While producing what became Ray Charles‘ final album, Genius Loves Company, John Burk asked the soul music legend if he might re-sing a part. “No,” Charles said. “I ain’t doing that.”
Burk revisited the subject later, in a quiet moment at the studio, asking Charles to explain his reluctance. “It’s about what I’m feeling, at that moment,” Charles replied. “That’s what you want on the record.”
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Charles, of course, was right: Genius Loves Company, released after the singer, pianist and songwriter’s death in 2004, went triple platinum and won the Grammy for album of the year. And Burk, a partner at Exceleration Music, remembered that conversation when preparing to reissue four albums from Charles’ catalog of 60-plus releases earlier this year. The first, 1974’s Come Live With Me, out today (Aug. 22), is what Burk calls a “heartbreak and sadness and loneliness album,” a gem that didn’t make the Billboard 200. “It’s one of the best examples of Ray truly expressing himself.”
The album, Burk adds, is “ripe for discovery” and came out “when the marketplace was just so different than what he was doing. It didn’t quite fit in certain charts and radio formats.”
The four releases Burk has prepared are from Tangerine Records, Charles’ longtime indie label, with which Exceleration partnered in 2021. An investment group formed by ex-execs from Concord Music Group, Merlin and others, Exceleration has spent the past five years investing in influential indie labels such as blues powerhouse Alligator Records, alt-country fixture Bloodshot Records and ’90s-rock stalwarts Kill Rock Stars. After making a deal in 2021 with the Ray Charles Foundation, Exceleration rolled out reissues from the singer’s vast catalog — the 90-track True Genius box set in honor of what would have been Charles’ 90th birthday in 2020, then Charles’ classic country albums such as the two volumes of Modern Sounds and Crying Time.
Burk, one of five partners at Exceleration, says the upcoming Charles reissues — Ingredients In a Recipe for Soul is due Sept. 19, Love Country Style, Oct. 24, and No One Does It Like … Ray Charles, Nov. 21 — will be part of a long, gradual rollout of Charles’ “massive catalog.” Although Rhino Records reissued much of Charles’ catalog in the ‘90s with lavish CD packaging, Burk says, “There’s a lot more to discover about Ray Charles than the public may know. A lot of this stuff’s just not out.”
Ray Charles
Courtesy of the Ray Charles Foun
Despite a long association with Atlantic Records, Charles spent much of his career as an indie artist, albeit funded by large corporations such as ABC and British Decca. Love Country Style, from 1970, is in the mode of Charles’ 1962 masterpiece Modern Sounds In Country and Western Music and includes a bluesy cover of Johnny Cash‘s “Ring of Fire”; 1963’s Ingredients In a Recipe for Soul, which hit No. 2 on the charts, opens with his classic version of Harlan Howard‘s “Busted”; and No One Does It Like … Ray Charles! is a new title compiling non-album singles from 1962-1965, including “No One” and “Something’s Wrong.”
Tangerine, named after Charles’ favorite fruit, was not actually the original record company that released Come Live With Me — that album belonged to Charles’ later label, Crossover, according to the singer’s 1978 autobiography Brother Ray. The material on the other three reissues comes from ABC, which in the early ’60s lured the singer from Atlantic Records, the label that made him famous. “Look,” he told ABC lawyers before signing, according to Michael Lydon‘s 1998 bio Ray Charles: Man and Music: “Since I’m producing my own music, I want to own my own masters.” Such a deal was unprecedented at the time, as labels have insisted on ownership of masters for decades. But ABC agreed — as long as the deal kicked in after five years.
“He’s just completely free and doing what he felt like doing,” Burk says about these recordings. “He built his own everything — his own record company, his own publishing company, his own management company, his own studio, his own tour bus, his own plane. He was completely independent.”
Charles was with ABC from 1960 to 1973, and for the last five years of that deal, his music came out under the Tangerine-ABC label, according to Brother Ray, the autobiography written with David Ritz. He returned to Atlantic Records in 1977. “I loved Tangerine,” Charles said in Man and Music. “But to run a label, especially a small label, you have to keep your hands in it. I was spread too thin, but I wasn’t about to give up my own music or going on the road. At least Tangerine didn’t lose any money, and figuring in all I learned, I’d say we came out ahead.”
