Johnnie Ray

At 63 years old, Johnnie Ray physical status not available right now. We will update Johnnie Ray's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

John Alvin Ray (January 10, 1927-1927 – February 24, 1990) was an American singer, songwriter, and pianist.

Ray has been cited by analysts as a major precursor to rock and roll's advent as a result of his jazz and blues-influenced music as well as his animated stage person.

Ray Bennett, the "father of rock and roll," died on the radio in The Dalles, Oregon, Ray, who was partially blind, began performing on Portland radio stations at age 15.

He would later gain a local following his appearances in Detroit, where he was discovered in 1951 and later signed to Columbia Records.

Ray came out of anonymity in the United States with the release of his debut album, "Cry" and "The Little White Cloud That Cried," in which he, Ethel Merman, Marilyn Monroe, and others were part of an ensemble cast.

In 1957, his life in his native United States began to decline, and his American record label dropped him in 1960.

He never recovered a large following there and rarely appeared on American television after 1973.

Ray's fanbases in the United Kingdom and Australia remained strong until his death in 1990 from liver disease, including Elvis. Music historians have praised Ray's incredible stage appearances and melancholic songs as precursors to later performers, ranging from Leonard Cohen to Morrissey.

Early life

Johnnie Ray was born in Dallas, Oregon, on January 10, 1927, to parents Elmer and Hazel (née Simkins) Ray. Ray spent part of his childhood on a farm in Dallas, as well as older sister Elma. Ray began playing the piano at the age three and began singing in the local church choir at age 12. The family migrated to Portland, Oregon, where Ray attended Franklin High School after World War II.

Following a mishap during a Boy Scout ritual dubbed a "blanket toss," Ray became deaf in his left ear at age 13. Ray performed with a hearing aid in later years. He was almost deaf in both ears after surgery in 1958, but hearing aids improved his condition. Ray characterized his deafness as crucial to his career and performance style, saying, "My desire for sincerity traces back to when I was a child and lost my hearing." I was arrested. "I had an emotional desire to have a friendship with other people." Ray spent time as a bus kid and as a mill worker in Salem, after graduating from high school. In the interim, he played piano at various clubs in Salem and Portland.

Personal life

In 1951, a burlesque house, Ray was arrested in Detroit, Michigan, for accosting and soliciting an undercover male vice-squad police officer for sex. As he appeared in court, he pleaded guilty, received a fine, and was released. Detroit newspapers did not cover the story due to his anonymity at the time. Following his ascension to fame the following year, rumors of his sexuality began to spread as a result of the incident.

Marilyn Morrison, the daughter of the owner of the Mocambo nightclub, married Ray at the height of his American fame, despite her knowledge of his solicitation arrest. The wedding took place in New York a short time after he gave his first New York concert, which was held at the Copacabana. The New York Daily News covered the wedding in 1952, and it announced that guests included Mayor Vincent R. Impellitteri.

Morrison told a friend that she would "straighten it out" because she was aware of Ray's unorthodox sexuality. The couple divorced in 1954 after being divorced in 1953. Several writers have pointed out that the Ray-Morrison affair began under false assumptions, and that Ray had a long-term friendship with his manager Bill Franklin. However, a biography of Ray shows that Franklin was 13 years younger than Ray and that both their personal and business relationships began in 1963, many years after the Ray-Morrison divorce. Ray cited rumors about his sexuality for his marriage to Morrison in a 1953 newspaper interview with James Bacon.

Ray was arrested in 1959 in Detroit for soliciting an undercover officer at the Brass Rail, a bar that had been referred to as a haven for musicians by one biographer and later identified as a gay bar by another biographer. Following this second arrest, Ray went to trial and was found not guilty. Many people told biographer Jonny Whiteside that Ray was bisexual two years after his death.

During the thirteen years he lived, Ray's two biographers, Jonny Whiteside and Tad Mann, claimed he did not have a close relationship with a man or a woman. Ray, who was married with five children, had a strong relationship with his road manager Tad Mann. Mann (real name Harold Gaze Mann III), and actress Jane Withers were among the regular guests at his Los Angeles house in the late 1970s and 1980s.

