Chart position: #1 R&B
Category: R&B
Writers: Ray Charles, Renald Richard
Label and number: Atlantic 1050, New York City
Flipside: "Come Back Baby" (the A-side, #4 R&B)
When and where recorded: November 18, 1954, in Atlanta, Georgia
When released: Late December 1954
Why important: In many respects it brought down the curtain on'50s R&B
and heralded in a new, heavily gospel-inflected music that would evolve into
early '60s soul.
Influenced by: "My Jesus Is All the World to Me" by Professor Alex Bradford
(1954)
Influenced: Otis Redding, James Brown, Wilson Pickett
Important remakes: Elvis Presley (Elvis Presley, #1 Pop, 1956), Sammy
Davis, Jr. (1960), Jimmy McGriff (#20 Pop, 1962), Rick Nelson (#49 Pop,1963
), Freddie Scott (#48 Pop, 1963), Ray Charles (#79 Pop, 1965)
The story behind the record: It's been said that most of the early great
R&B songs were inspired by-or directly taken from-gospel songs. In the case
of "I've Got a Woman," despite Ray Charles and Renald Richard being listed as
the composers, there's no doubt that the melody was a secular reworking of a
spiritual.
Renald Richard, who played trumpet in Charles's band, told writer Colin Escott that he and Ray Charles came up with "I've Got a Woman" while they were traveling together on tour from South Bend, Indiana, to Nashville. "We were listening to gospel on the radio like we often did, and there was some spiritual that had a good groove to it . . . We started singing 'I Got a Woman' to the tune on the radio. Ray said, 'Can you do something with that?' " By the next morning he had grafted some lyrics he had been writing for another song onto the melody they'd heard-Professor Alex Bradford's "Jesus Is All the World to Me" on Specialty Records. (Charles subsequently rewrote other spirituals into secular hits: Dorothy Love Coates' "Hallelujah! I Love Him So," became "Hallelujah I Love Her So," and "You Better Leave That Liar Alone" turned up as "Leave My Woman Alone.")
Not long after that night in the car, Charles contacted his bosses at Atlantic Records, Ahmet Ertegun and producer Jerry Wexler, and asked them to meet him on the road. Wexler, in a conversation with writer Cliff White, gave this account of how he first heard "I've Got a Woman": "In November of 1954, Ray called us to Atlanta to dig his new band. We got with him in the afternoon at the Peacock nightclub, where he had his band set to play for us. Except for Ray and the band the place was empty, and as soon as we walked in, Ray counted off and they hit into 'I've Got a Woman' and that was it."
Ertegun recalled how tight and "prepared" Charles and the band were. Until then, Charles had recorded with studio musicians in New York City or New Orleans, but this time he had his own orchestra. "They were totally familiar with what he wanted them to play. He had every note that was to be played by every musician in his mind, he had the whole thing down and knew exactly what he wanted to hear and say."
Drummer Glenn Brooks lays down a standard New Orleans shufe beat, as Don Wilkerson and David "Fathead" Newman on tenor and baritone saxes blow stabbing, percussive riffs. "Weelll!" Charles wails about his lady of convenience, "I got a woman, way over town, that's good to me, oh yeah, she gives me money when I'm in need, yeah she's a kind of friend indeed, she saves her lovin' early in the morning, just for me . . . " Charles at no time used the contraction and sang "I've got a woman," but for grammar's sake "I've" was put on the label.
That wailing "Weelll" had become a standard, multi-syllabic opener for blues shouters like Big Joe Turner, Roy Brown and Wynonie Harris (both Brown and Harris used it on their versions of "Good Rockin' Tonight"). It was a device for catching the listener's attention, announcing the beginning of the song. (A couple of years later Buddy Holly would take it to new artistic heights on his recordings of "Rave On" and "Early in the Morning.") Interestingly, Ray Charles had begun using the herald in August of the previous year, during a New Orleans session in which he began every song but one with "Weelll!" That exception, "I Wonder Who," began with "I-I-I-I" instead, but otherwise it was identical to the "Weelll" on "I've Got a Woman."
