Ray
Ray Charles's voice carries the story forward, while the score hums low on the side of memory and guilt, where that voice cannot reach.
At a glance 🔭💭
Some coordinates adapted from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) · Pleiades (CC BY 3.0)
The makers ⏳🌊
- ComposerCraig Armstrong
A Scottish composer who bridged the songs with orchestra and gospel voices, winning a Grammy for it.
- DirectorTaylor Hackford
He spent 15 years bringing this film to life and was also credited as a co-producer of the score album.
- ScreenplayJames L. White
He shaped the story with Hackford and wrote the screenplay.
- Lead roleJamie Foxx
Won the Academy Award for Best Actor for playing Ray Charles.
- Lead roleRegina King
Played Margie Hendricks, lead singer of the Raelettes.
- Lead roleKerry Washington
Played Della Bea, Ray's wife.
I. One man's voice, two strands of music
(Origins) Director Taylor Hackford spent many years trying to bring the life of Ray Charles to the screen. He had made "Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll," the concert documentary about Chuck Berry, and by his own account it took fifteen years to find the money. In the end Philip Anschutz's Bristol Bay Productions put up the entire $40 million budget. Ray Charles read the script in a Braille transcription. But he died in June 2004 without seeing the finished film, which opened four months later and was dedicated to him. (Two strands) The music of this film runs in two strands. One is Ray Charles's own recordings. Music supervisor Curt Sobel secured the original masters and placed them throughout the film. Jamie Foxx, once a classical piano scholarship student, sat at the keyboard himself, with no double, to play Ray. The other strand is the original score that fills the spaces between the songs. (The composer) The score went to Craig Armstrong, from Glasgow, Scotland. He studied at the Royal Academy of Music in London and worked with artists such as Massive Attack. In Baz Luhrmann's "Romeo + Juliet" and "Moulin Rouge!" he stitched together, with orchestral writing, the gaps between the existing songs that filled the screen. That experience seems to have weighed in Hackford's choice. In a film where the songs are the protagonists, the score does not step forward; it takes on the memories and wounds the songs cannot speak. (Lineage) Following a real musician's life while letting us hear the songs as they were links this film to "La Vie en Rose" and "Walk the Line," both covered in this series. "Walk the Line," released the following year, dealt with the Southern music of the same era. In "Dreamgirls," playing a record producer, Foxx returns once more to the heart of the Black music industry of this period.
II. Learning the world by ear
(Poverty) The film opens in the 1930s in Greenville, a rural town in northern Florida. His mother, Aretha, is raising two sons on her own. Young Ray first touches the keys at a battered piano in a neighborhood store, picking up by ear the boogie-woogie the owner plays. (The accident) One day his little brother, George, falls into a washtub. Ray freezes on the spot and cannot save him. Not long after, Ray begins to lose his sight, and by about the age of seven he is completely blind. The film binds these two events into a single wound that follows him all his life. (Hearing) The protagonist of this chapter is not music but sound. When her son falls inside the house, his mother does not lift him up but watches, holding her breath. Ray stops crying and listens. He picks out the sounds of the kitchen, the sounds outside the window, even the sound of a single cricket crawling across the floor. Here the film amplifies the small sounds around him so that the audience, too, hears as Ray does. It is a scene that shows how a musician who cannot see comes to know the world, and the ear he would carry all his life begins here. (Flashbacks) This childhood is not laid out all at once at the start of the film. Instead the film threads it into the adult Ray's present in short recollection scenes (flashbacks). Each time, the image of water returns and Armstrong's score seeps in. On screen is the warm Southern sunlight, yet the music stays low and dark. That mismatch tells us the memory has not yet healed.
A short cue for the moment he loses his brother, and for every time that moment returns in flashback. It runs barely more than a minute, yet the wound of the whole film is held in this sound.
- The solo gospel voice that lies beneath the score elsewhere like a consolation is used here as a tension close to a scream. The same voice is made to do a different job.
- Rather than revealing a melody, it uses long-held chords and low resonances to make time seem to stop. It is music that paints not the event but the frozen heart of a child.
- The color of this cue returns in every later flashback, serving as a marker that lets the audience recall that day from the image of water alone.
III. From imitation to a voice of his own
(Seattle) In the late 1940s, Ray takes a bus to Seattle, at the far end of the country. Playing in clubs and imitating the smooth styles of Nat King Cole and Charles Brown, he first learns the coldness of the music business among people who skim his pay. A scene in which he meets a still-teenage Quincy Jones also passes by here. (Atlantic) Atlantic Records in New York buys out his contract, and Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler welcome him. The scene in which a boogie-woogie tune Ertegun hums becomes "Mess Around" is staged as the moment Ray first finds a rhythm that fits his own hands. It is the passage where a man who borrowed other people's voices begins to sing in his own. (Gospel) The decisive step was mixing church music with secular music. Ray carries the melodies and cries of gospel, ingrained in him since childhood, into a love song and makes "I've Got a Woman." The film also shows the storm of accusations that he had dragged sacred music into worldly song. The film's reading is that the music later called soul was born of this collision. (Della) Around the same time Ray meets Della Bea, a gospel singer, and starts a family. The Della of the film is the one who remains a place to come home to, whatever Ray does out in the world. Armstrong gave this character a theme of her own. If Ray Charles's songs keep the time of the stage, this melody keeps the time of the home.
