From a bout of nostalgia in 1930, created by Hoagy Carmichael, covered by Louis Armstrong, to a symbol of the civil rights struggle, by Ray Charles, how a nonchalant song becomes a heartbreaking anthem.
Standards know how to bide their time. Some may have been created in a particular context, have aimed at a specific goal and then find themselves, a few decades later, in perfect harmony with another time, a new interpreter, a struggle, and suddenly go down in history. Such was the destiny of Georgia on my Mind.
Mother Earth, Soulmate: Louis Armstrong (1931)
Once is not custom, Georgia on my Mind was composed by its first performer, Hoagy Carmichael, with the help of his roommate, named Stuart Gorrell. It is therefore not a commercial production of Tin Pan Alley or a spiritual immemorial but of an original creation. Gorrell vividly told how his idea came to him and Carmichael. Lost in the New York of 1930, having “cold feet but warm heart” like the heroes of Bohemian of Puccini, the two accomplices had comforted themselves by thinking of the good old South, of the State of Georgia. Problem, both were from the South, but from Indiana, a rather cool part of the Midwest, and Carmichael had previously said that the song was addressed to his sister Georgia. Paradoxically, this indetermination will be the strength of the song when Louis Armstrong, a true native of the South, gives his version, full of pleasure and gasps of pleasure.
A lukewarm drunkenness: Billie Holiday (1941)
Ten years separate the versions of Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday. In the meantime, jazz has grown in sophistication. The piano introduction is softer, the tempo slower and the four quarter notes less marked. Everything is therefore both the same and different. Like Armstrong, Holiday lets the brass and the clarinet embrace and cuddle her, the better to surrender to nostalgia and welcome the warm intoxication of a breath of spring (« A song of you / Comes as sweet and clear / As moonlight through the pines », say the lyrics). But her sensuality is more painful, more poignant perhaps to find herself watched by sobbing. With it, the anecdote disappears. It no longer matters whether Georgia is a woman or a country, the memory of a homosexual affair or a fantasized South: Billie Holiday’s singing touches on the universal.
A Revolution: Ray Charles (1960)
Slow down the tempo again, let the sun crush you and feel the slowness, the great gravity of the South. His gaping carcass. This country is that of the Blacks of America not because they are the owners but because, for centuries, they have been exploited, dehumanized and made to die on the job. When you’ve paid so much for it, the land is yours, anchored to your body like a curse. Ray Charles was born in 1930 and is therefore the age of the song but he is from Georgia. Before being crowned “Genius” by the general public, he experienced all the humiliations that the South and Jim Crow laws could reserve for a poor and handicapped African-American. At the dawn of the 1960s, however, times began to change. In his hands, Georgia on my Mind becomes an anti-segregationist anthem that he refuses to sing in rooms where whites and blacks would be separated. No more question of simply evoking a region or a beloved woman: Georgia is now a manifesto in favor of civil rights.
In Majesty: James Brown (1971)
In the copious and somewhat messy discography of James Brown, Love Power Peace, remains one of the best testimonies of the great era of “super heavy funk” (copyright JB). Recorded at the Olympia in 1971 with overheated musicians, remained unreleased until 1992, it is a concentrate of pure energy to wring you from head to toe. Between two squalls, Georgia on my Mind recalls, however, that the “Godfather” native of South Carolina (state bordering Georgia), before reinventing himself as the supreme “sex machine” with roars and boosted dance steps, was first an extraordinary voice, full of feeling. The soulful voice in all its majesty.
All or Nothing: Patty Waters (1971)
How to end – since it must end well? Of Hardin Team to Willie Nelsond’Ella Fitzgerald et Peggy Lee to Gladys Knight, Bobby Bland or The Band, Georgia on my Mind has passed through thousands of hands and voices, telling new stories, arousing various emotions, also working to reconcile a little blacks and whites of the South. This is the great lesson of the standards: belonging to everyone, they plead for a single and multiple humanity, fraternal and tolerant. To conclude, we will therefore rely on a free artist – “free” –, close to Albert Ayler and admirer of Nina Simone. Patty Waters took all the risks, she offered herself naked to her songs, like others go to the sacrifice. All or nothing, either you like it or you hate it. And it’s very good like that.