Tom Waits believes that Ray Charles is the only artist anyone needs: “It was just amazing”
The true brilliance of Tom Waits as an artist was never apparent to me until adulthood.
Unlike his canonical counterparts, his voice didn’t ring through my childhood subconscious, quietly forming my understanding of music. Instead, with each new chapter, he slowly rose through the cracks of passing time to become more and more important as a writer and soothsayer.
His gravelly voice felt like the perfect soundtrack for life lived in the shadows; as the painful nuances encapsulating growing up in the modern world start to unfold, Waits takes the stage as an obscure yet poignant narrator, almost like an intimate voice talking to you in the warm bustle of a late night bar. Despite whatever instrumental embellishment exists around him, his candid growl is always the most distinct part of any song.
His almost conversational performance style allowed him to exist somewhere between rock, R&B and soul, creating almost delicate and considered soundscapes for his poetry to exist in. And while doing so, he became an original and innovative artist in his own right, pulling upon the influence of each of those genres’ greats.
“I knelt at the altar of Ray Charles for years,” the songwriter once explained, “I worked at a restaurant, and that’s all there was on the jukebox, practically, that and some Patsy Cline”.
Cline’s storytelling impact can certainly be noted in Waits’ music, bridging country and pop through poetic lyricism, but the painstakingly raw depiction of human emotion is undoubtedly linked to the soulful brilliance of Ray Charles. He became the most common thread in the fabric of influence for Waits, first hypnotising him with his voice and then guiding him through his lyrics, because Charles’ storytelling and vocals combined were one of the most profound musical vehicles in history.
“I worked on Saturday nights, and I would take my break, and I’d sit by the jukebox, and I’d play my Ray Charles,” he said, before adding, “It was just amazing what he absorbed and that voice, for years it was just The Genius of Ray Charles”.
In fact, when asked about the genuine importance of Charles’ work in his own life and how future creatives should go about moulding their own influence, the songwriter simply said, “You don’t need anything else in your record collection if you have Ray”.
Of course, through the lens of Waits’ career, that’s a fair comment given just how much of a footprint Charles’ music has on his own. In fact, the latter’s iconic number ‘Georgia On My Mind’ is openly regarded as the ancestor to a song of his own, using its compositional style to help craft ‘Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis’.
But let’s get one thing clear, the very reason Waits is a treasured artist is for his ability to brazenly use his influences as a creative template, without sounding like nothing more than a carbon copy. Simply listen to the two aforementioned songs, and you’ll see how his hit is a doff of the cap, and nothing more. Because the key ingredient he picked up from Charles was performing as your most authentic self.
