Ray performed the song on his 1970 summer show and with the help of camera tricks and post-production special effects magic he was able to appear multiple times on the television screen. I'll be embedding the 1970 television performance and the official music video from 1999...
In the screen cap below Ray is seated at one of his various red pianos. The red piano became something of an identity for Ray going back to his years in Branson, Missouri. In fact, 2021 marks the 30th anniversary of his former music theater's grand opening. He performed at the theater for three seasons (1991, 1992, and 1993) and then he rented the theater to a production called Country Tonight. This production remained at Ray's theater throughout the rest of the 1990s and into the mid 2000s. The executives at Country Tonight shut down their program in 2003. Ray spent the remainder of 2003 and 2004 overseeing the theater as construction crews set about removing signage and logo's affiliated with the Country Tonight program. The interior was renovated and, according to Ray's memoir, new carpet was laid down with the goal to have it feel like the The Ray Stevens Theater of the early 1990s with some added features (like a huge remote control gorilla that would raise from the floor).
Ray's grand re-opening of his Branson theater took place in 2005 and he remained a concert attraction there until the end of the 2006 tourist season...upon which he sold the property to RFD-TV. A decade later, 2016, the property was purchased from RFD-TV by businessmen from Pigeon Forge...but getting back to "Freddie Feelgood" and his funky little 55th anniversary...
Unlike the performance of "Freddie Feelgood" on the 1970 summer show which no doubt tested the abilities of the computer graphics department this 1999 music video was probably a whole lot more easier to make by comparison...but this music video features a lot of neat special effects and quick edits. Ray, for example, appears in front of five differently dressed versions of himself. Even after all this time I still have no idea how they put this music video together. I've never bothered to ask but I'm sure computer whiz's out there no doubt know how the video was put together. Here we have five versions of Ray Stevens dressed in red, side by side, and then in the foreground we have a sixth Ray Stevens in a suit singing the song to us. It's a hilarious music video as one could imagine so I know you're going to enjoy it as you did the summer 1970 video clip!
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