Ray Stevens entertaining at CabaRay in Nashville

Good Mornin’! Good Mornin’!

As the fourth child in a Delta farm family, I never controlled the radio or record player or cassette player or even the eight-track in the vehicles I was carried around in. I didn’t have my own radio or record player till junior high or so but by that time my musical influences had solidified and firmly cemented. Take a look at my iPod/iPhone and you’ll find an eclectic mix that continues to this day with rock, blues, Top 40, Broadway show tunes, a little country, Christian contemporary and Ray Stevens. Yes, I give the Georgia born entertainer his own genre. The comedic yet sometimes serious entertainer has been part of my musical history probably since I was born.

Everybody knows his hit “The Streak” from the 1970s but my oldest brother, John, had his albums before that so Guitarzan, Ahab the Arab and Jeremiah Peabody’s Polyunsaturated Quick Dissolving Fast Acting Pleasant Tasting Green and Purple Pills and many others are part of my musical foundation. Whether lip syncing or actually singing, Stevens songs will put a smile on any person of any age who’s in a funk. The piano player who has been nominated for 11 Grammy’s with two wins, moved to Nashville in the early 60s and started writing quirky hit songs as well as recording session work before he hit the top 10 with Ahab the Arab and hit the road touring.

After a multi-decade career, Stevens decided to open his own show in his adopted hometown in a dinner theatre he designed and built from scratch paying homage to the old school Las Vegas showrooms – CabaRay. Stevens performs throughout the week and has a Christmas show heading the stage currently. He said he got the idea when he saw so many tour buses in and around Nashville.

“Just like they had been coming to Branson in the 1990s. I thought Nashville was going to experience an influx of tourism,” he said. “Nashville could use a small theatre and I’m ready to stop traveling. If I built a small theatre, I could stop traveling.”

So, he did – CabaRay was born and dubbed so by Ray’s brother, John. Located at 5724 River Road in Nashville, Stevens plays shows and has a piano bar manned by another talented pianist as well. One of his backup singers also sold real estate so he asked her to find some land. She did and the projected nine-month build stretched to a two-year actual construction build with Ray’s fingerprints all over the blueprints as he brought in ideas from all the theatres he had played.

“It’s like an old Las Vegas showroom. One of my favorites to play was the old Desert Inn. When I drew the CabaRay, I remembered how the Desert Inn showroom was laid out. The showroom was called the Crystal Room and we’ve got a couple of big crystal chandeliers in the showroom. It seats 500 for dinner and 200 upstairs in theatre seating for folks who don’t want to have dinner. But they are all great seats and great sound.”

CabaRay opened last January and Stevens’ show averages 90 minutes.

“If you come to the CabaRay, you won’t forget it,” Stevens promised.

To learn more, check out www.RayStevensCabaRay.com or give them a call at (615) 327-4630. As a life-long fan, I wanted to talk to him and hear about his career and his new venture.

We were connected by Jerry Kennedy of Mercury Music fame who had produced Stevens. Kennedy was a renowned session player whose work can be heard on near about every country hit from the late 50s through the 70s. Oh, yeah, and he’s Gordon Kennedy’s dad – the expert guitar player who played in Christian bands and wrote hit songs including one for Eric Clapton. Bryan Kennedy, another son of Jerry’s, writes hit songs for Garth Brooks and is one of the finest entertainers known to man and grew up hanging around Stevens and Jerry Reed and the like. They all have much more to their pedigree and resume than I can write about here.

Ray Stevens isn’t even his real name. His producer didn’t like his actual name and decided to change it.  

“I was born Harold Ray Ragsdale and I made my first record in 1957 and Ken Nelson the producer at Capital Records didn’t like the name Ragsdale,” Stevens said. “I said, ‘you’re gonna make my momma mad if you change my name.’ And he said, ‘What’s your momma’s maiden name?’ I said Stevens and he said, ‘Well, that’s a good name.’ Then I said, ‘Well, you’re gonna make my father mad.’ And he said, ‘Well, we can’t make everybody happy. Do you want to make a record?’ And I said, ‘Sure, call me anything you want to.’”

