The album begins with a cover of Big Jay McNeely’s 1958 R&B hit ‘THERE'S SOMETHING ON YOUR MIND’, in which Baby Ray incorporates one of my favorite singing techniques - the narration. After delivering the verse and chorus, he goes into a spoken word account of how the lead character finds his baby in the arms of another man in his OWN house, in HIS chair, eating HIS peanut butter and crackers! And in a fit of outrage proceeds to shoot them both! But, “then realizing what he’s done” he picks up his baby in his arms and says, “speak to me baby, what have I done”, to which she replies, in her “last dying breath” … “do-do-do-do-doo.. do-do-do-do-doo..” 

I LOVE it!!

It’s a very short song, just a couple minutes, but it must have been a show-stopper to do live! 

Next up is ‘HARPOON MAN’, a kick-ass, funky, mid-sixties, blues-harp-stomping little rocker. You can almost imagine sex-kittens-in-cages doing The Monkey to this one. While guys with Benjamin Braddock haircuts & wearing horn-rim shades bopped their heads saying things like, “I dig it, baby!” In other words, the kind of record that’s instantly likeable.

Next is ‘SADIE (THE AVON LADY)’. Every man’s fantasy of the hot chick that comes to your house unannounced and asks if she can come in. 

               She’s a way out chick, man, she sure is slick 

       
               <Ding-Dong> 

      
                        "Avon calling"

Like ‘Harpoon Man’, this song just rocks from the opening note. When I hear a record like this, so well produced, with great singing and clever musical accompaniment, and know it went nowhere, and was most likely never even played on the radio, I realize just how much great music there was in the mid-sixties. If you were a soul act and trying to get any traction at the height of Motown and STAX, the odds must have seemed insurmountable.

The album continues with ‘MERCY HAVE PITY’ (a pleading love song), ‘WHEN ARE WE GONNA GET MARRIED’ (a tight rockin’ soul number), ‘VALLEY OF TEARS’ (the Fats Domino ballad), and other great tunes in the vein of pop-soul, blues-wailers, and sentimental ballads. All with the commanding and captivating voice of a singer who clearly was no novice – either to singing or to holding an audience. On side 2 when he covers the Hank Thompson country classic ‘THE WILD SIDE OF LIFE’, you (if you’re like me) want to know WHO the hell is this guy and WHAT the hell ever happened to him?! 

One track from this album that I included on a mixed artists collection I listen to in my car is called ‘SAVING MY LOVE FOR YOU’. It’s a searing, slow-burning soul number in the tradition of Sam Cooke and Joe Tex. The kind of song that comes to mind over and over again like a beautiful memory.

The album closes with Chuck Berry’s ‘PROMISED LAND’, showing that Baby Ray isn’t just a soul man or sentimentalist, he’s also a straight up, old school rock n’ roller! 

Baby Ray was clearly a man who had an appreciation for great music whether it was Soul, or Country, or Pop. And he delivered them all with a raspy and endearing voice, not unlike Joe Tex, full of sincerity and soulfulness that makes his lack of notoriety, and mysterious disappearance after one album, all the more bizarre.

I have seen on used record sites that he released one single outside of this album. A 45 containing one of my favorite Irma Thomas’ tunes, the Goffin & King ballad, ‘ Yours Until Tomorrow’. But that’s it. No other record, either musical or historic, can I find out about this guy. He put out one album, ‘Where Soul Lives’, and then vanished off the face of the earth.

Baby Ray, whatever happened to you, man? You were great!

                             

YOU ARE BUYING / PURCHASING ITEM IN THE TITLE