Despite being one of the greatest voices in British pop history, it’s strange that Elton John never considered himself a singer at first.
He had a voice that could hang with the best vocalists in the industry, and yet some of his first songs were meant to be given away because he saw himself as a songwriter over anything else. In another timeline, he would have been happy giving songs to anyone within earshot, but even some of his greatest inspirations figured out that it was better to sing what was in their hearts.
Then again, John was more of an interpreter than a proper lyricist most of the time. Bernie Taupin was the one painting the picture for him before he even touched the piano, and while John brought that brilliant colour to every single one of his albums, it was a lot easier for him to take his musical cues from what Taupin was writing about rather than plop any of his lyrics on top of already-existing music.
It was a musical dance in a way between him and Taupin, and that wasn’t all that different from what he heard from his idols. Both John Lennon and Paul McCartney could bounce songs back and forth until they were perfect, but in the age before the British invasion, John was already paying close attention to the kind of vocalists that he heard from America, like Chuck Berry and Little Richard.
These musicians were ushering in a new genre of music, but if you think about it, it wasn’t all that different from what the blues singers had been doing for years. They certainly put a lot more energy behind the music when people like Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis started to gain some traction, but when you stripped all of the window dressing away, people like Ray Charles showed everyone what a proper musician was supposed to sound like.
He had his high-energy numbers like ‘Let the Good Times Roll’, but Charles’s greatest strength was always singing ballads. ‘Georgia On My Mind’ is still one of the finest vocal performances ever recorded, and despite being the furthest thing from country music when he began, his take on some of the greatest country tunes like on Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music would have been enough to put even Johnny Cash to shame.
But no matter what genre he played, Charles was always a guiding light for John when he first got started, saying when introducing the song ‘I’ll Drown in My Own Tears’, “Ray Charles is one of the greatest performers of all time; definitely one of the greatest voices of all time. And this song is just full of emotion and soulfulness.”
If hearing that song was bad enough, it was another matter entirely trying to play alongside him. John can hang with the best of them whenever he was putting on a show, but being able to hang with one of the greatest voices in R&B is something that no amount of showmanship could have made up for. Charles was the epitome of a soulful musician, and there was no way that he was going to walk on that stage without putting his full heart into every single soul that he was playing.
Because when you think about it, people like Charles were more than just a bunch of musicians that played their shows and got on with their lives. Music was running through their veins from the minute that they performed for the first time, and it was up to the rest of us to listen and hope to keep up with what they were doing.
