Ray Charles, an Emmy-winning choral director, lyricist and composer who worked with Perry Como for three decades, sang the theme song for the television sitcom “Three’s Company” and didn’t mind being known as “the other Ray Charles,” died Monday at his Beverly Hills home. He was 96. He won two Emmy awards and received eight other Emmy nominations, for writing special vocal material, music and lyrics, music direction and arrangements
We first met at the Las Vegas Hilton in the early 1970s, when I was the music director for Perry Como’s singers for that particular show run and Nick Perito was Perry’s music director. Ray brought some new vocal charts and was just delightful to work with. Like Perry, a quiet and, as you say, a dear man to everyone. I loved his monthly calls for so many years.
Charles’ choral style raised hackles in the studio when he began recording in the 1950s. The sound engineer told him that the group’s soft, whispering tones would be obliterated by surface noise on the record. “I told them that was their problem,” Charles said in Joseph Lanza’s book, “Elevator Music: A Surreal History of Muzak, Easy-Listening, and Other Moodsong” (2004). “My whole theory of singing,” he said in the book, “is that you were singing to someone no more than two feet away, like a lover.”
His name often caused confusion despite obvious differences from the black, blind soul singer.
One time during the Reagan Administration the white Charles was invited to join the line of Kennedy Center Honors guests allowed to meet the president. When Reagan was handed a card with Charles’ name on it, he did a double-take and quipped, “I didn’t know you came in two colors.”
He wound up singing the “Three’s Company” theme song (with Julia Rinker Miller) by accident.
He was asked to teach the tune (“Come and knock on our door. We’ve been waiting for you …”) to the show’s stars — John Ritter, Suzanne Somers and Joyce DeWitt — but their efforts after an hour’s practice were not promising.
Asked by the producers how the trio was doing, Charles was tactful. “I said, ‘I’m not sure,'” he recalled in 2008. “They said, ‘Well, we are. We like the way you sing it.’ And that’s how I got it.”
During the late 1970s, Charles worked on The Muppet Show, creating special material, writing arrangements and producing the vocals for Jim Henson’s characters during its last two seasons of production in London.
Charles received the American Society of Music Arrangers and Composers’ Irwin Kostal Award in 2004 and ASCAP Foundation’s Life in Music Award in 2013.