A song written by Atlantic's Ahmet Ertegun; in the film it accompanies the scene in which Ray takes up Ertegun's humming and finds his own rhythm.
- This is boogie-woogie piano, the left hand rolling the same figure over and over while the right hand frolics above it. The very style he learned at the store piano as a child comes back.
- Ertegun credited the song under the pen name Nugetre, his surname spelled backward. It is a glimpse of early Atlantic, when the label's own boss wrote the songs.
- Heard against the voice that earlier sang softly in the manner of Nat King Cole, it lets you hear Ray's first step away from imitation.
A song that turned gospel into a love song. It is the moment the film calls the birth of soul, and the point where condemnation pours in from the church.
- Its skeleton came from "It Must Be Jesus," a hymn by the gospel group the Southern Tones. The heart of the song's shock was keeping the ecstatic tone once aimed at God intact while changing only its object to a lover.
- Ray recorded the song in 1954 in the studio of a radio station in Atlanta. The following year it reached No. 1 on the R&B chart and became his first signature hit.
- Listen for the way the horns push the beat with short, clipped stabs while the voice above them shouts and stretches like a preacher. The singing style of the church has been carried over intact.
The melody given to Ray's wife, Della Bea. In a film filled with songs, it marks off the time of house and home.
- Beneath a warm solo piano the orchestra spreads faintly, like a wash. Romantic yet never swelling large, its restraint resembles the character herself.
- It serves as a leitmotif (a short melody that points to a particular character), returning when Della appears on screen or when Ray thinks of home. It reappears in altered shapes in cues such as "Ray and Della" and "Della Kisses Her Baby."
- Critics noted a faint trace of jazz's lilting rhythm (swing) in it. It sounds like a bridge between Ray's musical world and the world of his home.
IV. Heat on the stage, shadows behind it
(Improvisation) As the tours grow longer, Ray brings a female chorus, the Raelettes, onto the stage. One night, having run out of prepared songs with time still left in the show, he starts playing an electric piano riff (a short, repeated phrase) on the spot, draws in the chorus and the audience, and creates "What'd I Say." It is the origin story Ray Charles told many times in his lifetime, and the film puts it on stage just as he told it. (Margie) His relationship with Margie Hendricks, lead singer of the Raelettes, is drawn as if the rapport of trading songs on stage had spilled offstage. Margie, played by Regina King, has a rough, fiery voice and is nearly the only person in the film who meets Ray as an equal in music. (Shadows) By then Ray is already deep into heroin. The film does not hide it. The confidence at the piano and the collapse behind the dressing room alternate within one man. In these passages the score offers almost no melody. Only low-lying electronic tones and brief bass notes signal the unease. The more dazzling the songs, the heavier the silence behind them sounds. (The move) In 1959 Ray leaves Atlantic, the label that raised him, and signs with ABC-Paramount. Along with better terms, he wins the right to own the originals of his recordings (masters). The film frames this scene as a conflict between loyalty and self-interest. It does not lose sight of the fact that he was both a musician and a businessman who calculated his share precisely.
A song said to have been born as an improvisation in a hall where the songs had run out. It sits at the center of the stage scene in which the Raelettes and the audience trade sounds back and forth.
- The opening electric piano (Wurlitzer) riff drives the entire song. The sound of an electric keyboard, rare in R&B at the time, makes the song instantly recognizable.
- In the second half, the call and answer (call-and-response), with Ray shouting and the Raelettes shouting back, grows steadily hotter. It carries the exchanges of Black church worship onto the stage.
- The original recording was so long that it was split into Part 1 and Part 2 across the two sides of the single. It became Ray's first Top 10 pop hit, and it appears on the soundtrack as a live recording.
- The film also uses this scene as the stage on which Ray and Margie's relationship begins. Their trading voices foreshadow the relationship between the two.
