something else all of his own

Apparently this was bound to be a Ray Charles day. Walked out the door, spun the dial on the pod, and found The Genius beckoning. By the time I discovered myself at the T some of Ray's early tunes - "Kissa My Baby," "Don't You Know," and his first hit for the Atlantic label "It Should Have Been Me" - had managed to make the dark sky day a little brighter. And then I let Blues and Chaos, the fairly new compilation of Robert Palmer's writing (the music critic and clarinetist, not that other Robert Palmer), fall open to any page it wanted to. The music gods turned the page to his liner notes for Ray Charles: The Birth of Soul. Ahmet Ertegun, co-founder and chairman of Atlantic Records, had this to say to Palmer about his working relationship with Charles:

Ray was never just another artist to us, he was always somebody very important. At first, we didn't know how to bring out of him what we knew was there and we rteally didn't hit our stride until we let him do what he wanted to do. In the first two sessions, we were trying to guide him into what was our formula, the Atlantic formula for making R&B hits. It took us a little it of time to understand that he had something else all of his own. When we heard him on the road, we realized we had a genius of sorts, an artist who had a lot more to offer than just writing a song and singing it. He had a whole conception of what his band should sound like, of what the track should sound like, and of what he should sound like.

Ray Charles - It Should Have Been Me [buy]