The Gospel According to Ray Charles

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

Ray Charles, unlike most heroin addicts, most keenly experienced the fear of death and the hand of God not during a drug overdose but during a sexual escapade. He was in flagrante with a woman who had neglected to inform him that her husband was “crazy jealous and carries a razor,” according to his biographer, David Ritz. All of a sudden, they heard said husband opening the door, so she hid Ray’s “naked ass” in the closet. He then starts to do something he almost never did: pray.


“I’m shivering. If I cough, I’m dead. But God delivers me. The man splits. I’m saved. Now am I supposed to believe that the good Lord spared me so I could have me some hit records, make me some money and get me some more [women]?” he asked Mr. Ritz. “Well, that don’t make sense, because God sure didn’t save Sam Cooke. Sam was [with] the wrong girl in the wrong place at the wrong time, and he got shot dead. Why Sam and not me? Church folks said ’cause Sam traded in gospel for the devil’s music. Well, I did the same. No, man, you got to believe that God works in mysterious ways. I’ve been blessed.”


Why did God spare Ray Charles, delivering him not just from that unfortunate closet but from the poverty and bigotry of the Deep South? Why did God help Ray Charles to overcome his blindness, to become a remarkable pianist and singer, and one of the most popular entertainers of all time? Why did he spare Ray his wrath, even when he committed what many considered a sacrilegious act by merging gospel music with R&B? Did he have a greater plan for Ray Charles? Those questions – believe it or not – are taken up in “Ray,” the outstanding new film directed by Taylor Hackford.


A movie about a blind man, “Ray” gets its visual details amazingly right, starting with leading man Jamie Foxx. Even having grown up with Ray Charles’s voice, seen him in concert and dozens of videos, and heard him speak in interviews, I quickly forgot that Jamie Foxx wasn’t really Ray Charles. He embodies every one of Charles’s distinct qualities: the voice that varies between falsetto and baritone, the lopsided walk, the facial grimaces of someone for whom the idea of being seen is an abstract concept.


The other details are right, too, from record labels to musical instruments; when it’s supposed to be 1956, there is a poster on a distant wall for the Broadway Revue “New Faces of 1956” – not 1952 or 1962. Mr. Foxx does an admirable job of lip-syncing and finger syncing (which is harder) to Charles’s classic recordings and, in several cases, tracks that the 70-something Ray recorded expressly for the film. One of these is a wonderful new treatment of “You Don’t Know Me” with just piano.


I had feared that “Ray” would whitewash Charles’s character, as movie biopics tend to do. But James L. White’s screenplay shows Charles’s many tragic character flaws in a sympathetic light. Charles had a terrible way of using everybody and everything around him, from musicians to producers to drugs to women. Benny Goodman had a reputation for being cheap, but he was the soul of generosity compared to Charles, who once left a sick sideman stranded in Japan and fired a disgruntled musician on stage.


Charles brought womanizing to a high art, and made even the Rat Pack look like choirboys. In the film, within a heartbeat of getting married, Charles is shown hiring singer Maryann Fisher (Aunjunue Ellis) for his band and launching an affair with her, then moving on to Margie Hendrix (Regina King) from his backup group, the Raelettes. When Margie tells Ray she’s going to have a baby, his first impulse, after telling her to abort it, is to channel her anger into his song “Hit the Road Jack.” When Margie realizes Ray’s not going to leave his wife (he never said he would, and he does support all his children, whoever the mother), she calls him a “cold-ass bastard.”


Likewise, Charles doesn’t flinch when he dumps his road manager and best friend of the early years, Jeff Brown, for a considerably more conniving manager, the smooth-talking former DJ Joe Adams (namesake of Billy Strayhorn’s “Smada.”) As documented by Michael Lydon’s fine biography, “Ray Charles: Man and Music” and by every one I ever spoke with who knows Adams, Charles had found someone who could be an even colder-assed bastard on his behalf. They do show Charles breaking down and crying, at least, when Margie dies of an overdose.


Now, that event actually happened a decade after its placement in the script. There are also other minor tamperings: Ray and his half-brother George, were, as is suggested, abandoned by their father as babies, but no mention is made of Mary Ann – George’s mother – who did almost as much to help raise him as his own mother, Retha.


The picture suggests that Charles finally kicked his drug habit to prevent his wife Della from leaving; in reality, he knew it was time to quit because it was the only way to avoid a prison sentence. The movie also doesn’t tell us that Della divorced him just the same (in 1976) and that even though he quit heroin, he continued to use copious amounts of pot and drink lots of gin, which he combined in potent mixture with coffee that he sipped all day long (no wonder Starbucks has sold equally copious quantities of his final album, “Genius Loves Company”).


Still, the most noteworthy dramatic opportunity the filmmakers missed was to show the 15-year-old Ray Robinson at the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind, when he was told of his mother Retha’s death. As it happened, had Ray Charles not gone blind as a child, he probably wouldn’t have had the opportunity to receive the education the state of Florida gave him. He wouldn’t have gained formal knowledge of musical technique, nor had his musical breakthroughs or popular success. Ray was right: God works in mysterious ways.


Why To See It


Taylor Hackford was the right man to direct a Ray Charles biopic, and Jamie Foxx the perfect man to play him. No wonder they both had Ray’s blessing.


Mr. Hackford is best known for “An Officer and a Gentleman,” but he also is responsible for a string of intelligent films about early rock and pop music, including “The Idolmaker,” “La Bamba,” and “Chuck Berry: Hail Rock and Roll.” Mr. Foxx makes any other actor playing a famous entertainer seem like a joke, from Larry Parks’s Al Jolson to every faux-Frank Sinatra in the movies.


The intention of any biographical narrative is to mine as much drama as possible from the subject’s real life. “Ray” does so with as little alteration or false drama as possible. His early childhood in North Florida is shown as a series of flashbacks. He watches helplessly as his younger brother drowns in a washtub, then – as if he had already seen more than a 5-year-old should ever have to – loses his eyesight from congenital juvenile glaucoma.


From these facts, Mr. Hackford and Mr. White create an ingenious psychodrama – which, to oversimplify, implies Charles took to drugs to escape from the guilt of not being able to help his drowning brother. The picture ends when he finally kicks the habit, after his inglorious bust in Boston, in which customs officials charged him with transporting drugs across international boundaries. The scene, in which Retha and George come back to him and forgive him, is supremely touching.


The New York Sun

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