Welcome to episode thirty-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This one looks at "I Got A Woman" by Ray Charles. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.



Resources

As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.

For more on Charles Brown and Nat Cole, Patreon backers might want to listen to the Christmas Patreon-only episode.

Most of the information here comes from Charles' autobiography, Brother Ray, which gives a very clear view of his character, possibly not always in the ways he intended.

All the Ray Charles music used in this podcast, and the Guitar Slim track, are on The Complete Swing Time and Atlantic Recordings. Charles' work from 1955 through about 1965 covers more genres of American music than any other body of work I can think of, and does so wonderfully.

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Transcript

Let's talk about melisma.

One of the major things that you'll notice about the singers we've covered so far is that most of them sound very different from anyone who's been successful as a pure vocalist in the last few decades. There's a reason for that.

Among the pop songwriters of the thirties, forties, and fifties -- not the writers of blues and country music so much, but the people writing Broadway musicals and the repertoire the crooners were singing -- melisma was absolutely anathema.

Melisma is a technical musical term, but it has a simple meaning -- it's when you sing multiple notes to the same syllable of lyric. This is something that has always existed since people started singing -- for example, at the start of "The Star-Spangled Banner", "Oh say...", there are two notes on the syllable "oh". That's melisma.

But among the songwriters who were registered with ASCAP in the middle of the last century, there was a strongly-held view that this was pure laziness. You wrote one syllable of lyric for one note of melody, and if you didn't, you were doing something wrong. The lyricist Sammy Cahn used to talk about how he wrote the lyric to "Pocketful of Miracles" -- "Practicality doesn't interest me" -- but then the composer wrote a melody with one more note per line than he'd written syllables for the lyric. Rather than let the song contain melisma, he did this:

[Excerpt: Frank Sinatra, "Pocketful of Miracles", with Sinatra singing "pee-racticality dee-oesn't interest me"]

That was the kind of thing songwriters would do to avoid even the hint of melisma. And singers were the same. If you listen to any of the great voices of the first part of the twentieth century -- Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Tony Bennett -- they will almost without exception hit the note dead on, one note per syllable. No ornamentation, no frills. There were a few outliers -- Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald, for example, would both use a little melisma (Holiday more than Ella) to ornament their sound -- but generally that was what good singing *was*. You sang the notes, one note per syllable.

And this was largely the case in the blues, as well as in the more upmarket styles. The rules weren't stuck to quite as firmly there, but still, you'd mostly sing the song as it was written, and it would largely be written without melisma.

There was one area where that was not the case – gospel, specifically black gospel.

[Excerpt: Rosetta Tharpe, "Precious Lord, Take My Hand"]

We looked at gospel already, of course, but we didn't talk about this particular characteristic of the music. You see, in black gospel -- and pretty much only in black gospel music, at the time we're talking about -- the use of melisma was how you conveyed emotion. You ornamented the notes, you'd sing more notes per syllable, and that was how you showed how moved you were by the spirit.

And these days, that style is what people now think of as good or impressive singing