“Chris is gonna find Ray Charles!” the queen cried ecstatically. “Chris is gonna find Ray Charles.”
So much baggage and backstory was packed into that joke. Wilson was among the first Black comics mainstreamed into American culture. His stardom coincided with the violence of the 1960s civil rights battles and the crisis of American confidence over Vietnam and Watergate. Around the same time, the American Indian Movement was demanding a new look at the legacy of European colonialism. Cesar Chavez and his United Farm Workers were asserting the humanity of Mexicans whose kingdom had been conquered by Spanish explorers.
These tensions were just below the surface of Wilson’s performance, coiled into his nervous smoking and darting eyes. But the brilliance of the bit was that it took into account the tremendous cultural power of this new world of forced amalgamations and global collisions. America the brutal, the bloody, the rapacious was also America the unfettered, the urgent, the new. Colonizer Columbus was destined to deliver woe, yes — but also to set loose the roaring genius of Ray Charles and so many others. The creative energy of the United States is inseparable from the friction.
The Big Question for American culture in 2024 is: How do we reconnect with this nuanced national identity? We’ve tipped way over to one side, into a relentlessly negative narrative of decline. Right and Left agree on almost nothing — except the proposition that we are a nation on the wrong track.
This demoralization has real-world implications. It is poisoning political discourse and turning blame into a booming business. It’s valorizing resentment and fueling fear. And it is empowering enemies of Western civilization who would like nothing more than for the story of American weakness to come true.
Oddly, perhaps, the epidemic of discouragement is rooted in mistaken ideas of American exceptionalism. The cultural Right is nostalgic for a past that never existed, when a homogenous nation enjoyed unprecedented peace and prosperity. The cultural Left seeks to correct a past of unrelieved violence and oppression. That the United States was neither as good nor as bad as its current critics imagine is a truth that can free us from the overheated politics of the present.
What does make America exceptional is its irresistible popular culture, which has saturated the world so completely that it seems at this point almost unremarkable. Popular music virtually everywhere on Earth bears genetic markers of American blues. Cinema, no matter the language, has a trace — or more — of Southern California in its accent. American technology is either adopted or copied the world over, as are American fashion brands.
It spreads so easily and mixes so thoroughly with countless local cultures because it is forged from differences, from inequalities, from tensions. American popular culture is never official; it is never mandated. It bubbles up from below rather than pressing down from above. It is made by people for people, with all the messiness and improvisation that implies.
In that sense, by staking a New World claim on American soil — by helping to initiate the many human collisions, the clashes of civilizations, the fortunes and misfortunes, the murders and matings and migrations — Christopher Columbus was indeed on his way to giving us Ray Charles.
Born in Jim Crow Georgia, orphaned in segregated Florida, blind from childhood, the man reportedly dubbed by Frank Sinatra as “the only true genius in show business” was a great conglomerator of sounds and rhythms. He inhaled the Delta blues, Appalachian folk music, Chicago jazz, Texas swing, Sunday morning gospel and Tin Pan Alley tunefulness — and exhaled the roots of soul.
All those traditions express, in one way or another, the shadows of oppression and inequality, as well as the sunlight of joy and creativity. They contain the scars and fecundity of people and tribes and societies rubbing against one another. They are equal parts heartache and hope. And when an artist finds that commonality and gives it full expression, the result speaks to humans everywhere.
In 1972, when Flip Wilson’s star was blazing, Ray Charles released his iconic — I use this word advisedly — recording of “America the Beautiful.” It was a time of domestic bombings, antiwar protests, racial confrontations, political assassinations, economic dislocation. He sang the song as it had never been sung, with the pain and the glory in soulful counterpoint. It was common ground for a divided people.
In 2024, we’re in search of another Ray.
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