“Hey Now”
Song by Ray Charles
One of Ray Charles’ final recordings for the Swing Time label was his own composition “Hey Now”, recorded on November 1, 1951 and released the following June on a 78 with “Baby Won’t You Please Come Home” on the other side. It was one of very few Swing Time Ray Charles releases also pressed as a 45. The catalog number was 297A+.
Credited to “Ray Charles with Orchestra”, “Hey Now” features Ray singing and playing piano with Lowell Fulson’s band: five saxophones, two trumpets, guitar, and the rhythm section. But in fact, the horns only comes in at certain times; much of this performance focuses on Ray’s blues wailing and his barroom piano, the brass merely (if conspicuously) accentuating with smooth mid-range washes and suddenly noisy, spirited eruptions.
Ray’s lyrics for “Hey Now” borrow from blues cliches and other things that had gone before – for example, the hoary but even now amusing line about “you’ll even cry so loud you’ll give the blues to your neighbor next door, and you say hey now, hey now”. Ray’s got the blues so bad it hurts his feet to walk and his tongue to talk.
Most satisfying of all is the vocal that Ray spits out for “Hey Now” – breathlessly he declaims his dilemma in an energetic performance that’s absolutely transfixing. There is no trace whatsoever of the Nat Cole croon he had employed for much of his Swing Time recordings; his famous raspy, soulful R&B voice is fully formed on “Hey Now”, finally. It was this Ray Charles that piqued the interest of Atlantic Records, who would bring Ray to the masses and pave the way for his conquering of R&B as well as pop, country, and jazz.
