“It Ain’t Easy Being Green”

Ray Charles’ version of the popular 1970s song “It Ain’t Easy Being Green” was recorded for his June 1975 album Renaissance. A reflective meditation on self-worth and identity, the gentle and delicately scored song is one of Ray’s more popular from this period of his career.

“It Ain’t Easy Being Green” was written by composer Joe Raposo, who worked with the Muppets and wrote music for television. The piece was originally sung on a 1970 album by Jim Henson in character as Kermit the Frog. How’s that for an unusual source for a Ray Charles song!

(Incidentally, Raposo also wrote the theme song for the sitcom Three’s Company, which was sung by a different, white singer named Ray Charles, whose records with “The Ray Charles Singers” continue to confuse sellers and torment buyers of Brother Ray vinyl to this day.)

At the beginning of the song, as is evident from its title, “It’s Not Easy Being Green” is a self-pitying list of reasons that being ones color is disadvantageous. As the lyric continues, however, the singer begins to see things from a different perspective: green is the color of spring, after all. By the end, he decides that green is actually the best color to be.

The sentiments detected in “It’s Not Easy Being Green” resonated with the racial equality movement of the time, as well as the self-acceptance movement: this was also the era of projects such as I’m OK – You’re OK and Free To Be… You And Me, which elevated tolerance and encouraged happiness with oneself.

The song was famously recorded by Frank Sinatra in 1974, and Ray knew he could do the song justice as well. His version is arranged with lovely, sympathetic strings that throb ever-so-gently underneath his vocals and some Spanish-sounding busy acoustic guitar notes. (Ray’s stingy-as-usual liner notes don’t mention the arranger on Renaissance.)

What makes this song, and much of the album, notable is that fact that it’s a socially conscious tune, which Ray had traditionally avoided but was turning to more and more in the mid-1970s. Equally new for him were the synthesizers that oscillated modestly in the background: he had long loved his electric piano but this was Ray Charles’ first use of the space-aged musical computers that were increasingly a part of popular music.

All of which add up to “It Ain’t Easy Being Green” being a particularly fine moment of effortless grandeur from Ray Charles circa 1975. It’s riveting for the soul-searching lament in his voice, the evolving and complex self-awareness of the lyric, and the touching, spectral gauze of the musical backing.

Listen to “It Ain’t Easy Being Green”

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