Kerry Kollmar, Ray's youngest child who was not adopted after Kilgallen's death in 1965, was born under lawyer and researcher Mark Shaw's relationship with her mother, who later wrote about her. Kilgallen faithful to her husband for thirteen years, according to Shaw's two books, who denied accusations of his extramarital affairs because she had no evidence of any of them during the time period. Kollmar became careless, to the point that he brought a male lover into his and Dorothy's new home, a five-story townhouse on Manhattan's East 68th Street, in 1953. She and Kollmar decided to stay married strictly for company after Kilgallen put the two guys in a dangerous situation. They had a talk radio show that they watched from home every day that paid them large salaries and promoted Kollmar Broadway shows. According to a biography of Ray in the Saturday Evening Post edition dated July 26, 1952, "Dorothy and Dick" as their radio listeners knew them.

Kilgallen gave birth to a baby boy who was photographed for magazines and newspapers with her holding him, but never with a father. Ray recalled Kilgallen to his boss Alan Eichler several times and was left devastated by her tragic death in 1965. Ray never discussed or denied reports that he fathered Kilgallen's third child, according to Eichler. Eichler was not aware of the eyewitness accounts that Mark Shaw discovered years later, and Eichler did not inform Ray about potential fatherhood.

Ray suffered with alcoholism throughout his life, but newspaper and magazine articles about Ray did not reveal the severity of his drinking disorder. Ray was arrested in Boston for public intoxication on September 2, 1952, but he was released four hours later. He drank heavily before, according to biographer Jonny Whiteside. He was hospitalized with tuberculosis in 1960. According to Whiteside, he stopped drinking shortly after his recovery. His music was not available for purchase, and he did not appear on American television in the first half of the 1960s. As a result, American newspapers carried ads for his shows but reported nothing about him, including marital status, offstage behavior, or health problems.

Ray returned to American television in December 1966, but not elsewhere, with a program televised in Chicago, but not elsewhere, titled An Evening with Johnnie Ray. In the early 1990s, Whiteside produced a video of this performance, but Ray seemed emaciated and sick, according to his biography.

An American doctor told Ray that he was well enough to drink a glass of wine on a daily basis when he returned to the United States from a European tour with Judy Garland with Judy Garland in 1969. He then began to drink heavily, and his health began to decline. Despite this, he appeared on prime-time television in the United States many times in the 1970s. After the television ads were turned off, he continued touring, attracting major media interest outside of the United States, until he performed his final concert, a benefit for the Grand Theater in Salem, Oregon, on October 6, 1989. Ray appeared on television for many years after the National Enquirer started investigating and reporting celebrity drug use, but no mention was made of him during his lifetime.

Source

Career

Ray developed a unique rhythm-based singing style based on rhythm singers like Kay Starr, LaVern Baker, and Ivory Joe Hunter, whose influence was influenced by rhythm singers like Kay Starr, LaVern Baker and Ivory Joe Hunter's, which alternating between pre-rock rhythm and blues and a more traditional classical pop approach. At age 15, he began performing on a Portland, Oregon, radio station, sharing billing with Jane Powell, who later became a local young singer.

He appeared in comedy shows and theatre productions in Seattle, Washington, before relocating to Detroit, Michigan. Ray performed at the Flame Showbar, an African-American nightclub, in Detroit, where he established a following. Ray, when performing at the Flame, attracted the attention of Bernie Lang, a song plugger who saw him perform with local DJ Robin Seymour of WKMH, who was also on the dance floor. Lang travelled to New York to sell the artist to Danny Kessler of the Okeh Records label. Kessler came from New York, and Lang Lang and Seymour joined the Flame. "Well, I don't know," Kessler's response was, according to Seymour, "I don't know." This kid does well on the show, but it will not go on records."

It was Seymour and Lowell Worley of Columbia Records, who persuaded Kessler to have a test record of Ray. Worley requested that a record be cut at United Sound Studios in Detroit. Seymour told reporter Dick Osgood that there was verbal agreement that he would be cut off on Ray's three-way contract for three years. However, the contract mysteriously ended, as did Seymour's friendship with Kessler.

Ray's first appearance for the race name Okeh, the self-penned R&B number "Whiskey and Gin," was a minor hit in 1951. When executives at Okeh's parent company Columbia Records discovered that the Caucasian Ray had amassed a fan base of Caucasian listeners, he was moved to Columbia Records. With the double-sided hit single "Cry" and "The Little White Cloud That Cried," he ruled American popular music charts in 1952. Ray's debut, which sold over two million copies of the 78 rpm single, struck a chord with teenagers and he soon became a teen idol.

On January 6, 1952, Toast of the Town's first appearance on the widely circulated American program that officially changed its name to The Ed Sullivan Show in 1955.

