MY BONNIE
RAY CHARLES
Written by: (Traditional)
Recorded by: Ray Charles (1958)
THE 1950S AND EARLY 1960s saw
numerous attempts to make new
up-tempo hits out of standards or
traditional songs. Little Richard turned the 1926
ballad ‘Baby Face’ into a rasping rocker; Conway
Twitty had a hit with his rockabilly adaptation
of ‘Danny Boy’ (re-titled and re-recorded as
‘Rosaleena’ for the UK market to avoid copyright
problems); Freddie Cannon turned the languid
1920s Southern paean ‘Way Down Yonder In
New Orleans’ into a raucous rock number; and
Bobby Darin made a yeah-yeah pop song out of
Bing Crosby’s 1938 hit ‘You Must Have Been A
Beautiful Baby’. Yet none of these revamps seems
quite as unlikely as The Father of Soul Ray Charles
deciding to record a laid-back jazzy version of
the venerable Scottish folk song ‘My Bonnie Lies
Over The Ocean’ in 1958. He did and the result
was unexpectedly classy, coming as it did towards
the end of Charles’ legendary R&B output for
Atlantic Records. Quite why he chose a song
always vaguely assumed to be about the elusive
Bonnie Prince Charlie (an 18th-century claimant
to the thrones of England, Ireland and Scotland)
is hard to fathom, but it somehow established the
song as fair game to update. In 1960 Duane Eddy
released an up-tempo instrumental version of the
same song redubbed ‘Bonnie Came Back’ and it
seems likely that both versions were in everyone’s
mind when Polydor label manager Bert Kæmpfert
asked Lennon, McCartney and Harrison to back
English performer Tony Sheridan on a recording
session in Hamburg in June, 1961, during their
second, three-month, season in the German
seaport. They did so and a further influence on
the record may have been that Conway Twitty
revamp of ‘Danny Boy’ which also begins at a
slow ballad pace then suddenly lurches off into
a brisk rockabilly beat. ‘My Bonnie’ was released
images Ray Charles was also an impressive alto sax player
although he rarely played the instrument on record.
as a Polydor single featuring ‘Tony Sheridan and
The Beat Brothers’ and was a hit in Germany but
not in the UK. ‘The Beat Brothers’ was a catch-all
name for a shifting ensemble that on this occasion
comprised Lennon, McCartney and Harrison plus
Stuart Sutcliffe and Pete Best (Ringo Starr would
become a Beat Brother in 1962). Subsequently
The Beatles often included the song in their own
act. Folklore has it that it was a customer request
for a copy of ‘My Bonnie’ from Brian Epstein’s
Liverpool record shop that first alerted him to the
group’s popularity and led him to signing them.
images Ray Charles Robinson was a musical magpie
who loved to mix genres and alight upon
unlikely songs. Having virtually invented
soul music by fusing gospel with R&B, he
would later tackle country music with great
success.