Ray Charles sings in the shower. Seriously, not from sheer exuberance, but in order to study his voice. "People make a lot of jokes about it," he says, "but the shower — if it's an average-size shower where the sound can bounce around those tile walls — is one of the best places to practice your singing. The sound is coming right back at you, and if you should get out of tune, you can hear it right away.
"Your voice actually depends on how you're feeling, how much sleep you've had and so on, and when I get out onstage I need to know what I can make my voice do under the worst conditions. So I just keep constantly fooling with my voice. It's like it's a house I'm keeping up. You know, you don't just build a house and do nothing else to it. You're always washing the windows, painting, adding a room. Because anything that you don't use, I think I heard somebody say, you lose."
Having capped this brief lecture on craft with a folksy but undeniably apt homily, Charles pauses for effect, smiling to himself. He is sitting at a dinner table in the celebrity suite of a Cleveland hotel. It is cold and rainy outside, but the room has no windows and is stiflingly hot. Ray, wearing an orange bathrobe that just about reaches his knees (he has, of course, just been in the shower), is methodically smoking a pack of Kools.
Getting to him hasn't been easy. He passed through New York to do Saturday Night Live but he wasn't giving interviews, and one had to be content with watching him carry off the show with the same incisive timing he brings to his music. Saturday Night regular John Belushi was impressed. "We gave Ray his material," Belushi related, "all the lines in all these skits, late Thursday afternoon. The next day at rehearsal he knew them all." As Belushi was talking, Charles swept past with an aide on each arm. As it turned out, he was on his way to Cleveland.
Ray Charles is impressive. He almost single-handedly created soul music by fusing the intensity, inflection and structures of gospel music, the subject matter of blues and the punching horn riffs of southwestern jazz. He composed and performed some of the most influential and lasting records of the rock 'n' roll era, from "I Got a Woman" to "What'd I Say." With two enormously popular crossover albums he made it acceptable for black people to sing country & western music, in the process doing almost as much to break down racial barriers as did the civil-rights movement. He is the greatest pop singer of his generation and probably the only singer of any generation who could get away with doing outrageous gospel, blues and jazz versions of "America the Beautiful" and making it almost as beautiful as America itself.
James Brown called himself Soul Brother Number One, but from the mid-Fifties through the mid-Sixties, at least, Soul Brother Number One was Ray Charles. There were Ray Charles jokes and Ray Charles imitators by the hundreds, and countless comedians wore dark glasses and greeted audiences by giving empty space a bear hug the way Charles did. Then, like many performers who reach a certain plateau in American show business, he seemed to become less visible. With the advent of English rock, some of it patterned on (and, in Joe Cocker's case, blatantly imitative of) Ray Charles' innovations, Charles began having fewer hits. But his drawing power was not overly affected.
For the past fifteen years, Charles has been working about nine months a year, taking his time off during the post-Christmas slump when pocket-books tend to be a little empty. The places he has been playing often are shrines to the great American middle of the road — suburban theaters, resort hotels, supper clubs — although he gets his share of concert-hall work.
What he has not had during these past fifteen years are hit records, and in part this seems to have been due to his desire to run his own ship. After his ABC stint, he launched his own label — first called Tangerine and later hopefully renamed Crossover — using independent distributors. He made fine albums and singles, and some of them sold well, but few media people received review copies, and they tended to wonder "what ever happened to" Ray Charles. Since he didn't play in rock theaters or star in lavish television specials or give frequent interviews to magazines and newspapers, he seemed invisible.
But right now, Ray Charles is highly visible. In addition to Saturday Night Live, he has also made recent appearances on the Barry Manilow special, a salute-to-the-Beatles special and Home Box Office's cable TV series, Standing Room Only. He has returned to Atlantic, the company that made him a star before ABC made his name a household word, and his new album, True to Life, is his best in years. It is selling, and critics are writing flattering reviews. People who are too young to remember how "suggestive" records like "What'd I Say" sounded when they came along, too young even to remember the definitive "Georgia on My Mind," are discovering Ray Charles.