This is white people’s blues. Our understanding is that every single country artist has been visited by the same world of hurt. Their truck simply will not start, and it is not at all certain their dog is going to survive either, and their Woman has done left them. As a result of these horrible, hideous, unforeseeable circumstances that fate has dealt them, they gots to go to the honky-tonk all night long. No golden ray of sunshine beams down upon this world. Theirs is an unceasing veil of tears. Jolly for us their own respite is to give voice to their troubles in song.
Music is about the only thing left that people don’t fight over.
—Ray Charles
It isn’t enough that Ray Charles was born to abject poverty, lost his sight as a boy, lost his brother to drowning, and lost his mother when he was just fifteen. A horrific childhood, but he survived it with music. A prodigy who became mentored by a teenage Quincy Jones, Charles was hailed as a musical genius by thirty. He basically invented soul music but also became wildly influential in jazz, blues, R&B, rock, and gospel. He sold a jillion records and won awards in every decade, but he also had twelve children with nine different Women, got busted for heroin, and struggled with the drug for years. Most awesomely, the state of Georgia made a version of his “Georgia on My Mind” the official state song. But that just gets us to this story’s opening, as on top of all that, he reinvented country music and made it popular again in the early ’60s by making the swinging and heartfelt Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music. A black man reinvigorated country music. By the way, he followed it up with Part Two a little later. He had the people at his label send him hundreds of country songs so he wouldn’t pick only ones he was familiar with. He listened to hours of music and then settled on these tracks. His soulful rendition of Don Gibson’s “I Can’t Stop Lovin’ You” made country music a factor again. He wails it like gospel blues with lush strings, lavish background vocals, and then invites them to “sing the song, children.” Willie Nelson said this album did more for country music than any one album has ever done. He took white people music and made it everybody people music. This is before blacks and whites could eat at the same restaurant together in many places in the USA. It is a statement, his homage to the South he grew up in, and a declaration that no song escapes his magnificent rendering. Ray Charles took Hank Williams and put a big band on it. A true giant making a giant record. Get it and open a beer. Have a handkerchief ready for the tears of joy. Then go out and obtain Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music 2.
I love songs about horses, railroads, land, Judgment Day, family, hard times, whiskey, courtship, marriage, adultery, separation, murder, war, prison, rambling, damnation, home, salvation, death, pride, humor, piety, rebellion, patriotism, larceny, determination, tragedy, rowdiness, heartbreak and love. And Mother. And God.
—Johnny Cash
He wore black because other singers wore rhinestones. He took massive drugs and fought with record executives. He looked like hell from too much speed and smokes. He was trying to clean up. He had a novel idea. He had played prisons all through his career—why not make a live record in one? Bob Johnston at Columbia Records made the call. Folsom Prison answered first. Johnny Cash had a huge hit early in his career with “Folsom Prison Blues” that has the immortal line of darkness and despair that any gangster poet would be proud to have written: “I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die/When I hear that whistle blowin’, I hang my head and cry.” The date was set and two shows planned. He brought his not-yet-wife and partner, June, and the whole Johnny Cash stage show, including rockabilly luminaries Carl Perkins and his brother Luther Perkins. June tamed the cons and read a poem. Think about making a record in a prison in the ’60s. People made live recordings at concert halls and nightclubs for nice people or at least unincarcerated people. Johnny Cash is a key voice for the underclass in American music. Murder and mayhem on the mainstream radio. The real world exposed in a train track shuffle. Guys take coke and shoot their girlfriends, men watch their own gallows being built, and then he sings a comedy song about a dog he hates, “Dirty Old Egg-Suckin’ Dog.” You hear cons being hailed on the PA system. He coughs, he clears his throat, he whoops and shouts off-key. The band finishes songs at various times. The crowd of prisoners is ecstatic—someone cares enough to come and sing about them. In an astounding moment, he sings “Greystone Chapel,” a song by Glen Sherley, a lifetime criminal and one of the cons in the audience. He did not know that Cash had been given the song by the prison chaplain and had learned it the night before. In a tragic postscript, Sherley was helped by Cash and let out of prison and joined the band, but was too damaged to play well with others. The stint with Cash was short; he ended up taking his own life years later. This album is a thrilling document of an outrageous gig.