“What-cha Doing In There (I Wanna Know)”

Ray Charles returns to his sweaty R&B roots on “What-Cha Doing In There (I Wanna Know)”, the first song on his 1966 LP Ray’s Moods. Energized and scandalized is poor old Ray, who drives himself insane wondering why his woman is taking so long to answer her door. “You never took this long before,” he growls suspiciously, as he embarks on a comical search around the house for the answer he already suspects.

After achieving worldwide superstardom with his orchestral “country” music, Ray had recently kicked heroin when Ray’s Moods was recorded, and he seems to have found a new vigor on “What-cha Doing In There (I Wanna Know)”. The Raelets get special, prominent mention on the album’s cover, and they do indeed provide a good deal of this song’s spirit.

Ray proves, for his part, that he hadn’t lost one iota of his ability to get down and dirty with a simple little rhythm and blues band and his girl singers. Shouting, grunting, and on fire, he wildly runs around her house, peeping through the keyhole and sliding down the chimney to finally find her in the kitchen kissing one Charlie Brown.

“What-cha Doing In There (I Wanna Know)”, written by C. Sessions, is an important moment in Ray’s career, as it showed the world in very clear terms that he was always going to be doing things his way. He’d always done this anyway, but now having made his mark with tender, orchestrated ballads, and done some more traditional country-sounding tunes on the previous LP, Crying Time, Ray now felt like doing fast rock-and-R&B music. So he did. You could never pin down ol’ Ray.

The music world had moved on from this type of music by 1966, and the track must have sounded like one of Ray’s 1950s Atlantic single with a bit of extra panache. In hindsight, thought, with the trends of the times irrelevant, “What-cha Doing In There (I Wanna Know)” can finally take its place among the artist’s great R&B cuts. Nobody growled, shouted, and sucked in the listener like Ray. You can see the house in this song, and you can feel his frustration. Go, Ray, go!

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