I am mildly obsessed with this recording, both as a work of art and as a music teaching resource.
While I have mentioned this track several times on here, I haven’t really dug into the details. So it’s time to change that. There’s a lot to talk about: the genre, the chords, the melody, the rhythm. Let’s take them in order.
The genre
“You Are My Sunshine” is the opening track on Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music Volume 2. It doesn’t sound much like country or western music to me, but that’s the point; Ray is remaking those tunes in his own R&B/jazz/blues idiom. The idea is not as surprising as it may seem if you know your American pop history. The distinction between “country” and “blues” was mostly a creation of the record industry, and they were thinking more about their audience’s race than about musicology. Black and white rural American music from the early 20th century sounded very similar, and Ray simply pointed up the shared roots of country and R&B. The excellent 500 Songs podcast tells this story with great clarity; see in particular episodes 32 and 78.
The harmony
If you know “You Are My Sunshine”, then you may hardly even recognize Ray Charles’ version as the same song. He sings a completely new melody over a different chord progression. For comparison, here’s the oldest known recording of the song from 1939 by The Pine Ridge Boys.
The closest recorded version to the one I hear in my head is by Norman Blake from the soundtrack to O Brother, Where Art Thou (though he doesn’t do the vocal harmony.)
Here are the chords, which I put in Ray’s key for ease of comparison.
| F | F | Bb | F | | Bb | F | F C | F |
To turn this into Ray’s version, slow the harmonic rhythm by half.
| F | F | F | F | | Bb | Bb | F | F | | Bb | Bb | F | F | | F | C | F | F |
Next, replace the F chords in measures 12 and 15 and the C chord in measure 14 with Bb chords.
| F | F | F | F | | Bb | Bb | F | F | | Bb | Bb | F | Bb | | F | Bb | Bb | F |
Finally, add flat sevenths to the chords to make them bluesier.
| F7 | F7 | F7 | F7 | | Bb7 | Bb7 | F7 | F7 | | Bb7 | Bb7 | F7 | Bb7 | | F7 | Bb7 | Bb7 | F7 |
Ray uses slightly different chords on the bridge, but that doesn’t matter for our discussion here. The point is that by replacing the I, IV and V chords with I7 and IV7, Ray has moved the song from the key of F major to the key of F blues. That I7-IV7 axis is a defining sound of blues tonality.
The melody
Having replaced the major-key harmony with blues harmony, Ray also replaces the major-key melody with a blues melody. Here’s the first verse of the original:
Here’s Ray’s first verse.
You Are My Sunshine (Ray Charles version)
Ray’s melody uses the pitches F, A-flat, A-natural, B-flat, C, and E-flat. It’s the F minor pentatonic scale plus the major third. This is not the pitch collection that is conventionally called “the blues scale”. As a matter of fact, there really is no such thing as “the” blues scale. Instead, there are many different pitch collections used by different singers and instrumentalists in different contexts.
The various pitch collections used in the blues are not scales at all in the Western European sense. They are more like ragas, with conventions about which note can follow which other note, organized into certain defining melodic gestures. Jeff Titon diagrams some of those conventions in his great book Early Downhome Blues, but you can also get a good sense of them just by listening to a lot of the music.
Another important difference between blues and Western scales is tuning. Pitches in the blues are not confined to the piano keys; instead, they use flexible pitch zones. It isn’t really true to say that Ray sings A-flat and A; more accurately, he sings within the zone between those two notes. He also uses the zone between D and E-flat. I can’t easily represent these nuances in notation, but that’s okay, you can get them clearly enough from the recording.
The rhythm
Ray replaces the country oom-pah feel of the original with a syncopated Latin-sounding rhythm. The horn section accents beat two, the “and” of three, and the downbeat of the following bar. The bassline accents each downbeat and the “and” of three. Ray’s vocal doesn’t follow any simple pattern, but he tends to accent the “and” of four. These parts combine into an elegant rhythmic counterpoint.
The most dramatic rhythmic moment of the song comes in the bridge at the 1:00 mark, when the feel suddenly changes from lightly swinging sixteenth notes to heavily swinging eighth notes. In less technical terms, the feel changes from “R&B” to “jazz”. I’ll explain what this means below, but you can get the idea most clearly from this illustration I made.
Here’s another view of the same idea using Ableton Live.
The simplest way to explain swing is that you stretch out the first half of each pulse unit, and correspondingly shorten the second half of the pulse unit. In jazz-style swing, the pulse units are beats: 1, 2, 3, 4. You subdivide the beat into eighth notes: 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 &. To swing, you make the onbeat subdivisions (1, 2, 3 and 4) longer, and you make the offbeat subdivisions (the &s) correspondingly shorter. This is what Ray is doing during the bridge of “You Are My Sunshine.”
In funk-style swing, the pulse units are eighth notes: 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 &. You subdivide the eighth notes into sixteenth notes: 1 e & a 2 e & a 3 e & a 4 e & a. To swing, you make the onbeat subdivisions (the numbers and &s) longer, and you make the offbeat subdivisions (the e’s and a’s) correspondingly shorter. This is what Ray is doing during the verses and choruses of “You Are My Sunshine”.
People sometimes say that in funk, you use straight eighth notes. This is true! But you usually swing your sixteenths by various amounts. You might wonder, why is it necessary to think in terms of different pulse units at all? Couldn’t you just play funk by swinging your eighth notes and counting twice as fast? You could! Unfortunately, this is not the convention, so other musicians will be confused when you count off at the wrong tempo. It’s confusing, I know; as in all things relating to funk, let your ears be your guide.
Anyway, it is extremely rare for the same tune to combine eighth and sixteenth note swing, so Ray Charles really gave pop music theory teachers a gift with this recording. He also gave a helpful example of how to adapt a piece of Western tonal music into the blues, and created an all-time banger in the process. Thanks, Ray!