“Come Live With Me”
Song by Ray Charles
“Come Live With Me” was the fourth and final song on Side 1 of Ray Charles’ excellent 1974 LP, also called Come Live With Me. A slow and gentle plea to a woman to join the singer in a life of matrimonial and familial happiness, “Come Live With Me” features a soft, swelling Sid Feller arrangement, as classic and classy as ever.
The song moves at a somewhat lugubrious pace, after beginning with the kind of off-hand, scene-setting chord that Ray occasionally stuck at the start of a song. (If your MP3 player is on a Ray-only shuffle, you might think this is “Drown In My Own Tears” based on the first few seconds.) It’s a nice touch; it gets him in the right key and the right mood, and does the same for the listener as well. Ray’s beautiful electric piano colors the performance throughout.
For most of “Come Live With Me”, Ray’s vocals are kept on the tame and controlled side. Oh come live with me, and be my love, let our dreams combine, he implores his woman. It’s only in the final verse that he really starts to let loose – after inviting a chorus to join him with the phrase “all right, y’all help me now”– adding a wondrously gritty RC howl that only goes to underscore the seriousness of his intent.
Feller’s dense, unhurried arrangement juxtaposes with the lyrics and Ray’s knowing, world-weary tenor – nobody believed this man had to plead or beg for anything from a woman – to give “Come Live With Me” a deceptively sly, romantic atmosphere. It’s not an air of hope as one might think, exactly, nor of an ultimatum, nor even really of the overtly earnest invitation in the actual lyrics. It’s more reminiscent of Ray’s LP I’m All Yours Baby!; that is, it’s more like a line. Settle into the evening – the couch – the bed – with me. Let’s celebrate our future right here in the present. Baby, it’s cold outside!
“Come Live With Me” was deemed important enough, and a good enough recording, to give Come Live With Me its title, and it is indeed a masterful example of Ray the artist exuding romanticism and charm and his special flavor of urgent but confident seductiveness. It was written by Boudleux and Felice Bryant and is the first of two of their songs on the LP (the other is “Problems, Problems”).
“Come Live With Me” was released as the first of two singles from its parent LP in October 1973, with “Everybody Sing”, also from the LP, as the B-side (Crossover 973). It was a tease for the album, which was not released until the following January.
In Michael Lydon’s thorough biography of Ray, he reveals how there were big hopes for “Come Live With Me” as the first single on Ray’s new Crossover Records, which included former ABC executive Larry Newton:
Larry Newton came out to RPM that fall and heard Ray mixing the title track, a big, country-flavored ballad. Excited to be chasing hits again, Newton flipped. He’d rush it out as a single, he said; it’d be as big as “I Can’t Stop Loving You”. Again and again he asked [engineer] David Braithwaite to play the tape, and each time Ray’s voice filled the room, Newton started shouting, “Number One, Number One!”
It reached Number 82; the album didn’t chart at all. Only with hindsight can “Come Live With Me” get the second look and respect it always deserved.
Single releases
“Come Live With Me”
b/w
“Everybody Sing”
Listen to “Come Live With Me”
Get your own “Come Live With Me” on 45, LP or MP3 from Amazon.
Songs on Come Live With Me