Ray's performance style included theatrics that were later associated with rock and roll, such as tearing at his hair, falling to the ground, and weeping onstage. Ray's nicknames "Mr. Emotion," "The Nabob of Sob," "The Prince of Wails," and several others followed shortly.

In the film There's No Business Like Show Business (1954), Fox executives starred him, Dan Dailey as his father, Patrick O'Connor as his brother, Mitzi Gaynor as his sister, and Marilyn Monroe as his sister-in-law. In Rogue's Gallery, this was his only film other than a cameo as a police officer. The former was supposed to be released to theaters in 1968 but was not seen again or in public until NBC telecast it in 1972, but it never was sold to theaters. When Ray was asked why he never made another widely seen film after "There's No Business Like Show Business," he replied, "I was never asked."

More hit songs followed in the 1950s as both sides of the single "Cry"/"The Little White Cloud That Cried" (foregoing) continued. "Please, Mr. Sun," "Walkin' My Baby Back Home," "A Sinner Am I," and "Yes Tonight Josephine" were among the songs included. With "Just Walkin' in the Rain," he had a number one hit in the United Kingdom (which he had feared) during the Christmas season in 1956, he became the first one to dislike during the Christmas season. In 1957, he hit "You Don't Owe Me a Thing" again, peaking at number 10 on the Billboard charts in the United States. Despite his fame in 1957, he remained popular in the United Kingdom, defeating the attendance record at the London Palladium set by fellow Columbia Records artist Frankie Laine. He maintained a faithful fan base in Asia, especially in Australia.

Ray had a close friendship with journalist and television game show panelist Dorothy Kilgallen. Soon after his sudden ascension to fame in the United States, they became acquainted. Even as his American career depressed, they stayed close.

Ray's appearances at the Latin Quarter in New York and the Tropicana Resort & Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada, were two months before Kilgallen's death in 1965. He began his duties in the Latin Quarter immediately after an eight-month absence in Spain, during which Bill Franklin and his new boss Bill Franklin had extricated themselves from their roles with Bernie Lang, who had been in charge of Ray from 1951 to 1963. Ray and Franklin suspect Lang was to blame for Ray's demise in the United States and the substantial debts he owed the Internal Revenue Service.

Ray headlined a European concert tour with Judy Garland in 1969. On March 15, 1969, he served as the best man at her wedding to her late husband, nightclub manager Mickey Deans. Ray and Garland performed together in Denmark and Sweden; they performed in Stockholm on March 19.

Ray's American career resurgent in the early 1970s, although he hadn't released a single single album or single in over a decade. During 1970 and 1973, he appeared on television shows The Andy Williams Show and The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson three times. Bill Franklin, his personal manager, resigned in 1976 and cut off contact with the singer a few years later. His American revival was short-lived, as his career had already begun to decline as the 1980s came.

Alan Eichler was hired as his boss in 1981 and returned to an instrumental trio rather than with the big orchestras he and his audiences had been used to for the first 25 years of his career. The New York Times announced that Mr. Ray, who appeared in Marty's on Third Avenue and East 73rd Street in 1981, was "in the years since his first blush of success, he has been seen and heard so infrequently in the United States, it was also ironic because it was his rhythm and blues style of singing that aided [ed] lay the groundwork for Mr. Ray's rock-and-roll that changed his entertainment industry. Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Johnnie Ray, the Beatles' fledgling days, were among the three Beatles' favorites, according to Ringo Starr of the Beatles.

Ray appeared in Billy Idol's "Don't Need a Gun" video in 1986 and is name-checked in the song's lyrics. Ray was playing minor roles in Los Angeles, California, during this time period. According to a Los Angeles Times article about him during that year, he appeared there in 1987 "with a big-band band band." The Dunes Hotel in Las Vegas, Resorts International in Atlantic City, and the Vine St. Bar and Grill in Hollywood, where his performance was broadcast live by KKJZ ("K-Jazz") radio. A high-school gym in Alexandria, Louisiana, was the location for a Big Band Gala of Stars in February 1987, which featured short sets by Ray, Barbara McNair, and other aging singers.

Marla Gibbs, a producer from Ray and sitcom, was one of the few people to thank Billie Holiday's on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1986.

Although Ray's fame in the United States faded throughout the 1980s, Australian, English, and Scottish promoters booked him for major venues as late as 1989, his last year of performing.

Source