V. Georgia, and rock bottom
(Longing) In 1960 Ray records “Georgia on My Mind,” a song Hoagy Carmichael had written thirty years earlier, setting it in a string arrangement, and for the first time he reaches number one on the pop chart. The film frames the song as his longing for the state where he was born. Passing through his voice, an old ballad by a white songwriter becomes an entirely different song. (Refusal) The following year, ahead of a concert in Augusta, Georgia, Ray learns that the audience is segregated by race and says he will not take the stage. In the film, the price is that he can never again perform in Georgia. What actually happened was somewhat different. (Collapse) It is around this time that “Hit the Road Jack” appears. The film stages Ray and Margie facing each other and trading the song back and forth as if it were their quarrel itself. From then on, his relationship with Margie tilts toward tragedy. Ray himself is arrested for drug possession at an airport in 1965 and is brought face to face with a decision he has long avoided. (Rehab) Choosing a rehabilitation facility over prison, he confronts, amid the agony of withdrawal, memories he has turned away from all his life. What happens there is not written here. But at this moment the score steps further forward than anywhere else in the film. Gospel voices and choir build slowly, and a hymnlike melody that had only flickered past in brief glimpses reveals itself for the first time. The dark sound that had trailed every childhood flashback takes on a different light here.
A song written by Percy Mayfield. In the film it becomes a scene in which Ray and Margie square off in song, hastening their breakup.
- Even in the original, it is built as a man and a woman trading lines as if in an argument. The dialogue between a woman driving him out and a man pleading with her is over in little more than two minutes.
- Four descending chords repeat endlessly in the same shape, and the progression sounds like a quarrel with no way out.
- The woman's voice on the record really did belong to Margie Hendricks. The film uses that fact to lay the song over the real conflict between the two characters.
- A number-one pop hit in 1961. The clash between the jaunty beat and the chill of the scene makes this the film's most bitter song sequence.
The melody first glimpsed briefly in “Redemption,” during the rehab scene, appears in its full form at the end of the album. It is the answer the score has held back throughout the film.
- The piano plays a plain, hymnlike melody while the strings enfold it from below. Critics singled it out as the most satisfying passage in the score.
- This melody is almost absent throughout the film and first appears at the moment of redemption. The very choice to hold it back rather than play it from the start, and only then bring it forth, is part of the story.
- The album also includes a version arranged for string quintet (Ray's Hymn Quintet). Heard in a smaller ensemble, the same melody's intimate, prayerlike character comes through even more clearly.
VI. The song that came back
(Homecoming) The film's final scene is Georgia in 1979. The land that once made him turn his back calls him home again, and “Georgia on My Mind” plays once more. The song that began as longing is now sung in a place of reconciliation. By using the same song twice, the film sums up twenty years of one man's life as the changing meaning of a single song. (Fact) The song was in fact designated Georgia's official state song (州歌) in 1979. Ray Charles sang it before the state legislature, and the film shows that day in dramatically condensed form. (Awards) The film received six Academy Award nominations and won Best Actor (Jamie Foxx) and Best Sound Mixing. The soundtrack album of original recordings climbed as high as number 9 on the Billboard 200. That album and Armstrong's score album each won a Grammy, and the score was also nominated for the BAFTA for film music. (Place) Looking back, Armstrong's score never once imitates Ray Charles. Nor does it warm up the song scenes in advance with blues piano or Raelettes-style backing vocals. It keeps to its own territory with only orchestra, choir and solo gospel voice, and thanks to that, Ray's voice remains the one and only voice in the film to the very end. Only when the end credits arrive does the music loosen up into a blend of gospel and rock, seeing the audience out of the theater.
A song the film uses twice. First it sounds as longing for home, and at the end as a song of reconciliation in the Georgia that called him back.
- Written by Hoagy Carmichael in 1930; on Ray's recording, strings and choir arranged by Ralph Burns surround his voice. An R&B singer dressed in an upscale pop arrangement was something new at the time.
- Ray doesn't sing the melody as written; he slows the beat and bends notes upward, singing as if speaking. That is why a thirty-year-old song became his own.
- The recording went to number one on the pop chart and won a Grammy. In 1979 it was designated Georgia's official state song.
- The soundtrack album includes the song twice. The studio version sits in the middle of the album and the live version at the very end, so the album, too, calls the film's two scenes to mind.
Lesser-known stories
(Augusta) The film depicts the 1961 refusal to play Augusta with street protests and a lifelong ban, but the record is somewhat different. Shortly after the film's release, the local newspaper “The Augusta Chronicle” rechecked the documents and testimony of the time. It found that Paine College students did not take to the streets; instead they conveyed their concerns to Ray by telegram through a representative. The ban headline shown in the film could not be found in the newspaper's archives either. What actually happened was that the concert promoter sued for breach of contract and Ray had to pay a fine. There was no official ban, but he kept his distance from that place at the height of the civil rights movement. It is a case of a dramatic myth spreading even further through a film. (Braille script) Ray Charles received the script transcribed into Braille, read it, and objected to several scenes: one that portrayed him as starting piano lessons reluctantly, and one that could be read as him urging heroin on Margie Hendricks. He meant to go see the finished film, but he died four months before its release. (Compressed time) The film makes it appear that Margie Hendricks died in the mid-1960s, but she actually died in 1973. It is an adaptation that sets Ray's rehab and her death close together to build dramatic momentum. Most viewers remember it as fact. (The condition) The financier Anschutz made a PG-13 rating a condition. Hackford has said he walked away from the film several times over this condition before finally accepting it. This is why, though the film deals with drugs and womanizing, what appears on screen is restrained. (Shooting blind) Because Foxx had been a classical piano scholarship student, the production did without the piano double it had planned. Wearing special prosthetics that covered his eyes, he went through most of the shoot genuinely unable to see.
