Album: Ray Charles

Sings For America Rhino/Warner / Thanks For Bringing Love Around Again, Crossover/XIII Bis

Even before last September, few peoples could match the eagerness with which Americans burst into patriotic song at the drop of a hat or the raising of a flag. Since then, things have grown even more jingoistically compacted: as well as having some deluded soul diva or country cupcake warble the national anthem at the start of each game, the country's recent baseball World Series also featured patriotic singing during the traditional "seventh inning stretch" intermissions, most of which were put to shame early on in the series by Ray Charles's majestic rendition of "America The Beautiful". It was a thoughtful, soulful interpretation that enriched the notion of nationhood with a vulnerability often absent from anthems. It was based on a version that first appeared on Charles's A Message from the People, a 1972 album that furnishes the lion's share of the new Sings for America compilation, a collection of national, regional and gospel anthems leavened with a sprinkling of questioning humanist songs such as "Imagine", "Abraham, Martin and John" and "Sail Away". It's a much more agreeable set than Charles' latest bona fide release Thanks For Bringing Love Around Again, a tragic affair that finds the singer trapped in a jazz-funk hell featuring the nastiest of Eighties keyboard synth tones and cheesy synthetic horns. Out of date, out of style and out of place, it's a wasted opportunity to engage with modern R&B by, say, working with Macy Gray or D'Angelo.