“You Ought To Change Your Ways”

“You Ought To Change Your Ways” is a thrilling, tight little R&B missive from Ray Charles’ 1969 album Doing His Thing. Like all of the album, “You Ought To Change Your Ways” was written by Jimmy Lewis and shows the lean, muscular, and pared-down side of Ray’s muse.

Sounding particularly aggrieved but, as is so often the case on Jimmy Lewis songs, ultimately powerless to better his own situation, the protagonist of “You Ought To Change Your Ways” is full of criticism and impotent demands. His woman is mistreating him, but her “love is so good” that he daren’t actually take a stand. And so his pitiful cycle will continue.

Jimmy Lewis frequently exposed the foibles of a pitiable form of masculine thinking on songs like this, adding fine details to make the situations seem all the more real (as in this song’s aside about paying the woman’s car note for her). And Ray was the perfect voice for them: he could make forceful demands and issue ultimata with the best of them, and could then pull back the curtain of pride to evince a fragile insecurity.

And that’s exactly what he does on the guitar- and brass-led “You Ought To Change Your Ways”. As the Raelets echo his vocals in their complementarily high and pretty way, Ray excitedly offers the suggestion – not an order, exactly – of the title, immediately tempering it with the realization that he’s “too weak to put you down”.

Particularly enjoyable is the hip, shameless rhyme of the lines:

Your love is so good I can’t overstep it
I’m a fool for you baby, Lord knows I can’t he’p it

The drums are busy, like the trebly lead guitar, on “You Ought To Change Your Ways”, and Ray’s piano is mixed very low. There’s only one brief solo during the song – shared by the guitar and trumpets – so Ray barely gets a break from his singing. It’s the key feature of the performance, as Ray snarls and hollers his way through a performance that come across more as humorous than poignant.

“You Ought To Change Your Ways” is the third song on Side 1 of Doing His Thing; it was not released on a 45.

Listen to “You Ought To Change Your Ways”

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