Ray Charles really had no time for Elvis Presley: “It wasn’t that good”
The entire development of rock and roll wouldn’t look nearly the same without Ray Charles.
Even though he has gone down in history as one of the greatest singers of his time, a lot of his credentials as one of the inventors of R&B and soul music go hand in hand with what he heard out of rock and roll. He had a healthy respect for all forms of music, but he did feel like some of the biggest stars in the world didn’t really need to be talked up in the same way that everyone else was back in the day.
Because when Charles was making his first records, there was no such thing as rock and roll. There were the bluesy bands that had bit more aggression behind what they were doing, but it wasn’t out of the question for Charles to try his hand at genres that were the farthest thing from rock and roll, whether that was working on some of the greatest American standards on his albums or finding time to pull a drastic left turn like when he started working on country music in the early 1960s.
Music was like the blood in his veins a lot of the time, and when rock and roll first began to take over the world, Charles seemed to fit right in. ‘What’d I Say’ was a fantastic song, no matter what genre of music you liked, and when you listen to the way that the rhythm of that song and ‘Hit the Road Jack’ was constructed, you could tell that people like Ringo Starr were definitely paying attention when they were cutting their teeth.
But no rock and roll history would have been complete without Elvis Presley. ‘The King of Rock and Roll’ was the gold standard for a teen heartthrob, and there were more than a few girls who were rendered utterly delirious the first time he shook his hips onstage. The whole thing was controversial if you were watching him on television, but Charles wasn’t the kind who had to see someone live to believe it.
His greatest tunes relied on the feeling that he got from the music, and as far as he could tell, Presley wasn’t doing anything that made him worthy of being called one of the giants of rock and roll, saying, “It wasn’t that good to care about … I got in trouble because one guy asked me this question, and I said, ‘The King of what?’. He got mad at me. I don’t think of Elvis like that because I know too many artists that are far greater than Elvis.”
And from a raw musical standpoint, Charles isn’t that far off, either. It’s one thing to bring showmanship into the equation, but what Presley was doing from a musical perspective wasn’t exactly groundbreaking. If anything, a lot of what he was doing involved him taking the basis of what people like Little Richard and Big Mama Thornton were doing and just repurposing it for a whole different audience.
Presley didn’t mean any harm by doing it, but that was beside the point. He just loved the idea of making the kind of music that lit a fire in him, as everyone else had done, but since he was slowly turning himself into a star, it began to look like he was co-opting this genre of music and selling white America a version of that music that watered down a lot of what made it great in the first place.
That must have stung people like Charles, but he was never one to let those superstars get to him all that much. He was more than willing to let his music do the talking for him whenever he made one of his records, and even if Presley raked in the big bucks every time he performed, it was hard for Charles to complain when he could play his music for a living and find that magical moment onstage.
