Johnnie Ray rehearsing at the London Palladium, 1953
’Johnnie Ray’s freakishness was accentuated. It wasn’t just his complete absence of emotional restraint, his use of make-up or his identification with Black American female performers; in the Life article, he is photographed wearing his hearing aid - not hiding his disability but making it an important part of his image. The desire for self-revelation went hand in hand with his whole approach of emotional honesty and nakedness: by displaying it so openly, he expressed a vulnerability unique in popular culture.
Ray’s determination not to hide his disability added to his strangeness, which, combined with the speed and scale of his popularity, resulted in a plethora of interpreations. In a New York Times review of Ray’s April 1952 Copacabana residency, the critic Howard Taubman observed how ‘this young man’s style speaks for young people beset by fears and doubts in a difficult time. His pain may be their pain. His wailing and writhing may reflect their secret impulses. His performance is the anatomy of self pity’.
But Ray knew exactly what he was doing. From his deep exposure to contemporary Black American styles - which he acknowledged where possible, itself an act of defiance in the early 1950s America - he realised that emotion was all-important. That was the gift; that was the key. ’I just show people the emotion they’re afraid to show,’ he said in April 1952. ’People are too crowded inside themselves these days. They’re afraid to show love. And boy, what is the primary existence for existing? It’s beauty and love.’’
“Epstein was the novice manager of a rough group from a nowhere town, yet, as his ghostwriter Derek Taylor told me: ‘Thinking big was what bound Brian and the boys together. They all did think big. Very high notions of themselves, and very high expectations. When he signed them up, when he had them in that office in Whitechapel, he told them, "I think I can help you.” He actually believed he could, and he was prepared to sit it out with them, with all their cheek and impudence… In a way they had a lot in common, just the vernacular was different.’“
