Ray Stevens sings "It's Me Again, Margaret"...

Hello Ray Stevens fans!! A few days ago Ray uploaded a performance of "It's Me Again, Margaret" taken from a concert he gave at Casino Rama in 2015. The concert happened to be taped and performance clips from that concert have appeared on Ray's YouTube channel in the last couple of years. If you ever see Ray Stevens in person you'll know that he rarely performs songs on stage the way he recorded them in the studio and from concert to concert he adds or subtracts lyrics. I've often felt he does this to establish a connection to the people in the audience...he looks out into the audience and sometimes smiles throughout a performance and often during a comedy song he'll use facial expressions or engage in other kinds of non-verbal comedy...purely to entertain an audience. I wonder if he intentionally performs the way he does because he wants to make it look real and natural? There are plenty of recording artists who've remarked that they block out everything when they reach the stage and they focus on the performance. I think Ray focuses heavily on the songs while he's in the recording studio...working on making what he feels will be the best recording...but once he hits the concert stage he perhaps can't, or doesn't want, to pretend there's no audience sitting out there and so I imagine that he loves communicating with an audience and wouldn't have it any other way. He puts emphasis on different lyrics in each performance as if he's striving to allow his songs to evolve and change...rather than sound exactly as they did on a recording. He also does stand-up/one liners in between his songs. 

"It's Me Again, Margaret" is a standard in Ray's career. It's been in his concerts ever since 1984 and in 1992 he made a music video of the song for the VHS, Comedy Video Classics. He performs the song, most of the time, while wearing a rumpled hat...but sometimes he doesn't. In some of the real early performances he didn't use a hat...but later on he began to use one...and probably seeing that it got laughs it became a fixture and it's turned into a beloved prop. I've seen performances where simply holding up the hat drew large applause...they knew from seeing the rumpled hat that the song was soon to be performed...it's the only song that I can think of that gathers anticipatory applause. I was in the audience at the CabaRay in 2018 and as if on cue once he began talking about the hat the audience began to applaud...and once the song was concluded there was thunderous applause and whistles. 

Here now is Ray Stevens, from 2015, performing that beloved novelty, "It's Me Again, Margaret", but this is one of those rare performances where he's not using the rumpled hat...but it's still fun to watch..