Growing up in Georgia, his family “wasn’t that musical” but his mother insisted he take piano lessons at the age of six as he described he had a “propensity for it.” In high school, he put together a band and not just any run of the mill garage band.

“My band had some pretty good pickers in it. Jerry Reed was my guitar player,” he said. “We played Georgia Tech fraternity parties and things like that. But I went to Georgia State and majored in Music Theory and Composition.”

He had first recorded at age 17 and played the Georgia Jubilee and met Shelby Singleton, a producer at Mercury Records and he brought along (another of my favorite artists) the Big Bopper. In 1962, he got his first big break.

“I was on the show and Shelby saw me and he became the head of A&R (artist and repertoire) at Mercury and called me and asked me if I wanted a job. I said, ‘well, doing what?’ And he said, ‘You’ll be an assistant in the A&R department.’ And I said, ‘ok, great.’ And I moved to Nashville and got to play on hundreds of sessions. The first guy I met when I moved up here to work for Mercury was Jerry Kennedy because Jerry had already been working with Shelby. So, I was assistant number two.”

In Nashville less than a month, Stevens wrote and recorded Ahab the Arab for Mercury. The song was a hit and put him on the road and out of the session recording work.

“I’ve always lived in Nashville and I never wanted to leave what was a small city. It’s a big city now with terrible traffic but I’ve got my roots here,” he said. “The other music centers in New York and LA were so crowded I never wanted to move.”

Stevens would work at several major labels – Mercury, Capital, RCA, Warner Brothers and more. Known for his keyboard and piano playing, he also plays guitar “just bad enough to be believable as Tarzan playing guitar.”

The song Guitarzan was written by Stevens but he didn’t have it titled until Bill Justice – musician, arranger, and sax player – called him and said he had a song title for him. Guitarzan almost didn’t get out though. Stevens was at Monument Records at the time and Fred Foster who owned the label didn’t like it.

“I said, just take a chance and sure enough it became a big hit,” he said.

Backing up to his session work, Stevens played trumpet for some Elvis songs and had a part in The Archies.

“I was in New York and a friend of mine was singing background on The Archies but they needed somebody to record some hand claps, so I went in and overdubbed some hand claps. I was just there doing what I could.”

The Elvis work came as Stevens had been hired to “do whatever needed doing. My brother-in-law was Elvis’ producer – Felton Jarvis. Charlie McCoy and I were in there and we were just waiting for marching orders. They wanted to do some songs with twin trumpets like the Tijuana Brass. We both played trumpets and went to our cars and got our trumpets and came in and played it.”

We had to talk about The Streak and he told me how it came about.

“I was flying back to Nashville and was reading those dumb magazines they have and Newsweek or something like that – in the back, they have those little blurbs – and one was about a college student in California who took off his clothes and ran through a crowd and they called it streaking. I thought oh boy, that’s a great idea for a song if this catches on.”

Well, it did and he started penning lyrics before the plane touched down.

“We went to the studio and recorded it and by the time I could put the record out there were 12 or 13 streaking records out,” Stevens said. “But mine was the one that made it.”

When folks recognize Stevens, he gets a lot of “don’t look, Ethel” and “It’s me again, Margaret” and sometimes people say several key phrases from songs.

I asked him about his musical influences and he quickly pointed out another famous Georgia born keyboard player.

“Ray Charles was my biggest influence.”

Ray Stevens a comical and musical genius who combined all of his talents to create a niche no one will ever duplicate. He’s one of a kind, the real Guitarzan – Ray Stevens.

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A Rebel, a Statesman — or Fightin’ Okra — and even a Trojan, I’m the Sunflower County farm boy with no green thumb who longed to live in the big city, got his wish and now is working his way back to the farm.

A freelance writer, middle-of-the-road-conservative and wannabe fry cook, I look to bring native Mississippi folks and businesses to your attention through my looking glass.

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