The live concert that saw Ray Charles invent his greatest song on the spot
If you ever want to understand the true essence of live music and all its riches, it’s worth watching archival footage of a Ray Charles gig. Every note on the piano was played with unbridled joy, as he followed the lead of whatever melody he was playing.
Whether it was the tenderness of ‘Georgia On My Mind’ or the bouncing ‘Hit The Road Jack’, whenever Charles sat at the piano, emotion rained over the song with relative ease. He was an innate songwriter and a captivating performer, who is rightly named as the icon of so many musicians.
In fact, when Elton John sat opposite him on stage, he brought the great artist, one we would all consider an impervious icon, to his nervous knees. He said, “I was so nervous because I was playing with one of my idols, one of my all-time favourite people – artist, and he was very sweet to me.”
Charles deeply inspired that generation through which Elton emerged; his blues sensibilities bled through pretty much all the popular music of the time. In fact, The Doors unashamedly ripped the chord progression from his track ‘What’d I Say’ for their most famous hit ‘Break On Through To The Other Side’.
The band’s keyboardist, Ray Manzarek, brazenly said, “It’s Ray Charles, but I play ‘break on through to the other side’. We’d steal from anybody.” And who can blame them? It’s an iconic progression that, when played in the soft landscape of an electronic keyboard, has one foot in the bluesy past and another in the progressive future.
While The Doors may have been credited for that, it was Charles they had to thank, once again proving that the magic created at the tip of his fingers could be found in pretty much everything in the late 20th century.
But what’s more astonishing is that it wasn’t a chord progression that was painstakingly laboured over in the studio. No, Charles achieved greatness with a smile on his face and time to kill.
During a performance in Brownsville, Pennsylvania, in December 1958, Charles had rattled through most of his hits and found himself with plenty of time left on stage. In fact, he had a whole 12 minutes to fill, which might sound meagre, but in front of a live audience is an incredibly frightening prospect. So, being the great musician he was, he improvised and encouraged his band to follow on with him. What spontaneously followed was ‘What’d I Say’, one of his – and The Doors’ – greatest hits.
Charles said, “I had sung everything I could think of. So I said to the guys, ‘Look, I’m going to start this thing off, I don’t know where I’m going, so y’all just follow me.’ And I said to the girls, ‘Whatever I say, just repeat after me.'”
Naturally, the crowd that night was astonished at what they thought was an incredible unreleased song and reportedly stood at the foot of the stage, begging for the song’s title. Without giving them a concrete answer, Charles quickly headed to the studio, recorded it, and the rest was history.
