Ray Charles - What'd I Say
What Started In the Church Ended In the Bedroom
Call it magic if you want. I call it conjuring. Magic implies rabbits, hats, and sleight of hand. Magic calls up images of men in tuxedos performing a pledge, a turn, and a prestige (Thank you, Christopher Nolan). Ray Charles was a conjurer of the highest order. They say sorcery is malevolent magic. Ray’s music was anything but, so sorcerer doesn’t apply (Dungeons and Dragons fan, please fact-check me). Listen, man! Ray Charles, Brother Ray, the High Priest, the Genius of Soul, conjured What’d I Say out of thin air in December 1958 at a show in Brownsville, Pennsylvania about an hour south of Pittsburgh. He pulled it, fully formed, out of the air inside a club, and created one of the greatest songs in history in real time as if he were a conduit channeling faith and sex and love and God and rhythm and blues from up on high directly into our ears, from the pulpit to the bedroom in about five minutes. Thank whatever gods may be. Preach, Brother Ray, PREACH!
In an instant, the music called Soul comes into being. Hallelujah!
-Lenny Kaye
Make no mistake, the sexuality of it pissed a lot of people off. All those oooohhhs and ahhhhhs… man, lemme tell ya, those oooohhhs and ahhhhhs are exactly how we ALL got here. What’d I Say exists at the nexus of making love, fucking, and spirituality. From the heavens to the hips, that’s what What’d I Say is. If you can’t get hip to that, I certainly can’t help you. You probably have sex with your socks on.
I'm not one to interpret my own songs, but if you can't figure out 'What I Say', then something's wrong. Either that, or you're not accustomed to the sweet sounds of love.
-Ray Charles
The song was banned on both Black and White radio stations, albeit for different reasons. The blending of Gospel songs with R&B pissed off Black churchgoers. The sexuality pissed off White people, but given Ray’s skin tone I’m sure that wasn’t the only issue White audiences had. One critic noted it was really about “the dialogue between himself and his backing singers that started in church and ended up in the bedroom.” Brother Ray was just trying to expand the congregation’s membership. It was the summer of ‘59 before the single hit streets, and music (like the rest of the country) was segregated. That son of a bitch Jim Crow was still holding court in 1959. Other people were pissed that secular musicians were hijacking Gospel. What’s worse, record companies marketed it to White people. When Ray performed the song throughout the 1960s the crowds got so frenzied outside observers remarked how much Ray’s show looked like revival meetings. So much so that police often got involved because show organizers thought race riots were inevitable. I wasn’t there, so I can only rely on attributed quotes and peer-reviewed works. What I CAN testify to is that if I discovered years after that What’d I Say had been kept from me in secret for some fear of miscegenation, secularity, or sexuality I would have rioted. I WOULD HAVE RIOTED. How DARE someone keep this magnificent conjuring from me. Thankfully my father, like Tom Waits, also worships at the altar of Ray Charles.
I knelt at the altar of Ray Charles for years. I worked at a restaurant, and that's all there was on the jukebox. The Blues is like a planet. It's an enormous topic.
-Tom Waits
We all know the Saturday night sinner and the Sunday morning worshipper. What’d I Say is the great reconciliation. It’s a song that says “I can do both.”
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)- Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, 51
In my recollections of temple worship and church prayer, the feeling is identical. Granted, I don’t have a par-for-the-course mind, having been warped by cartoons and Jazz, PTSD and subversive literature, LSD and pre-marital sex. I’ve attended Pentecostal meetings, Baptist revivals, traditional Jewish temple, Catholic mass, Protestant mass, and a host of others. When one listens to the sounds made, not what words are uttered, but what sounds are made, in those houses of worship, one can only reasonably conclude that joy and ecstasy are deeply related - cousins, if not direct siblings. The call and response is right there, plainly evident. The difference may only be the inclusion of an electric Wurlitzer piano and a conjurer of the highest order. I have a jukebox of my own - a 1965 AMX juke - filled with my records and the song slips are in my handwriting. I have changed many of the records through the years I’ve owned her, but Ray Charles’ What’d I Say remains. How else would a reasonable person conclude liturgy?