BAY-BAYY-yYyYeEeEeEe
MARGIE HENDRIX, “(Night Time Is) The Right Time” | 1959
Ray Charles didn’t so much sing and play piano as much as succumb to the spirit of music and let it funnel through his body. Lyrics were, like lines to the best actors, suggestions. He was “method” in how he repackaged them into his own poetic time with the music, and then delivered them in that piney, breaking voice.
Charles was also a king of singing “baby.” The word never served as a standby between lines or verses. His “babies” expanded into their own complex form of poetry within the song, looping and climbing and falling. “Baby” was, every time he sang it, the most important person in his world.
Which is why it’s so remarkable to hear someone else sing with him in a song and — no way else to say it — show him up. And even out-“baby” him. That’s what Margie Hendrix, of his backup group the Raelettes, managed in the sweaty, somewhat raunchy 1959 Charles single, “(Night Time Is) The Right Time.”
Some backstory: Charles was married at the time, but he slept around; he had numerous children outside of his marriage. Hendrix was his lover in one of these affairs; they had a child, Charles Wayne Hendricks, born the same year “(Night Time Is) The Right Time” debuted. By the early ‘60s, Hendrix demanded that Charles leave his wife. Charles refused and eventually fired Hendrix from the Raelettes. Her dismissal apparently started a long spiral of alcohol and heroin addiction for Hendrix that led to her somewhat mysterious death in New York in 1973.
But it was when “(Night Time Is) The Right Time” was recorded — live, at an Atlantic studio in New York in the fall of 1958 — that things were just heating up between Charles and Hendrix. A lusty sax kicks off the song, with Charles and his band pounding out a mid-tempo hip-swing. Though the tune was “borrowed” from the singer-songwriter Nappy Brown, it could’ve been written about Hendrix and Charles — two lovers singing to each other over the piano, and just wanting to do it. On the piano.
The lyrics are simple, direct, and urgent, with a fun wink: Charles makes the case, using a couple of come-hither “baby” pronunciations, that night time is the right time to get in the sack with a lover. But Hendrix and her fellow Raelettes answer in the background, over and over, “Night and day, night and day.” Night and day. This is a 24-hour operation, with no set stopping point.
It even gets a little Freudian, as Charles references a dying mother and a crying father. Then he sings (with the Raelettes backing):
WHOA whoa bihh–behhhhh-na (night and day)
When I come home bay–bEE now (night and day)
I want you to hold my hand (night and day)
Yeah, tight as you can (night and day)
The metaphor is abundantly clear and tender.
Then, at the end of that second verse, Charles says, almost offhand, “Sing your song, Margie.”
Hendrix comes in like a guitar solo — like a horse out of the gate, or maybe a lover rushing into an unlocked back door of Charles’s house. She sing-hollers four quivering, pawing “babies” that are the mountaintop type, her voice wailing and desperate.
BAY-BAYY-yYyYeEeEeEe
BAY-BAYY-yYyYeEeEeEe
BAY-BAYY-yYyYeEeEeEe
Whoa BAY-Bay-uH-AyYyYeEeEeEe
One thinks of Merry Clayton’s goosebump-inducing screeches on the Rolling Stones “Gimme Shelter.” But that would come 10 years later. Hendrix is setting the standard here. She beseeches Charles for the next one minute and 12 seconds of the song with her tease-squeeze-don’t leave pleas.
When Charles comes back in, he is clearly moved and inspired by Hendrix. He belts out five — FIVE! — incandescent “babies.” In any other context, they would be everything Charles proved to be in his life: wholly original, primal, seductive, supreme, anointed by the spirit.
But it’s kind of hard to truly hear him. Hendrix’s “babies” are still echoing in our ears.
