. In a liner note, Ritz says of Margie:

Yes. Or rather, “
Yas
indeed.
Yas
indeed.” And it's too bad none of that got into
Brother Ray,
in which she receives way too little credit. She and Ray were lovers, and it's a blot on his life and career that he let her slip away. “What kind of
mannn
are you? What kind of
mannn
are you?” the Raelettes sing on “Busted.” Genius that he was, that question must have stumped him in the night sometimes after Margie was gone.

In Brazil in ’63, Margie, like the other three Raelettes (she's second from the left), is wearing a perky taffeta party dress with a big flat bow at the waist. Demure, except for her mouth. She's not very big and not very pretty (she has Michael Jackson's original nose; in fact she looks a bit like him when he looked real), but you can't take your eyes off her, the confident, slightly lopsided curl of her lip as she goes
Wow'r.
She works her mouth around as if she's winding up, and pooches her lips with zest on the let-go. If you have a hard time picturing two people twenty feet apart turning “You Are My Sunshine” into carnal knowledge, then you owe it to yourself to check out this CD. On “Don't Set Me Free,” Margie lets out a “No-n’-no-no-
no
!” that will make your blood run several directions at once.

When Ray sings “Margie,” about there being only one and “Margie, it's you,” the Raelettes aren't onstage, so we don't know whether the other three are giving her jealous looks, or …Oh, well, I'm going to let Margie go now. I feel partly like I'm her father and partly like I wish I could have gone out with her in high school. But here's a question: When Ray sings, whom is Ray singing to? A good deal of the time, I'd say it's his mother, his only parent, and it's about having to leave her when he was still a boy so he could learn to be self-reliant. However warmly he may have felt toward his wife when he was at home, he was too much a habitué of the road to be feeling profound separation from her when he sings with such longing, “Now if I call her on the telephone / And tell her that I'm all alone…,” on “Hallelujah I Love Her So.”

I talked to David Ritz back in 1983, and Ritz did grumble about Ray Charles: “He's an interesting American businessman. His entire life is music, touring, and pussy. That's it. He's only written five or six tunes— once he made a lot of money he let other people write for him. He should deal more autobiographically with his art.” But that was back then, when the man was coasting. When he was cooking, he could turn anything— “My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean,” even—into a personal grievance, over primal love lost, sunshine taken away. He recorded lots of songs about light, vision, and tears: “I Can See Clearly Now,” “Don't Let the Sun Catch You Cryin’,” “I'll Be Seeing You,” “Drown in My Own Tears,” “Ma,

She's Making Eyes at Me,” “By the Light of the Silvery Moon,” “Show Me the Sunshine.” Just a few of them. He didn't sing
“Hear
the gal with the red dress on.” On his rendering of “Till There “Was You,” Ritz says in his notes to
Brother Ray,
“If you listen closely you'll hear him cry.” That's a song with lines like “There were birds in the sky / But I never saw them winging….”

Don't want to explain a man by his songs, of course, nor the songs by the man. Here's one he sings with great conviction: “You Don't Know Me.” When I tried to sound him out about the kind of work he was doing in 1983, he said, “I ain't never been so sure of what I was doing. But I've always been one of those people had the balls or, what they call it in sports, confidence. My mother's training. I've been out here performing thirty-eight years. If I'm going to die, I'll kill myself. You've got some people want to tell you what to do, who are accountants, lawyers, who can't tap their feet to hardly anything—I hope you don't make that sound nasty.”

I was pretty sure I wasn't going to be able to make it sound like much of anything. I asked him how he felt when Elvis came along.

“I think in all fairness about that,” he said, “at the time, families were not about to let their young girls go out and swoon over a black guy. And Elvis the cat that came along at the time. Doing everything that black people had been doing
all
the time. Get out on stage and wiggle his behind, the white version. You had a lot of white artists doing clean-up versions. Like …who was it? He covered a lot of Little Richard—it was like food with no seasoning in it. Can't think of his name. Had a daughter who sang, too.”

I didn't know who he was trying to think of. He got a faraway look on his face, as I tried to press him on why he carried seventeen musicians around with him, when his earlier work with a small combo had been so fine. “When you got a big plate, you can put as much as you want on it. If you want just a little bit to eat, just put a little bit on, but if you want a lot, you can have that, too.” He said a number of things that he'd said in interviews before. When I asked him why he thought he hadn't self-destructed like so many great American musicians, he said, “I have never let
anything, anything
—I have never let
nothing
come between me and my music. I have never been so out of it that I couldn't get up on stage and sing ‘I Can't Stop Loving You.’ And the fact I'm blind, that's bad enough—I better keep my
senses
about me.”

Meanwhile, I could tell he was doggedly trying to remember something. The name of that other white guy besides Elvis.

“The key to survival is know what you're doing. People may not like it, but some people don't like sex, far as that goes. “When it's time to start singing, you just—
Pat Boone!”

Nearly the whole time of my only conversation with Ray Charles, he had been trying to think of Pat Boone. I didn't much want to share that with the world.

But, hey. Tell the truth, I sort of liked “Love Letters in the Sand” back when that came out—which was before “What I Say.” I met Pat Boone once, a nice fella. We were in a green room, waiting to go on TV. Pat's topic was how Christians could have better sex and feel good about it. Pat Boone is part of America.

If it hadn't been for Ray Charles, though, there wouldn't have been any America. According to Flip Wilson on one of his comedy albums, this is what happened when Christopher Columbus asked Queen Isabella to finance his voyage:

“Chris say, ‘If I don't discover America there's not going to be a Benjamin Franklin or a Star Spangled Banner or land of the free and home of the brave—and no Ray Charles!’

“When the queen heard no Ray Charles she panicked. Queen say, ‘Ray Charles? You gon’ fin’ Ray Charles?’ Queen running through the halls saying, ‘Chris gon’ find Ray Charles!’ ”

I
n Brother Dave Gardner's version of Scripture, Goliath tells Little Davy he will come down on him so hard his head will “hum like a ten-penny finishing nail hit with a greasy ballpeen hammer.” That is how my head is humming, dear hearts (Brother Dave said “dear hearts” a lot), as I try to figure out what to say about the late—and all-time one and only—peckerwood hipster comedian.

Check the “Customer Reviews” of
The Very Best of Brother Dave Gardner
CD on Amazon.com. “A music fan” from New Orleans says: