Chart position: #1 R&B, #1 Pop (for 11 weeks)
Category: Pop ballad
Writer: Churchill Kohlman
Label and number: Okeh 6840, New York
Flipside: "Little White Cloud That Cried" (#2 Pop-the A-side)
When and where recorded: October 16, 1951, in New York City
When released: November 1951
Why Important: It established Ray as the '50s' first teenage idol and
started an R&B tradition of crying records, such as the Orioles' "Crying
in the Chapel" (#1 R&B, 1953) and the Dominoes' "The Bells," on which singer
Clyde McPhatter cried the lyrics.
Influenced by: Possibly by Billy Eckstine's "Crying" (#12 R&B, 1949),
Lionel Hampton/Jimmy Scott's "Everybody's Somebody's Fool" (1950) and the Griffin
Brothers' "Weepin' and Cryin'" (#1 R&B, 1951)
Influenced: Dozens of records from Garnet Mimms's "Cry Baby" (#4 Pop,
1963)
and Ray Charles's "Crying Time" (#6 Pop, 1966) to Johnny Cash's "Cry! Cry! Cry!"
(#14 C&W, 1955) and Roy Orbison's "Crying" (#2 Pop, 1961)
Important cover versions: Eileen Barton (#10 Pop), the Four Knights (#21
Pop), Georgia Gibbs (#24 Pop), Bette McLaurin
Important remakes: The Knightsbridge Strings (#53 Pop, 1959), Ray Charles
(#58 Pop, 1965), Ronnie Dove (#18 Pop, 1966), Lynn Anderson (#3 C&W, 1972),
Crystal Gayle (#1 C&W, 1986)
The story behind the record: "So let your head down and go-o-o-o on and
cah-ry-hy!" The white public had never seen or heard anything quite like it,
unless they'd been to a black church or funeral. Crying, weeping like a mourner,
bawling your eyes out-it simply wasn't done in front of friends, and especially
strangers. Especially by a man.
But when weepy, willowy (and white) Johnnie Ray boo-honed his cathartic "Cry" before screaming audiences, he didn't just add a little teardrop to his voice. He reared back and bawled like a baby. Globules of salt water gushed from his eyes onto his cheeks as his long hair hung damp and limp over his forehead. And when he'd worked his audience to a soggy emotional pitch, he'd swoon, fainting dead away. Many of his fans swooned with him. Pundits dubbed him the Nabob of Sob and the Prince of Wails.
John Alvin Ray was born January 10,1927, in the small town of Dallas, Oregon. A boyhood accident damaged his hearing so badly he required a hearing aid by the time he was fourteen. He grew up around music. "My family listened to everything from Billie Holiday and Kate Smith to [country boogie singer] Rose Maddox . . . I'd watch my dad play everything [on fiddle] from the 'Wabash Cannon Ball' to `Red River Valley.' " In particular, Billie Holiday took hold of him. "It was like being possessed," he said. Johnnie matured into a shy, waiflike, even effeminate man by 1950s standards. His androgynous persona endeared him to young girls, but it also brought a lot of vicious gossip. Later arrests for "soliciting sex" in a men's room and making "indecent propositions" to a male vice officer didn't help things much.
"In 1951 I was working in Detroit at a small nightclub called the Flame Show Bar," he told writer Robert Cain. "This club was patronized by both blacks and whites; in those days that type of bar was called a black-and-tan club. I was the only white entertainer on the bill. The show consisted of about five acts and Maurice King and his twelve-piece orchestra." (King would later become Motown Records' first A&R man.)
A local disk jockey, Robin Seymour, was so knocked out by Ray's vocal performance that he contacted Danny Kessler at Columbia Records. Kessler at the time was reactivating Columbia's famed Okeh subsidiary label, which in the'20s and early '30s had launched many classic blues singers, including Bessie Smith. Seymour told him about this young white kid who sang with almost black gospel intensity. When Kessler caught Johnnie's act, he flipped. "When I signed with them," said Ray, "I was the only artist on the label." Well, not quite-Okeh had already signed black singer Claude Trenier and a couple of bandleaders. But Ray was Okeh's first ofay.
His first release was a self-written R&B torch song called "Whiskey and Gin," recorded with Maurice King's band at Detroit's United Sound System. Nobody listening to "Whiskey and Gin" would have imagined that Ray was white. They wouldn't even have been sure of his gender. One Columbia Records executive, after hearing the record, reportedly said, "I don't think she's gonna make it." But "Whiskey and Gin" became a hit in several northern cities, especially in Cleveland, where popular disk jockey Bill Randall hyped it. When Ray traveled to Cleveland to promote the record, five hundred kids mobbed him as he got off the train. "I had almost all my clothes ripped off. I really didn't know what hit me."
Columbia's top A&R man, Mitch Miller, quickly got wind of this new phenomenon. An oboist who wore a Van Dyke beard, Miller would later be vilified as one of rock 'n' roll's most vocal antagonists. But in some ways, at least by 1951 standards, he was progressive. During his stint at Mercury Records in the late '40s, Miller had signed and produced Frankie Laine, one of the first white artists who sang with the emotionalism of rhythm and blues. Miller hustled the diminutive Johnnie Ray into New York City for a couple of well-polished sessions. For background vocals, Miller brought in the Four Lads-James Arnold (tenor), Bernard Toorish (second tenor), Frank Busseri (baritone) and Connie Codarini (bass)-who would have their own hit, "Mockingbird," a year later.
