♬ "You Be My Baby" (Ray Charles)

I'm undergoing a kind of Ray Charles Early Catalogue Immersion Therapy at the moment. I dunno what the medical indications are for this treatment but I fully intend to keep faking the symptoms long after I feel cured. Long, long after.

I blame my local public library. Rather than hold a Book Sale as a big semi-annual event, they a permanent section. As books, CDs, movies, puzzles, and board games go out the front door, the do it as an ongoing thing. A corner set of shelving is stocked with books, music, movies, puzzles, and board games. Stuff leaves through the front door and is replenished from community donations that keep coming in through the back door.

I scored big a few days ago: two Ray Charles collections. And they aren't lame-ish "Greatest Hits" collections packaged for sale at gas stations, either: each collection contains five discs, and each disc is an early-catalog Ray Charles LP, in its entirety. The sleeves even reproduce the LP's cover and liner notes, both front and back!

I finished ripping the first collection two days ago. I've banished all other elective noises from my earholes ever since.

"What's your favorite track so far" you ask? My answer is "how dare you." But yes, I've been repeating "You Be My Baby" more than the others.

It's off of his sixth album, 1959's "What'd I Say." The title track is, of course, aces. But it suffers from (a) over-familiarity, and (b) competition with John Belushi's cover version.

I wasted too much time trying and failing to find the actual video online in any kind of palatable form. Then I went to Etsy and looked for a bust of John Belushi As Beethoven, suitable for placement on a piano. I wasted less time there but the pursuit was just as fruitless and disappointing. I have added this to the List Of Art I Should Commission Someday. It's manifestly too good a thing not to exist in any form.

I guess it wasn't a complete waste of time. Along the way I came across this live Ray Charles performance of "What'd I Say" on the Ed Sullivan Show, featuring (holy cats!) Billy Preston on the Hammond organ:

Oh, yes…let's get back to "You Be My Baby." I love every bit of it:

• Ray Charles tapping his feet as he keeps time throughout. This record is totally unfussy: "we're just going to play it through a few times and when one of 'em feels right, we'll stamp it Done and move on."
• The Ray-ettes. Wait, the YouTube title card says "Raelettes." That can't possibly be right, can it? …Well, I'll be damned. Were they forced to change their name after a different girl backing troupe named "The Ray-Ettes" raised a stink? Well, whatever: I love the flowy rhythm they're contributing. I'm finding it impossible to type while I listen to this song. I can't help but perform a sort of a rolling shoulder shimmy throughout.
• While I'm a generation or two too young to have been directly influenced by jukeboxes in any real way (beyond occasionally encountering a still-working example, and wielding the only real power a kid has over adults: turning $1.75 in quarters into the collective annoyance of everybody in that diner). All the same, there's something about a "jukebox-ey" kind of song that transcends nostalgia for that medium, isn't there? It's as though the people who wrote and recorded it tailored the tune's rhythms and instrumentations to penetrate cheap, shagged-out old speakers and clouds of cigarette smoke.
• The lyric "You look so tasty/Like quick cream pastry/Never, never let you go." Oh, if only I were smooth enough in my teens and Twenties to come up with a line like that one and deploy it correctly! But I know in my heart that I wasn't and I couldn't have.

I still have a whole second pack of Ray Charles albums to rip and process. I'm torn between my excitement to hear five more albums of this stuff, and the knowledge that I don't want to move on from the first set yet.

Listen to "You Be My Baby" on:

• Amazon Music (this isn't tech-related, so I'm using an affiliate link. If you click through to Amazon from this, and buy literally anything, I'll get a little kickback in the form of Amazon store credits, proportional to the price. Thank you kindly.)
• Spotify
• Apple Music
• YouTube Music