“Don’t You Think I Ought To Know”

Ray Charles included a soulful if opulent version of “Don’t You Think I Ought To Know” to his January 1966 LP Crying Time. Originally recorded by artists such as Bill Johnson and His Musical Notes (in 1947) and Ella Fitzgerald, and later The Orioles, it has an emotional melody that Ray handles beautifully.

“Don’t You Think I Ought To Know” was written by Bill Johnson and Melvin Wettergreen. Wettergreen’s name was misspelled as “Wettergren” on the original Bill Johnson 78 label, and Johnson’s is rendered as “William Johnsohn” on the Ray Charles Crying Time album cover. Both writers’ names are added to the wrong song on the LP label itself, so this song gets no credits at all there. Quality control failed ABC Records in this case.

At any rate, Ray’s version of this dramatic, bluesy song keeps the original slowish pace of the 1940s recordings, but he allows his incredible voice to reach some higher, more indignant growls throughout the number as heard on lines like, “if I can’t have all of you, though I can’t believe it’s soooooo?!”

The songwriting credits and publishing information for Track 5 are added to Track 4, and their lengths are switched, on the misprinted label on Side 2 of Crying Time.

The painful sentiment of the lyrics is tempered to a point by Sid Feller’s thick, melancholy strings. The orchestra shines high above the rest of the song, providing a kind of angelic glow in which Ray Charles and his willing-and-able drummer are left to deliver the song’s humanity. Ray’s listeners had by this time long gotten used to this stylistic approach, and for his part Ray certainly knew his way around a melody in these circumstances.

“Don’t You Think I Ought To Know” continues the theme of empty despair established on the rest of the unnerving Crying Time LP, but as the penultimate track on Side 2 it acts almost as a little gentle musical relief. With his barely-audible piano emerging only occasionally from under the orchestra, Ray uses the genuine sense of anguish of his personal life around this time to put his stirring stamp on a song that seemed custom-made for him.

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