“There’s no beating”: Glenn Frey discusses the only singer nobody can compete with
Anyone even attempting to sing along to an Eagles song needs to come correct. Although their music has been known as the soundtrack to people’s lives and can lighten up any poolside party, getting all of those harmonies to overlap perfectly on top of each other is practically an impossible task. While Glenn Frey was the glue that held the band together in many respects, he knew that they were no match for what some of the pre-rock and roll stars could do.
Granted, the whole point behind rock and roll was to get away from the standard singers of the world. There was an excitement that came with listening to Little Richard, and once someone got to listen to something like ‘Tutti Frutti’, there was no reason to think that Tony Bennett or Bing Crosby was going to provide the same kind of results whenever they sang one of their songs.
That’s because a lot of the greatest rock and roll artists in the world came from blues first. As much as people like music that relies on everyone singing the exact right notes, not everything about the blues revolves around being in tune all the time. It was about the energy that came across as you were singing, and that’s why, despite not having the best technical voice, Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters have gone down in legend as some of the finest musicians of their time.
Then again, sometimes God smiles upon the Earth and gives us the perfect package in one person. The Beatles are definitely in that club, and Stevie Wonder might be the purest example of someone who used every part of man’s capability of making music, but before any of them, Ray Charles was taking the crux of blues and R&B and helping create soul by reaching across the aisle.
“There’s no beating Ray.”
glenn frey
At the time, there was no one in Charles’s lane trying to make country songs or sing the standards of the day. However, whereas someone like Nat King Cole could deliver tunes perfectly, Charles had the voice of someone who seemed lived-in, as if he had known all of the lessons of his songs firsthand before a word even came out of his mouth.
Although Frey did have those slice-of-lice songs in his catalogue, he knew there was no point in trying to match what Charles did when he covered the tune ‘Worried Mind’, saying, “This is probably one of the only Ray Charles songs I would ever attempt to sing myself. There’s no beating Ray. It was on a country album that he did, and I always loved it. I thought, it’d be nice on an album full of very sophisticated chord changes to do something a little simpler.”
And while Frey’s version doesn’t hold a candle to what Charles was like at his best, there is something to be said about the way he interprets the tune. Eagles were no strangers to the occasional heartache song, and hearing Frey interpret the tune is like watching him read from a sacred text, making sure that he gets every word right so he doesn’t do a disservice to what Charles originally made.
But breaking down Charles’s tune might be the one occasion where every musician knows they’re going to be performing for second place. No matter how many times they try to put some soul in their voice or how much Jamie Foxx has channelled his spirit into his own impressions of him, Charles’s voice is something that was in his bones before it even came out of his mouth.
