Word: vocalizings
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...Morris band provided a couple of entertaining exceptions: "The Applejack" had the saxes booming out thunderous elephant farts, and "Anytime, Anyplace, Anywhere" featured a piercing vocal by Little Laurie Tate that suggested Butterfly McQueen attempting a soul tune while having her hand hammered. But the Atlantic oeuvre was more notable for good intentions than radical R&B, let alone crossover pop-rock...
...Records contract for $2,500. Ray brought with him a pioneering blend of gospel melodies, R&B raunch, a suavely swingin? piano groove ? la Nat Cole and the imposing sound of a big band behind him (though typically he worked with only six sidemen). Oh, and an epochal vocal style that would make him the dominant and longest-lived soul singer of the century. Was Charles, as one of his own albums proclaimed, a "genius"? Eh, who?s to say. But at Atlantic he was the genie let out of their R&B bottle. The cork got lost...
...Henry Pleasants, in his ear-opening book "The Great American Popular Singers" (a 1974 work that deserves to be back in print), gets to the heart of Charles? vocal achievement: "Sinatra, and Bing Crosby before him, had been a master of words. Ray Charles is a master of sounds. His records disclose an extraordinary assortment of slurs, glides, turns, shrieks, wails, breaks, shouts, screams and hollers, all wonderfully controlled, disciplined by inspired musicianship, and harnessed to ingenious subtleties of harmony, dynamics and rhythm... It is either the singing of a man whose vocabulary is inadequate to express what...
...After four verses of 12-bar blues, the song rollicks into some of Charles? swingin? lounge piano, then returns to the vocal, in a squealing release -"Say, have you heard, baby/ Ray Charles is in town/ Let?s mess around till the midnight hour/ See what he?s puttin? down" -that prefigures no fewer than three Atlantic songs: Charles? own "Let the Good Times Roll" and "Mess Around" and Wilson Pickett?s "In the Midnight Hour." The song ends with generic barks ("Come on! Come on, child!") that are pretty much grunts with consonants. A listener needs no English...
...electric piano that sounded like a guitar with a mitten muffling the strings. It was blues, all right, but (like so much other Atlantic music of the period) with a Latin accent, thanks to great cymbal, conga and stick work by Milt Turner. It featured his urgent vocal, but not until almost 50 seconds into the song. And where was Fathead?s mandatory solo? Withheld; he played the final choruses, behind the Raelets, on part ". The complex simplicity of the number made it seem both roughhouse and pristine...