Exploring the legacy of Oregon musician Johnnie Ray

Oregon had its own “father of rock & roll.” Some have called Johnnie Ray, an Oregon farm boy turned teen idol, the musical link between Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley. In the early 1950s, Ray’s songs, including “Cry” and “The Little White Cloud that Cried,” topped the charts. Ray grew up in the Willamette Valley. A documentary about his life aired this week on OPB TV and can be watched online. We learn more about the late artist and his musical legacy from OPB’s Kami Horton, a writer and producer for Oregon Experience.

Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

[Funky jazz brass playing, then singing.]

Johnnie Ray: ‘I’ve got a gal who drinks whiskey and gin. Oh yes now, oh I’ve got a gal …’

[Fades out.]

Dave Miller: We end today with this man, Johnnie Ray. He was Oregon’s own heartthrob and teen idol, a rock and roll pioneer who topped the charts in the 1950′s, had legions of screaming fans around the world, influenced Elvis and others who followed him, but who has largely become unknown to younger generations. Johnnie Ray is the focus of the most recent episode of Oregon experience on OPB TV. It premiered last night and is available online right now. Kami Horton wrote and produced the episode. She joins us now to talk about Johnnie Ray’s life and legacy. Welcome to the show.

Kami Horton: Hi, thanks for having me.

Miller: Thanks for joining us. So, Johnnie Ray was born in 1927. He grew up in Dallas, Oregon in Polk County, and he went to Portland’s Franklin High School. What were his early years like?

Horton: He was a farm boy. It was him and his sister, and they had quite an extended family in Polk County. He was really a country boy. Then his family moved around a bit with the beginning of World War II, and he ended up in Portland, and he always was really driven to play music. That was really remarkable because he was hard of hearing. In his earliest years, his family didn’t realize that. He was probably about a young teen when it was finally pointed out to them by a teacher that he was having some hearing difficulty, and he finally got a hearing aid. Even at a young age, he was playing music even though he was having these kinds of hearing problems, so he was always really driven to that.

As a teenager, in about 1941, he started on the local radio show, ‘Stars of Tomorrow’, and eventually he was even hosting his own weekly 15 minute show on that. He wanted to be a star from an early age.

Miller: What were his early musical influences?

Horton: He always talks about Duke Ellington, and the jazz greats of that era were a really important influence to him, but he was also really influenced by music that his father played. His dad played the fiddle, so there was a lot of country and western music. Then he was very involved with the church; his family was and he sang in the church choir. He had a wide variety of influences, but it was really that early jazz, and R&B music that had the most influence.

Miller: You note in the episode that he was given the advice early-ish on, when he told a performer that he wanted to be a star, he wanted to be an entertainer, he was told ‘then leave Portland’ and so he did! He went to Los Angeles, where he tried to make a go of it as an actor or a musician. That didn’t work out, so he came back to Oregon. What did he do next?

Horton: He really started writing. He was always writing songs, but in that period of time, he just didn’t really know what he was going to do because he felt like he had tried by going down to California and wasn’t successful. He had gone down to California to be an actor, and he really wasn’t the greatest actor. He really needed to focus on music.

Miller: Also, we learned in the episode that part of the reason could have been that he was hard of hearing; he often couldn’t hear his fellow actors.

Horton: Absolutely, that’s right. Then, when he does eventually get into a movie, he has to memorize everyone’s lines because he isn’t wearing his hearing aid in the film.

Miller: So, acting didn’t work out. He comes back to Portland, or to Oregon. Where did he go? And what did he do?

Horton: He traveled around, but he ended up in Detroit, at the Flame Show Bar, which was a pretty important R&B Club in Detroit. That’s where he really put in his dues. He met a lot of very important people there; he was playing with Ruth Brown and Laverne Baker, he got to meet his hero Billie Holiday. That was a huge influence on him.

Miller: You play some excerpts from some different radio interviews he did in the episode. One of them is from 1977. I want to play a piece of that now. This is where he’s talking about those early days in Detroit and in the Midwest. He’s talking about the support he received, specifically from Black musicians and Black audiences at the very beginning of his career. Let’s have a listen:

Johnnie Ray: If it hadn’t been for the black community, actually, there really wouldn’t be any Johnnie Ray around, because at that time I was supported by virtually all black people. They were my friends. At that time, I didn’t have any white friends, and I was literally fed and clothed and kept in that community.

Miller: It’s so striking to hear that, because in the 50s and 60s, there were a lot of popular white musicians who did not acknowledge the huge debt that they owed to Black musicians. What did Johnnnie Ray say about his musical influences?

Horton: He always credited those early folks that he worked with in Detroit as being a huge influence on him. He wrote an article for Ebony Magazine that was actually sparked by going down to a southern city and witnessing segregation. He says in that article that if he’d have known that it was segregated, he wouldn’t have performed, but he didn’t want to disappoint the audience. He vowed that he would never play there again. Right after that, he wrote in an article for Ebony magazine, saying how important these different musicians had been to his own success, and he remained friends with a lot of these people, especially Laverne Baker, throughout his life. He always really credited that as where he had his inspiration.

