THE STORY OF A SONG : Ray Charles - I Can’t Stop Loving You

May 1963, and 33-year-old pianist, singer and genius Ray Charles is sat down with NME correspondent Ian Dove to promote his UK tour. Ray’s already a legend in these parts, a master of fusing gospel, jazz, R&B and big-band arrangements - but remains unique as everything he turns his hand to sounds immediately, brilliantly like him. “People call me a jazz singer and a blues singer but I don’t really know the difference,” he confirms. “I just try to sing a song and I only sing songs I like to sing. And I try to put a little bit of soul into everything.” Indeed he does. The song that remains on everyone’s lips is Ray’s smash hit of the previous summer, transatlantic chart-topper I Can't Stop Loving You, written and originally released by country crooner Don Gibson in December 1957. A heartstring-plucking 6/8 canter with keening pedal steel and massed vocal harmonies, it was classic Nashville to a tee.

“I sat down to write a lost love ballad," Gibson told author Dorothy Horstman in her 1975 book Sing Your Heart Out, Country Boy. “After writing several lines to the song, I looked back and saw the line, ‘I can’t stop loving you.’ I said, ‘That would be a good title.’” Little did Gibson know that the 45 and its self-penned flip. Oh Lonesome Me would become one of the most influential A-B couplings in C&W history. The tongue-in-cheek, cheery Oh Lonesome Me would be recorded by a number of artists, most notably when reimagined as a funereal dirge by Neil Young in 1970 - it would even appear, crooned by singing milkman Craig Douglas on the Pops And Lenny show in 1962, at the behest of faintly terrifying puppet mascot Lenny the Lion.

I Can’t Stop Loving You soon became a Nashville favourite, with Kitty Wells one of the first out of the traps to cover it. Charles’ lush, impassioned version of the song (perhaps nudged by Roy Orbison’s rendition the previous year) may have seemed a bold, unusual turn for some observers, but Ray made no secret of his wide- ranging tastes in interviews, liner notes, and anywhere you’d care to look. He’d grown

up listening to The Grand Ole Opry, telling Rolling Stone in ’73: "I don’t know why I liked the music. I really thought that it was somethin' about country music, even as a youngster - I couldn’t figure out what it was then, but I know what it is now.’’ Ray also noted in the sleevenotes to 1959’s What’d I Say LP that, amongst his other jobbing pianist work as a young man he “used to play piano in a hillbilly band." Adding weight to his unlikely C&W credentials, Charles exited his contract with Atlantic later that year on a kinetic cover of Hank Snow’s I'm Movin’On.

Signing to ABC-Paramount with the promise of greater artistic control, Charles began to plot a long-player of C&W songs interpreted in his own style in 1961. "You take country’ music, you take black music, you got the same goddamn thing exactly," he later argued in an interview with Peter Guralnick.

At Ray’s behest, producer Sid Feller went out looking for C&W copyrights for Ray to tackle, bringing back songs by the likes of Felice and Boudleaux Bry ant, Eddy Arnold, Hank Williams - and Don Gibson. Perhaps seeing something in common with Fats Domino’s treatment of old cowboy number Blueberry Hill, Ray reinvented I Can’t Stop Loving You, reinstating the introductory’chorus that Orbison had ditched and having the Raelettes sing the song’s title as a call-and-response, making it the centrepiece of his ambitious fusion album. Charles worked feverishly on his new passion project over three exhausting sessions, enlisting a team of arrangers to handle variously band, string and choral arrangements. At one point, according to Feller, arch-perfectionist Ray, unsatisfied with one incorrect arrangement tore it up and dictated individual parts for 18 players.

Recording on Modern Sounds In Country And Western Music wrapped on 15 February-1962. Feller, in charge of sequencing the album, placed I Can’t Stop Loving You (a song he didn't much rate), at the penultimate spot, much to Ray’s disappointment. He needn’t have worried, it was edited from a luxurious 4:12 to 2:37 for its single to accompany Modern Sounds. Soon it would top the Billboard chart, repeating the trick in the UK in July.

I Can’t Stop Loving You quickly became a standard, recorded by white crooners like Frank Sinatra and Andy Williams and in a Grammy winning instrumental (courtesy of Quincy Jones) by Count Basie. In 1970, Elvis Presley, recasting the song into an emotional epic waltz a-la One Night, added it to his setlist, while Ike and Tina Turner’s gritty 1964 live version continued what Ray started, ditching C&W in favour of fiery soul. The country-soul crossover Ray had unwittingly pioneered was cemented by the turn of the 70s, with artists like The Flying Burrito Brothers covering James Carr and Aretha Franklin, while Ray himself cut a startling version of Glen Campbell’s Wichita Lineman.

The last word should go to Ray, who told Rolling Stone in 1973: “When I sing / Can’t Stop Loving You, I'm not singin’ it country-western. I'm singin’ it like me...”