With a steady string of Top 10 hits lasting for most of a decade, he influenced Elvis, & infuriated Sinatra. He broke through more racial & musical barriers than any other artist in the 1950s. But 50 years after his electrifying entrance on the pop music scene, the name Johnnie Ray now evokes blank stares when I asked if people know of him. Not one person that I mentioned working on this post had ever heard of Johnnie Ray. He was a talented, tragic talent who sobbed & shook his way to international celebrity, & then experienced an equally explosive & inexplicable fall.
Oregon’s own John Alvin Ray was born on this day 85 years ago. Even through the tempestuous years of the Great Depression, his loving family always supported their young son’s musical talents.
As a youth, Ray was the victim an accident where he landed on hard ground during a blanket toss on a Boy Scout camp out. A single straw was driven into his left ear, puncturing the membrane of his eardrum. He instantly lost all hearing in his left ear.
He didn't tell his parents about the accident. The formerly extroverted boy became a sad, lonely teenager. It was from this dark time of loneliness & bitterness that the shameless sadness & fierceness of his singing took hold.
Ray found solace & strength from the latest black music of the era. He found an idol in Billie Holiday. After being fitted with his first hearing aid & regaining the ability to experience the sounds around him, his full focus became his music. Ray’s lifelong hearing problems drove of his thundering, tumultuous, tearful vocal style.
Ray was a tall, fair, alarmingly thin young white man, performing in black nightclubs in Detroit, where he honed his smoky, soulful voice with a sorrowful delivery that would become his trademark.
Ray didn’t write the dynamic 1951 smash hit- Cry that made him a household name, but he wrote a great deal of his own hit records including my favorite Ray song- Whiskey & Gin, the gut wrenching ballad that made the music biz take notice. The recording executives who heard his impassioned, soul inflected vocals thought that they were listening to a black female blues singer & the fact that the voice was coming from a gangly white country boy from Oregon was shocking.
He was signed to Okeh Records where he became the first white artist ever to release pop hits on a blues label, & one of the first to land on the R&B charts. In 1951, Ray was the hottest performer in America, & his buzz would be felt by everyone, everywhere, on radio, TV, magazines & movies.
Ray worked with the most respected singers, arrangers, & band leaders: Doris Day, Frankie Laine, Ray Conniff, & Mitch Miller.
In the summer of 1951, just a few months before Cry would make him a smash, he was arrested twice by the Detroit Vice Squad for soliciting sex with a man at the notorious gay bar- The Brass Rail. The Vice Squad had been on to Ray ever since he played "Black & Tan" clubs earlier in his career, gaining a reputation as a rebel. The damage to his career when the police report & his mug shots were discovered was significant. Teen rebels & bobbysoxers still held Ray as a hero, but to the Establishment, he was the devil. a half decade before Elvis Presley, Ray had buttoned-down Americans fearing for the souls of their children.
Ray’s ferocious, fierce, performances style & his stage shaking zeal endeared him to British audiences. Even after his popularity faded & he was ridiculed in the USA, Ray would always play to a packed house of adoring fans in Britain.
The scandals of Ray’s notorious personal behaviors, his fondness for alcohol & pills that lead to high profile public drunkenness arrests, & the emergence of rock n’ roll diminished Ray’s musical force. He would continue to have records on the charts but the material he was being given by producers like Mitch Miller became increasingly sappy & irrelevant.
Despite her knowledge of the 1951 arrest, Marilyn Morrison, the daughter of the owner of the Mocambo nightclub in LA, California, married Ray in 1952. Morrison was aware of the singer's sexuality from the start, telling a friend she would "straighten it out." The couple separated in 1953 & divorced in 1954. Morrison tried to contact Ray many times in the decades that followed their divorce, sometimes talking on the phone with Ray’s lover/manager Bill Franklin. Ray always instructed Franklin to get rid of her on the phone. Morrison attended the LA memorial service for Ray a month after his death & she refused to talk about Ray until the end of the 1990s.
During a 1956 engagement at the Desert Inn in Las Vegas, Ray met up with a young Elvis Presley, who had just bombed at the same venue. Ray had been one of Presley's biggest inspirations as a teenager in Memphis. Elvis had the performance style & stage shaking mania pioneered by Ray. The singers enjoyed a friendship that lasted until Presley's early death in 1977.
Ray also had a “beard” in news columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, despite the wrath incurred on both of them by Frank Sinatra. Ray's conquest of the pop charts in 1951, holding the top 3 spots at once had come at a time when the once, outraged Sinatra. He was a little unhappy to be replaced by a raging, flaming fag cry-baby, & he was maddened by the fact that the love of his life Ava Gardner had an obsession with the singer. Sinatra held a lifelong grudge.
In 1964, Kilgallen, who had nurtured & supported Ray through so many ups & downs, was found dead in her apartment. It was speculated that she was murdered by someone who thought that she was delving deeply into JFK’s assassination. She had reportedly uncovered some very damning evidence that linked Jack Ruby to a criminal plot.
After Kilgallen’s death, Ray was back to booze, pills, & anonymous hook ups with men. His recordings & stage performances suffered. At 50 years old, Ray was diagnosed with cirrhosis.
In 1974, Ray played the London Palladium. In an echo of his friend Judy Garland before him, 20 years after he shook the Palladium audiences, Ray enjoyed an unprecedented come back with a 15 minute standing ovation.
Sadly, like Garland, Ray was one of those performers born to destroy themselves. After relapsing back to booze & pills, he slipped into a coma on February 24, 1990, surrounded by friends. He was only 63 years old.
He was the most controversial performer alive in his day. He captured more imaginations and minds with his heartbreaking voice and tearful lyrics than anybody had before. Ray had taken the formidable handicap of hearing impairment & he used the personal pain to bring out his heartbreaking voice. Ray was a gay man, who some people thought sounded like a girl, with a hearing aid sticking out of his ear. Is there any way that Ray could be any more an outsider? Ray is buried here in Oregon.
Ray: “Above all thing, a man must be masculine But when he has the desire to express emotion, he suppresses himself because he doesn’t think it’s manly. Ordinarily a man can’t be as demonstrative as I am when I sing, people wouldn’t understand it. But I get fan letters from men. Women in my audiences see reflected in me all the emotion & tenderness & thoughtfulness that unfortunately the American male doesn’t have time for today.”
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