1962 Ray Charles: I Can't Stop Loving You

In 1962, Ray Charles released his 'Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music' album. Prior to this, Charles' chosen medium was purely blues/r&b based and a black soul artist crossing over into the world of country music was a provocative act that raised eyebrows. The title of that album is self explanatory; an overwhelmingly white concern, country evolved out of indigenous Appalachian/hillbilly balladry and followed a completely different trajectory to blues and soul to appeal to a niche audience. But rather than don a Stetson and break out the steel guitars, Ray's approach was not to jump both feet into the deep end of the genre but to force it to meet him halfway and on his own musical terms.

For starters, Charles' arrangement applies the brakes to slow down the tune until it's double the length of Don Gibson's original, stressing in music the grinding misery of the lyrics' self inflicted hurt. And he sounds like he's hurting - Gibson sounded relaxed about his life choice but Charles' take is of a man determined to love no other than the one who no longer cares ("So I'll just live my life in dreams of yesterday") but who understands that these blinkers ensure he won't be allowed to see happiness anywhere else for the remainder of his life. Ray was only 32 on this recording yet his throaty croak couldn't sound more aged and hardened if it were coming from one of the mouths carved on Mount Rushmore.

A pitiful stance maybe, but there's dignity here too and it's telling that Charles never actually sings the song's title. Instead, it's handled by a whine of a backing group who in a sense present the outward facing plea for sympathy to the 'you' being addressed while Ray's own vocal plays out as a soliloquy of personal acceptance that does not court sympathy from anybody. And it's this backing vocal that anchors the song in the country genre, providing a mix and match fusion of styles that create a single lake for the two separate genre rivers to empty into in the same way Run DMC and Aerosmith would splice metal and rap on 'Walk This Way' in 1986 to open up a whole new audience for both genres. It's a point of comparison certainly, but one that maybe sells Ray Charles short.

In Peter Guralnick's biography of Sam Cooke 'Dream Boogie', there's a photograph of Sam and a young Aretha Franklin taken outside The Lorraine Motel, Memphis in 1961 shortly after they'd refused to perform to a segregated audience (or as one contemporary headline put it "Singers Say No To Jim Crow Seats"). Whenever I look at it, I'm always conscious that I'm not simply seeing a photograph of two major soul stars but history being made. Cooke and Franklin's defiance marked another breaking down of racial and cultural divisions through simply not accepting them, a stance that made the path to equality of rights between the races that much clearer.

Similarly, whenever I hear Ray Charles' 'I Can't Stop Loving You', I don't just hear a great version of a great song, I also hear the sound of walls collapsing, divisions pushed over by an alchemic mix of musical styles that once stood as separate as oil and water. But not overbearingly so - it's to Ray's genius that the sound of falling brickwork doesn't drown out the song beneath but rumbles away in the background, to be attuned by those on the right wavelength. Music as a engine for social change - you can't ask much more from a number one single than that.