“Let Your Love Flow”
Song by Ray Charles
If you like Ray Charles’ singing voice, you’re in luck on 1983’s “Let Your Love Flow”: there’s a big chorus of singers, all of them overdubbed Rays.
“Let Your Love Flow”, originally a number one hit for The Bellamy Brothers in 1976, is the first song on Side 2 of Ray’s first 1980s countrified album Wish You Were Here Tonight, and it’s a busy piece of studio wizardry that’s ultimately light and a hell of a lot of fun.
With a quick and funky pace, the Sid Feller-arranged performance features flat, simple verses, during which Ray comes over rather good-natured and untroubled by the world. He sounds like he’s at home, in his element, and there’s nothing to get overly excited about (and few other sounds to obstruct his vocals, either; for the first few bars it’s almost a cappella). A hint to the glint in his mellow eyes may be found when he sings the word “season”: he goes back to the comical drunk voice he employed on 1972’s “I Can Make It Through The Days (But Oh Those Lonely Nights)”, pronouncing it as “sheason”. Hey, why not!
It’s during the choruses of “Let Your Love Flow” that the multiple Rays come in. As on previous songs that feature this technique – most notably 1959’s chilling “I Believe To My Soul” – the multi-tracked voices don’t clutter or distract from the musicality of the song. The fact that the singers are all Ray isn’t especially noticeable; they just suit the recording. It’s actually pretty remarkable that Ray Charles could do something like this and not have it get in the way of the song’s sentiment.
Instrumentally, “Let Your Love Flow” does indeed, as its title suggests, flow smoothly. Snatches of Brother Ray’s funky electric piano reveal themselves from time to time, and everything about the track feels like an undemanding good time.
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Songs on Wish You Were Here Tonight