Three of the four songs they recorded came directly from Miller, including "Cry." According to Ray, "Mitch played me a record he wanted me to record. It was a sugary little ballad by some girl I'd never heard of." The "girl" was an obscure torch singer named Ruth Casey, who had cut the simple ballad just a couple of months earlier for a new Philadelphia-New York R&B label called Cadillac Records. Neither Casey nor Cadillac was heard of again, but the record did create a stir long enough for Miller and a couple of other A&R men to pick up on it. "Cry" had been written by Churchill Kohlman, a forty-five-year-old Pittsburgh civil servant who had dreamed up the song while moonlighting as a night watchman at a dry-cleaning plant.
"Mitch didn't have any idea how to record me," Ray told writer Jonny Whiteside. "We picked out 'Cry,' 'Broken Hearted' and 'Please Mr. Sun,' and did them all as head arrangements, just knocked them off. The only time we did second or third takes was when one of the Four Lads decided to try a different note or switch their parts. We found that we still had time left on the session, and that's when we decided to do 'Little White Cloud That Cried.' I said, 'Well, I've got this song I've written that I always do in the club, when it's quiet enough.' Mitch liked the idea." (There's some confusion here. According to Columbia's files, "Cloud" was recorded on the fifteenth and "Cry" the following day, with a change in musicians.) All four songs would eventually make it into the upper reaches of the pop charts.
With "Cry," Miller wisely put Ray right up front and consigned everything else to the background. The Four Lads open with "ooh ahhs" and add a coda at the end, but during the performance you can't hear them unless you really listen. The band is simple and subdued: Mundell Lowe on guitar, Ed Safranski on bass and Buddy Weed on celesta-a keyboard that sounds like soft bells. (Ed Shaughnessy was supposedly on drums, but he's inaudible on the record.)
The celesta, the most prominent instrument on the recording, gives the song a nursery quality to fit its selfpitying mood. And Ray drags out some of his words, the way a crying child catches on certain consonants. "Iiiiiiiiiif your sa-weetheart sends a letter of goodbye, it's no secret you'll feel better if you cry, if your heartaches seem to hang around too llllong, and your blues keep getting bluer with each song . . . " To get the maximum effect from Ray's sobbing gimmick, Okeh released "Cry" with "Little White Cloud That Cried" on the other side. An early ad in Billboard suggests that "Little White Cloud" was Okeh's intended hit side, but jocks wasted no time turning it over. The record sold at least two million copies. "Cry" was number one on the Hit Parade from March to early summer-a crying jag of eleven weeks. In the meantime, "Little White Cloud That Cried" reached number two. The record was also a big hit in England. Ray was crying all the way to the bank.
Two weeks before "Cry" chatted in late December, another record had appeared on the R&B charts called "Weepin' and Cryin'," on Dot Records. Though credited to the Griffin Brothers, the vocalist was Little Tommy Brown, a black crooner who subsequently made a modest career out of crying on records. Shedding real tears-"He puts his hand to his head, sits down and really weeps," a producer said later-Brown rode Johnnie Ray's salty tide to the top of the R&B chart, but apparently Brown had cut his record first. Had Ray heard Brown's "Weepin' and Cryin' " before he broke down on "Cry"? One thing seems almost certain: both singers had been listening to Little Jimmy Scott, another singer, who'd performed his popular 1950 hit, "Everybody's Somebody's Fool," with Lionel Hampton's band, on the verge of hysteria. Now that the floodgates for R&B singers were open, tenors like the Dominoes' Clyde McPhatter and the "5" Royales' Johnny Tanner could express their secular selves as they once did when they sang in church (most of them had begun their careers in gospel groups).
Columbia Records decided that Johnnie Ray's sales figures were impressive enough for him to be promoted from the scruffy Okeh subsidiary. All of his subsequent releases were on the parent label.
When Sam Phillips at Sun Records reportedly made his famous remark about finding "a white boy that sounds like a Negro," he meant another Johnnie Ray. Bill Randall, the first major deejay to support Ray's first record, later became the first northern exponent of Elvis Presley in 1954. On January 28, 1956, when Randall introduced Presley to the nation for the first time, on the Dorsey Brothers' TV show, he compared Presley to Johnnie Ray. (Incidentally, Mitch Miller, who promoted the R&B flavored careers of both Frankie Lame and Johnnie Ray, was given first choice, before RCA, to sign Elvis Presley. Miller declined the offer.)
To underscore the Presley connection, when Ray's career was slipping in 1956, he plucked a song from Sun Records' blues catalog called "Walking in the Rain," recorded a couple of years earlier by the Prisonaires, so named because they were serving time in Tennessee State Prison. Johnnie's version shot to number two on the pop charts and would've gone to the top if Elvis's "Don't Be Cruel," "Hound Dog" and "Love Me Tender" hadn't hogged it for sixteen weeks consecutively.
Johnnie Ray died on February 24, 1990, of liver failure, in Los Angeles.
"Johnnie Ray is the first real cry-baby. I love Johnnie Ray. He was scarily great."-John Waters, film director, Cry-Baby