“Show Me The Sunshine”

At turns fiery and elegiac, “Show Me The Sunshine” is a rousing album closer for Ray Charles’ 1970 LP Love Country Style. With heavy gospel touches and a simple structure that lets the emotional content cut through, it’s a bracing and even disquieting way to end the album.

“Show Me The Sunshine” was written by singer/composer Jimmy Radcliffe and lyricist Robert Baird, a.k.a. “Buddy Scott”. The song is a plea for peace amid a dark night of the soul; wisely, the song is kept very simple so that the singer can concentrate on the raw feeling rather than technical demands.

Often following a two-chord, I-IV back and forth, “Show Me The Sunshine” is constructed of a rubbery bass, Ray’s gospel piano and wailing vocals, and a chorus of testifying Raelets. A gentle orchestra, arranged by Sid Feller, crops up her and there but remains appropriately supportive rather than prominent.

Ray as a singer is the undeniable star of “Show Me The Sunshine”: he’s in his best outraged and hurt voice, letting it all hang out and holding back nothing. The song wouldn’t work nearly as well anywhere else on the album; it has to be the final song on Side 2. Having moved through a number of other musical modes on the preceding songs, it’s here that Ray wraps up the record with its most harrowing cry.

With the gentleness of the music and those pitying Raelets to balance him out, Ray communicates both his anguish and his resigned patience for the redemption that may or may not come.

Listen to “Show Me The Sunshine”

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