That's All Right

He speaks and even seems to think with a stammer--but the halt is strangely touching. In song, his voice quavers and breaks, but then he catches it, and it rises to a shriek that ends on a cheerless blue note. He rocks in rhythm across the keyboard of his piano, but he seems not so much mannered as he is possessed. He is a blind Negro, haunted by narcotics; yet when he sings a song that makes him stammer, shriek and rock, Ray Charles is the best blues singer around.

The Message. At a couple of standing-room-only Carnegie Hall concerts last week, just before he pushed off for a month's tour of Europe, Charles put on a performance that seemed designed to describe the course of his career. He sang selections from his collection of popular country and western songs,* such as You Are My Sunshine and Born To Lose, and his band occasionally slipped into a ballroom blandness that was really a bow to Carnegie respectability. But when Charles took flight, he reached the limits of his unpolished art. There was a point when the words of his songs could no longer carry his message.

But however that message may be blurred, it is still bought so avidly that Charles is now a leading record-album seller and concert performer in jazz, blues and popular music; he is also the only Negro ever to make a big hit in country and western music. He draws on all the streams of American music, and last year his record sales came to $8,000,000.

Clear Melancholy. Ever since his good days began, with his first hit record (I Got a Woman) eight years ago, Charles has been steadily plagued by souvenirs from sadder times. He was born in Albany, Ga., blinded by illness at six, orphaned at 15, addicted to narcotics at 16. He went to school just long enough to learn Braille, at 17 struck out with a trio; soon he was in Seattle playing ersatz Nat King Cole, and he kept at it well into his 20s. Then, in a flash of insight, he decided to be himself. He began singing and playing his wailing mixture of rhythm and blues, jazz and shoutin' gospel music. "What they call 'soul music.' "

Bourgeois Negroes at first winced at Charles's almost burlesque use of Negro idiom: it seemed embarrassingly clear that no white man could ever sing the songs his way. Today, though Charles still sings the same "race music," there is no modern singer who has not learned something from him. His touches turn up in other singers' styles; his trademark phrases, such as "What'd I say" and "Don't you know now" and "That's all right," poke out from everybody's rhythm choruses like passwords to success. But the man himself remains apart. And in nearly everything he sings, clamped onto the end of a verse is the bent blue note that makes his melancholy clear.

Darker Fears. Always the spirit Charles evokes is melancholy, even among those who respectfully call him by his press-agent nickname--"The Genius." Those who brood over his willingness to sing valueless songs also see with horror in the bravura, spotlight style of his band a hint that he may yet turn out to be a grinning bandleader some day. But other, darker fears call up his past arrests on narcotics charges, his occasional lapses into moments of incoherence, the grotesque contortions that sometimes seize him. Behind his dark glasses, there looms a man in trouble with himself.

Charles lives in a world of sounds alone, and even his best songs do not completely tell what goes on there. Southern spiritualists have claimed to hear him speaking the "unknown tongue," and serious jazz critics go along with calling him "The Genius." But something else remains--the catch in the way he sings "That's all right"--and it suggests that something is wrong. How can it be all right, when it stirs the listener so sadly?

*Usually plaintive ballads, sung with hillbilly or cowboy guitar accompaniment.

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