93. Ray Charles, "Mess Around" (1953)

(listen)

On a list like this I can't very well include every track from The Birth of Soul, which is as massively enjoyable as it is massively important, so I will choose a representative favorite. I like this one best today, getting the edge if only for the iconic moment when Ray Charles deliberately drives a wedge of silence between the words "pit" and "barbecue" in the first line, which somehow launches the thing to unimaginable levels of feverish excitement. Check it out: a song based on a backyard good-times rave-up, playing and wailing just for the pleasure of it, and for the escape—the same kind of thing that Louis Jordan and others have memorialized elsewhere in songs about rent parties. The tempo is fast, and Charles furiously pumps his rollicking piano with his left hand and skitters across the keys with his right. The horns are boss—just boss. The vocal is loose but always in command. Ray Charles the piano player seems entirely self-aware of every bit of the song's stride/boogie-woogie antecedents as it moves through its paces. It's sloppy and tight all at once, and there's a saxophone solo with potential to tear your head off. This well-known version at some two and a half minutes is freewheeling and explosive, and I can only imagine how it must have sounded on gutbucket nights when whatever band Charles had assembled stretched and let it hang out, with all its trapdoors and veering passages. Best enjoyed standing on a chair. And I wish Mary Fleener would make a comic strip out of this one too.