“Shakin’ Your Head”

Ray Charles finally dove into full-on country music for his 1980s Columbia Records contract, as can be heard on the rip-snortin’ banjo and fiddle workout “Shakin’ Your Head”, the final song on his Wish You Were Here Tonight LP of February 1983. This is no orchestral version of an erstwhile country tune by Don Gibson; this is real 1980s Nashville country.

“Shakin’ Your Head” was written by famed songwriter Micheal Smotherman. (It is indeed spelled “Micheal”.) Smotherman wrote songs for such luminaries as Glen Campbell, but had begun his career, surprisingly enough, as a last-minute addition to Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band. So if you were wondering how to connect Ray Charles and Don Van Vliet with only one degree of separation, your quest is over.

Reflecting on this era in 2014, Smotherman said his success came so early that he didn’t appreciate it at first, taking it all in stride and not realizing how lucky he was:

Glen Campbell cut a whole album of my songs. I was so green that I just took it as a matter of course, the natural order of things so to speak. “Oh, Ray Charles cut my song? Cool. Any beer in the fridge?”

“Shakin’ Your Head” is more explicitly country than even much of its parent LP, but it’s also a fun balance of this new Ray and his classic, more soulful guise. It hits the ground running from the outset thanks to James Pulk’s arrangement, with Hoot Hester sawing a sweet fiddle and Vick Jordan’s fleet-fingered banjo gurgling and popping with impossible exuberance. Nothing about the song says “Ray Charles” during this opening bit.

But then Ray’s voice comes in – “I know you like all the presents,” he sighs in his warm but enervated mahogany tones – and he’s mixed loud enough that he buries the country combo. When he finishes the line, the instrumentation has changed, and a new song reveals itself: Ray is playing his groovy electric piano in a much sparser arrangement of what sounds like a different song. It’s a nice effect, using the first line of the vocals to bridge the manic opening bars and the quite different main section. The message? Ray is the force that brings these types of music together.

But you can’t keep the hot country players down long; after a few lines from Ray they are back, this time joining in rather than starring. It’s another tying-together of two styles.

Thus settled into their groove, Ray and the band proceed to tell the song’s story, in which the protagonist rattles off all the ways that he and his woman are in fact quite alike – liking the same music, keeping the same hours, enjoying spending his money – but he thinks he saw her look at him and shake her head. It’s driven him to distraction, so he confronts her. “Were you lookin’ at me and just shakin’ your head?!”

Don’t tell me I’m paranoid
I heard you tell your sister
That I was getting null and void

Ray’s 1980s era, like many of his most famous 1960s country recordings, was far less “country” than subsequent legend would have it. On “Shakin’ Your Head”, however, the epithet is applicable. Mr. C’s crackling vocal and sensational keyboard work occupy their usual places, but this time some hard-country musician friends have been invited along, and the mixture is a varied, never-boring performance with highs and lows, humor and pity, hurtling by at a thrilling velocity.

Seven of the ten songs on Wish You Were Here Tonight were issued on one side or the other of a single; “Shakin’ Your Head” was not among them. So buy one of the many used copies of the LP for sale in online listings to hear it.

Listen to “Shakin’ Your Head”

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