Terminology notes 📚🔎
Score (film music)
(Literal meaning) The English word score originally meant a notch or incised mark, and in music it refers to the full score (總譜), in which the notes of every instrument are written together. In film it came to mean all the music newly composed for that film. (In film · musical theater music) Unlike inserted songs, which borrow existing songs, the score is background music a composer writes anew to fit the scenes. In “Ray,” Ray Charles's songs are the inserted songs, and Craig Armstrong's orchestra and choir are the score. Think of a school play where, between the songs the actors already know, the piano accompanist improvises music for the scene changes. That accompaniment is the score. (Elsewhere) In sports, it means the points.
Cue
(Literal meaning) The English word cue comes from its theatrical sense: a signal telling an actor when to deliver the next line. (In film · musical theater music) It refers to each individual piece of music that makes up a film score. A cue begins and ends to fit a single scene, and it may last a few seconds or a few minutes. “George Drowns” is a cue of just over a minute. In a video game, the short music that plays only when a boss appears, or each little musical sound effect when you pick up an item, is much like a cue. (Elsewhere) In billiards, the stick used to strike the ball is called a cue.
Leading motive (leitmotif)
(Literal meaning) The German Leitmotiv means a leading (leit) motive (Motiv) — that is, a short phrase that leads the story. It came into wide use in describing Wagner's operas. (In film · musical theater music) A short melody that returns whenever a particular character, place or emotion appears. Listeners can tell whose story it is from the melody alone. “Della's Theme” in “Ray” works this way. It is the same principle as when the school PA plays the same music every lunchtime, until just hearing it makes you hungry.
Gospel
(Literal meaning) The English word gospel comes from the Old English godspel — good (god) news (spel) — and in Christianity refers to the Gospel (福音). (In film · musical theater music) Sacred music that grew up in Black churches in America. A soloist calls out, the congregation answers, and emotion is raised higher and higher along with handclaps. Ray Charles carried this style of singing into love songs and opened up a new music called soul. Armstrong's score, too, uses solo gospel singing to evoke the Southern churches Ray grew up in. A pep rally where the cheerleader leads a chant and the whole class shouts it back, louder and louder, shares gospel's fervor.
Rhythm and blues (R&B)
(In film · musical theater music) Popular music created by Black American musicians in the 1940s–50s by adding a strong, danceable beat to the blues. At first it was also the name of a record chart aimed at Black audiences. Ray Charles's early hits reached number one on the R&B chart first. Just as kimchi stew tastes different in every household, think of it as a dish that takes the basic ingredient of the blues and seasons it heavily with rhythm. (Elsewhere) Today R&B often refers to the smooth Black pop of the 1990s onward, which sounds quite different from the R&B of Ray Charles's era.
Megigo batgi (call and response)
(Literal meaning) In Korean folk song, megida ('to lead off') means the lead singer sounding a line first, and batda ('to receive') means the group taking up that line and singing it on. The English call and response carries the same meaning: a call and an answer. (In film · musical theater music) A practice in which one person sings a phrase and a group sings back a short reply, as if answering. It has been handed down from African music and Black church worship. The passage in “What'd I Say” where Ray shouts and the Raelettes shout back is a classic example. It is just like one person leading a song on a school-trip bus while everyone joins in on the chorus, or the circle dance ganggangsullae, where the lead singer calls a line and everyone answers “ganggangsullae.”
Riff
(In film · musical theater music) A short phrase repeated over and over to serve as a song's framework. Even as the vocal melody changes, the riff keeps cycling in the same shape and drives the song forward. The electric piano phrase that opens “What'd I Say” is a riff. It is like friends turning a jump rope at the same steady beat: the rope is the riff, and the person who jumps in is the song.
Recollection scene (flashback)
(Literal meaning) The English word flashback means flash (flash) back (back) — that is, a sudden, momentary return to the past. (In film · musical theater music) A technique of inserting past scenes into the story's present. Music often serves as the marker telling us that we are now in the past. In “Ray,” each time his childhood appears, a dark score flows in along with images of water. Just as flipping through a diary and finding a photo from last year's school picnic makes that day's song ring in your head again, the music carries us into the past before the picture even changes. (Elsewhere) In psychology, it refers to the symptom of a traumatic memory suddenly returning in vivid detail.