Live Concert Series, Pt. 11

Lonely Avenues

Seeing Ray Charles almost by accident

Dr. John’s only hit was a 3-minute ditty called “Right Place, Wrong Time.” He did so much more, but as far as Pop music is concerned, that’s pretty much the doctor’s only prescription. I love the song and did back in high school when I first heard it. A true, if cliched sentiment. If it weren’t true, however, I might not have seen Ray Charles live.

My mother liked Ray and talked about how good he was. But neither she nor my dad ventured any money into purchasing Ray Charles’ albums. They did have records by Lionel Hampton and Johnny Mathis, but anyone else of a darker shade just didn’t fit our stereo so well, for reasons I think you know, though when it comes to music, who can really understand all the secrets of a person’s heart?

It’s no secret, though, how influential Charles was on musicians and singers in the 1950’s, 60’s, and on up until today. A couple of years ago, in my Southern film class, I showed the biopic, Ray, and my students — from 18–22 years old — voted it the single best movie we watched, beating out my favorite, The Last Picture Show, and what I thought might be their favorite, Coal Miner’s Daughter (aka the Loretta Lynn story). Shows what I know, and also shows the power of Ray — his sound and the great portrayal of him by Jamie Foxx.

So after they voted and then gushed again over Ray’s life and music, I told them this story, a story I’m glad to have lived, lonely or not.

My wife and I had just moved to upstate South Carolina for my first and only teaching job at Presbyterian College. We don’t live in that semi-college town, but chose a larger place, one that might offer some nightlife, for as we all know, “the night time is the right time.” We lived in a downtown townhouse in a building erected back in 1912. We loved the place, but not only were we all alone in this town — no friends and definitely no family — we lived right next to US Highway 29, better known in our downtown as Church St. Trucks, speeding cars, blaring horns, accompanied us to sleep every night, and though we lived two doors from the corner, traffic lights infiltrated my closed eyes. Every hour of the night.

Still, in love as we were, we were happy in this place, this lonely street and neighborhood. I had just started the daily drive to work — sitting through events like “New Faculty Orientation,” a time I can’t remember and don’t really want to. We had one car, and so my wife tried to occupy herself at home, looking for part-time jobs (she was also finishing her Master’s thesis) and being comforted by our two house cats, Angela and Hugo.

We were so isolated and crazed by our loneliness that we often went to grocery stores like “Welcome” and “The Fresh Market” just to see other people and to buy hard bread. We chatted up deli workers and, when we’d venture into whichever affordable restaurant we could, the waitresses who, as Neil Young once said, looked as if they had been “crying in the rain.” Who would pass our way then, or again, or ever?

So one day, somehow, I learned that on the coming Thursday night of this late summer week, Ray Charles himself would be appearing at the old Greenville Memorial Auditorium which, I swear, was just a two-block walk up Church Street from our townhouse apartment.

“Hey,” I called to my wife, “let’s see if we can get tickets!”

“I’ll go up first thing tomorrow morning,” she said.

I don’t know how much she knew about Charles, how many of his songs she had heard, aside from what I played on my Atlantic Rhythm and Blues records, or from that one song the Cosby kids lip-synched and danced to — the one I named above, in so many words.

So she left the next morning while I was at the college figuring out how to manage my fears about Oxford commas and whether anyone would discover that I was no longer a member of a Christian church. When I got home that night, my wife was still almost breathless:

“You’ll never believe it…”

“Did you get us tickets?”

“Wait, wait, let me tell you.”

So I waited, and knew it had to be good, given her eyes, her smile, and all her dream-stories I had head every morning of my life when her expression looked just like this one.

“When I got to the box office, a man had just walked away. So I asked if they had any Ray Charles tickets left, and the ticket agent said: ‘Well, we do now. Two tickets that man just returned. He couldn’t use ’em, he said. Do you want ‘em?’ ‘Sure I do,’ I said, and so I paid him, and it was only after I left and looked at them that I noticed.”

“Noticed what?” I asked, because if I hadn’t have responded, she would have kept pausing till morning.

She smiled even bigger:

“They’re on the front row.”

I’ll spare you all my disbelief, and my joy, and what we might have done next.

We were just off center, to the left, sitting there stunned as Ray was led to his piano. The crowd around us erupted, and kept erupting during the two-hour show as Ray played every hit and semi-hit imaginable: “What’d I Say,” “Hit the Road, Jack,” “I Got a Woman,” “Night Time,” “Georgia…,” “I Can’t Stop Loving You,” (and if you don’t own Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, I don’t know what to do for you), “Come Rain or Come Shine,” “You Don’t Know Me,” “Just for a Thrill,” and of course, my favorite:

“Lonely Avenue.”

I’m sure there were others, too, but I got lost somewhere in hour two, wondering how we got here, why we got here, and what I had to think and say about sitting on the front row of a Ray Charles concert in the post-Modern sounds of my South, amidst a mainly African American audience, listening to music that was in the very process of saving me. Is timing really everything? Shakespeare would say so, and so would I, and maybe so would Ray Charles, had I been able to ask him that night.

As we walked home afterward, long after sundown, and down the avenue of our lives, I wondered what my colleagues would think when I told them the next day (fairly unimpressed was the main reaction), or what my mother would think when I called her later that night (“I always loved Ray Charles,” she said).

Time stretches us in funny ways. From the Blues, through Rock, Pop, and Country, Soul, and R&B, one man can help us find the bridge to so many roads. And loneliness?

It’s really just a state of mind, in Georgia, South Carolina, or Alabama, where I’m from. States where when Ray played during the time of my birth and childhood, people who looked like me couldn’t have gathered so easily or at all with people who looked like him.

Ray left us a few years back, and so did that old auditorium. Otherwise, the street by our old place looks just the same.

So, Dr. John…I hear you, and you, too, Ray Charles. I always will.

Thanks for reading, all you Riffers: Noah Levy, Rob Janicke, Kevin Alexander, Steven Hale, Harry Male, Keith R. Higgons, Alexander Briseño, Jessica Lee McMillan, Kathryn Dillon, Frank Mastropolo, S.W. Lauden, Sarah Paris, Gary Chapin, MDSHall, If Ever You’re Listening, Christopher Robin, TheWellSeasonedLibrarian, Eddie Becker, Aimée Gramblin, and too many others to fit! Don’t be lonely, but if you are, please read on:

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