Ray Charles — Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music

There are records you listen to with your ears, and then there are records you listen to because your reputation depends on understanding them. Ray Charles has given us the latter. Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music isn’t merely a new direction — it is the clearest reminder in years that some men hear more of America than the rest of us.

And if this writer has learned anything in recent weeks, it’s that one must pay attention when a man like that opens his mouth.

Charles approaches these country standards with a steadiness bordering on reverence. Where lesser singers decorate, he clarifies. Where others bend a phrase to impress, he bends it to reveal. In “You Don’t Know Me,” he discovers the lyric one syllable at a time. In “I Can’t Stop Loving You,” he gives back the sorrow that decades of repetition had nearly sanded away. Not since Sinatra has a vocalist shown such discipline in stripping a song down to its truth.

But the real revelation is how naturally these country songs fit him. There is no novelty here, no “crossover experiment” staged for polite applause. Charles delivers them as if he were born with one foot in every American genre at once — gospel, blues, jazz, and now country — all part of the same river running in different directions. He simply has the good sense to follow the current.

Some traditionalists grumble about the orchestration. They say the strings soften the edges. They miss the point entirely. This record is not about genre purity; it is about scale. Charles treats these songs with the dignity of full arrangements without sacrificing the ache that made them worth singing in the first place. And somehow — against every prediction from radio men in Nashville and cultural arbiters in New York — the ache remains intact.

Let us state it plainly: Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music is the most important American album released this year.

Not because Ray Charles “crossed over.”

Not because he will bring new audiences to country music.

Not because of its inevitable chart success.

But because Ray Charles has done what the rest of us are too timid to attempt: he looked at the map of American music and refused to believe the borders — just as a young truck-driver from Tupelo did back in ’54, when he walked into Sun with nothing but a rhythm in his bones and a hunger no gatekeeper could name.

There is a confidence in this record — not arrogance, but conviction — that can only belong to a man who knows exactly who he is and what he intends to say. When Charles sings a country song, he isn’t borrowing from another tradition. He is revealing that the tradition was always bigger than the men who tried to fence it off.

If this writer sounds emphatic, perhaps clarity feels especially luxurious at the moment. But the truth is simple: Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music is a masterpiece of interpretation, arrangement, and sheer human expression.

Ray Charles did not merely expand country music.

He expanded America’s understanding of itself.

Rating: 10/10 — and understatement at that.

Johnny Cash & The Tennessee Two — The Sun Sessions

BY GYPSY JACK CARTER

Johnny Cash is only a few years into his career, but already he sounds like a man who has been living with his own legend longer than his age should permit. There’s a gravity to him — not heaviness, but purpose — the sort of thing you usually hear in voices worn down by decades, not twenty-five years and a whirlwind of Memphis nights.

The Sun Sessions gathers the sides Cash cut with Sam Phillips before his leap to the big leagues, and hearing them together makes one thing unmistakably clear: Cash did not stumble into his sound. He walked straight into it with both boots planted, a clear idea of who he was, and two men behind him who understood that sometimes the simplest thing is the hardest to get right.

The Tennessee Two — Luther Perkins on guitar and Marshall Grant on bass — don’t accompany Cash so much as frame him. Perkins’ playing remains among the leanest ever committed to tape. Folks who don’t listen closely call it simple. Folks who do listen know better. His lines are so spare that removing a single note would make them collapse — yet adding a note wouldn’t improve them. That’s the paradox of true minimalism: everything unnecessary has already been cut away.

Grant’s bass is the spine of the operation. No frills, no flourish, just a relentless, heartbeat-steady pulse that lets Cash’s voice sit right where it belongs — front and center without ever sounding lonely.

Cash’s singing on these sides is unlike anything in country or popular music at present. He doesn’t croon. He doesn’t shout. He states. Each line feels like it’s being carved, not sung. “I Walk the Line” still startles with its calm assurance. “Cry! Cry! Cry!” and “So Doggone Lonesome” show a writer who understands restraint in a way most performers spend years trying to master.

Much has already been said around the coffee shops and college halls about Cash’s supposed lack of “experimentation.” But this criticism misunderstands the achievement. Experimentation is what artists resort to when they haven’t yet found themselves. Cash, Perkins, and Grant bypass that awkward stage entirely — not out of laziness, but because they already located what most musicians spend their whole careers chasing: authenticity.

The question now — and it’s a fair one — is whether Cash can preserve that authenticity on a major label. Columbia Records is a far cry from the independent laboratory Sam Phillips built in Memphis. Phillips had the instincts of a mad tinkerer and the courage to let a performer be wrong on tape until he found the right thing. Major labels tend to prefer polish over pulse. Orchestras over empty space. Sweetening over silence.

Cash’s challenge going forward will not be writing good songs. He already does that. His challenge will be maintaining the same stark confidence that made these Sun sides feel so unavoidably true. If Columbia tries to turn him into another velvet-voiced matinee idol, they will ruin what makes him matter.

But for now, in this moment, in these recordings, one thing is certain:

Johnny Cash has found something rare, and he has found it early.

Rating: 9.5/10 — A new voice with an old soul, and a future worth betting on.