Ray Charles

After renting the film of Ray (more on that tomorrow) it once again reminded me that I had no Ray Charles music in my collection. I set about correcting that by picking up a two-disc collection of his greatest hits, which I listened to twice over the weekend.

My record collection, much like the various suburbs I grew up in, is almost entirely white. Until a few years ago the only non-white artists in library were probably Stevie Wonder and Miles Davis. For the past few years I've been trying to expand my horizons, adding discs by John Coltrane, Billie Holliday, Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald. But in the area of R&B, I am sorely lacking.

Of course, Ray Charles defies categorization. He touched on R&B, country, gospel and rock and roll. I am probably most fond of the obvious hits--What'd I Say, Hit the Road, Jack and The Nighttime is the Right Time. But I found a few that I hadn't heard before, or at least didn't know were his. One Mint Julep is an instrumental that sounds like something Esquivel could have recorded for a sixties go-go movie. Lonely Street is a classic, poor pity me blues number. And I'm fascinated by At the Club, which is about a man hitting on a woman only to discover that she's a cop's girlfriend. It's a lot of fun to listen to.

I'll never forget when Ray Charles died. My friend Bob and I had just landed in L.A. for a vacation that he won in a contest. While we were waiting for our rental car the news of his passing was on the TV. Later, during a tour of Hollywood Boulevard, we saw the requisite flowers on his star on the Walk of Fame. He was surely one of the great recording artists of all time.