Ray Stevens audio track: "Earth Angel"...

Several months ago back on May 25th I uploaded the Ray Stevens audio track of "Earth Angel". The song is on his Nouveau Retro album. The definitive version for a lot of people is the recording by The Penguins, a rhythm and blues group, who took the song to number one on the Rhythm and Blues chart and into the Pop Top-10 (peaking at number 8). There was also a rendition of the song out in the same year by The Crew-Cuts, a group that specialized in covering Rhythm and Blues songs for the Pop music market. In those days (early to mid '50s) recording artists or their songs didn't freely cross-over from one music format to another as is often commonplace today. 

In those days if there was a big selling hit in the country music market, for example, pop radio disc jockeys would demand a recording of the song by a pop music artist rather than play the country music recording. The same was true for Rhythm and Blues. If a song in that format was a big sales hit then pop music stations would want a recording of the song from a pop music artist rather than play the Rhythm and Blues recording. In Country music most disc jockeys preferred country artists stick with country music rather than bring in "outside music" from the pop and rhythm and blues worlds. 

Some recording artists in the country format were able to break such unwritten rules due to their overwhelming popularity while other country singers actually had some of their recordings and albums reaching the pop music charts...a rarity for country music in the '50s...but a recording artist like Ray Stevens absorbed all kinds of music in his youth and because of that he's never been one to be tied down to one music format. Musically non-conformist his songs and his albums have appeared on pop and country charts; and for a stretch of, let's say 10 years (1969-1979), his music routinely appeared on both the pop and the country charts...usually simultaneously. There were several appearances from Ray on the Rhythm and Blues charts in the early 1960s. Since 1980 he's been marketed as country as well as country comedian but, to me, Ray Stevens remains uncategorized and uneasily defined and I like it that way!!

Ray's rendition of "Earth Angel" is fabulous, in my opinion, and as of this writing it's gotten 914 YouTube plays. In mid July, when I wrote a blog entry about the YouTube play for the audio tracks on Nouveau Retro, the play total for "Earth Angel" was 878. Now with 914 that's a pickup of 36 organic plays in less than a month.