Miller: What was his big breakthrough?

Horton: His big breakthrough was a song called ‘Cry’ in 1951. It was really emotional, and really a different sound than people were hearing in pop music at the time.

Miller: Well, let’s have a listen to it. This is a piece of his breakthrough song, ‘Cry’.

Johnnie Ray: [Singing] ‘If your heartaches seem to hang around too long, and your blues keep getting bluer with each song, remember sunshine can be found behind the cloudy skies, so let your hair down, and go on, cry. If your heartaches seem to hang around too long, and your blues …’ [Fades out]

Miller: Can you describe his performing, and his dancing and his hand movement style? That was one of the striking things about this episode.

Horton: Yeah, that is the thing that really made him stand out. He would sing these emotional songs, but it was really his full-life performances that really got him noticed. People would call him the Prince of Wails and Mr. Emotions because he really got into these songs that he was doing. He was one of the first white performers that would be going all over the stage and throwing himself onto the ground. He’d be sweating and dancing into the aisle, and often crying as he was singing the song. That was something very new and that’s, I think, why he was considered the link between Frank Sinatra with that crooning kind of sound, but then Elvis. He was the first person to really get up there and dance around the stage. Elvis actually watched him, studied him, and credited Johnnie Ray as being an influence on him.

Miller: You note, or somebody does in this documentary, that Johnnie Ray called himself a song stylist more than a singer. What does that distinction mean?

Horton: I think it’s just exactly that, of putting that emotion into those songs and making it his own. He always talked down about his own talents. He always said he didn’t really like his own singing, that kind of thing, but he really loved to get up and perform. If you watch his performances from those early years, right up until the end of his life, he always just seems so excited to be on stage and he’s always giving these full body performances each time. So I think it was that: putting himself into every song.

Miller: How big was he at the height of his popularity?

Horton: You know, that’s the thing. It’s amazing to think that for a short period of time, he was probably the biggest pop star in the United States. He had the number one hit with ‘Cry’ on the pop charts, and on the R&B charts, and then the number two hit with the flip side of that record, which was ‘The Little White Cloud That Cried’, which he wrote. It really happened overnight, and no one had seen anything like him before, so he just became huge and then he immediately went on tour. He became huge in the UK and Australia, and continued to be very big overseas, even after his star started to diminish here in the United States.

Miller: He was bisexual and was sort of in the closet, although being bisexual was maybe more well known to people that knew him in the entertainment world, in entertainment circles. How did that impact his career?

Horton: You know, there’s a lot of discussion about that, because he was actually arrested a couple of times for solicitation. You could go to jail for being gay in this time period, so he immediately got married after that first solicitation arrest became public. That marriage didn’t last very long. After that, he seemed to embrace who he was. It was said to have been an open secret within the industry. He had long-term relationships with both men and women. His family knew that, and embraced him for who he was. I think probably, as he got older in life, he was very open and more accepting of himself and who he was, and that became more important than necessarily having the big success that maybe he might have had. He would have been completely in the closet about everything.

Miller: There’s also a ‘what could have been’ feeling about his later career. If studios hadn’t tried to smooth his edges and package him as a kind of crooner, could he have been more of a force in rock and roll or R&B?

Horton: Well his last agent, Alan, I really think that is the case. His last agent was trying to get him back into those rhythm and blues kinds of sounds towards the ends of his life. He was signed on to Columbia, and Columbia had a specific idea of what they wanted their music to be. They really moved him away from that raw, edgy kind of R&B sound into much more cheesy pop music, so he did continue to have hits, but none of them were like his early sounds. Possibly, if he’d have been able to continue with his original sound in his own writing, because he did write dozens of songs, maybe he would have had more success, but the music industry was changing a lot in that time period and he was going through some health problems. It’s hard to say.

Miller: Why do you think he is not that well known right now, when you think about his meteoric rise to fame, and how he ruled the pop charts briefly and then sort of disappeared?

Horton: That is the question! That is a great question, because he was so big and some people have dismissed him as a one hit wonder, which I think is completely wrong if you look at his music over time. He is remembered overseas, but why we don’t remember him in the United States? I don’t really know. He did a lot of tv programs, but it was in the very early fifties and a lot of people just didn’t have TVs in that time period. Maybe people didn’t see him as much. Maybe he was eclipsed by Elvis and other kinds of singers within the time period. I don’t really know, but I think it’s really unfortunate.

Miller: Thanks very much for joining us.

Horton: Thanks for having me.

Miller: Kami Horton is a writer and producer for Oregon Experience. You can see the half hour episode about Johnnie Ray online at OPB.org right now.

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