Atlanta's top R&B jock, Zenas Sears, booked them some time at Georgia Tech's radio station, WGST. "We had to break every hour during the session so that they could read the news," Wexler told Robert Palmer. They managed to get down four numbers: "Blackjack," "I've Got a Woman," "Greenbacks" and a blues called "Come Back Baby."
"Come Back Baby," a downright churchy number based closely on a Lowell Fulson song of the same name, was the first to chart in mid-January 1955, but deejays tried the other side, and by the following week "I've Got a Woman" began its climb to the top. It would stay on the R&B charts for twenty weeks. "Come Back Baby" peaked at number four. The other two songs recorded at that valuable session also made the R&B Top Ten later in the year.
Ray Charles Robinson was born September 23, 1930, in Albany, Georgia, and grew up in Greenville, Florida. He went blind from glaucoma between the ages of five and seven. He learned the piano from a neighborhood store owner named Wylie Pittman, who kept an old upright in the place, played often and encouraged the boy to learn his trade on it. "He'd let me sit with him and bang on the piano," Charles told Robert Palmer. Later on, he also learned the saxophone, which was his instrument of choice early in his career.
Like many black Southern kids, he grew up in the church, with gospel music soaked into his bones. On jukeboxes he listened to the music of the swing bands, such as Jimmie Lunceford's and Lucky Millinder's. He recalled that the first song he learned by heart was Lil Green's 1940 blues hit, "Romance in the Dark." Another strong influence was the "Grand Ole Opry" radio show out of Nashville, which was popular with many blacks despite its rigid fare of white country music. "I would never miss that for nothing," Charles told Palmer.
After his parents died, he left the state school for the blind in St. Augustine and began playing with various Florida bands, including the Florida Playboys, an all-white country outfit. He was fifteen. He stood in a tradition of blind black entertainers: bluesmen Blind Blake, Blind Boy Fuller and Blind Lemon Jefferson, gospel singers the Five Blind Boys of Alabama, and balladeer A1 Hibbler. If any musicians had a profound effect on him at the time, they were Nat King Cole and Charles Brown, pianists who could also sing ballads. He formed several combos based on the Nat Cole Trio and patterned both his voice and piano style after Brown's. He dropped his last name to avoid confusion with boxer Sugar Ray Robinson. After moving to Seattle, Washington, he was signed to his first label, Downbeat, a black-owned Los Angeles indie, in early 1949. The label shortly changed its name to Swingtime. One of his stablemates was Lowell Fulson, who at the time recorded the original "Come Back Baby."
On Ray Charles's first recordings he sang in Charles Brown's murmuring, polite cocktail voice. His first substantial hit, "Baby Let Me Hold Your Hand," in 1951, was for all intents and purposes a Charles Brown recording. Not until Atlantic Records picked up his contract the next year for $2500 did Ray Charles begin to find his own, less restrained voice. The songs he wrote himself still sounded like Charles Brown, but on outside blues material he stretched out and worked gospel turns and gospel piano figures into his performance. His "It Should Have Been Me," a talking blues, became his first major hit. But nothing really happened until after the night he and his band recorded that session at an Atlanta radio station in 1954. The Genius had arrived!
Little more than a year after the release of Ray Charles's "I've Got a Woman," Elvis Presley went into RCA's studio in Nashville to record his first session with his new company. "I've Got a Woman" was the first song he and his band laid down on tape, as a warm-up for the next number, "Heartbreak Hotel." Elvis changed the lyrics a little bit: his woman was "way 'cross town," which may have been a reference to another Ray Charles song called "I'm a Fool for You," in which Charles accused his woman of having "a man way 'cross town." Just as Atlantic had cleaned up the title with "I've," RCA tailored it for a teenage audience (and ignored grammar) by calling the song "I Got a Sweetie." Presley's wild, echoed version appeared in 1956 on Elvis Presley, the number one album for ten weeks, which sold several million copies and introduced R&B to a mass white audience for the first time.
A little more than ten years later, after a couple of other artists had introduced "I've Got a Woman" to the pop charts, Charles recorded a new version of the song, flavored with a pop arrangement, for ABC Paramount. It was a minor hit.
"Ray Charles really knocked me out. When I recorded I tried to do his music in the style I could do."-Don Everly