It’s Those Extra Few Things

Home to the mountains — the Hall of Fame he rebuilds turns and counts him among its legends.

Eddie Ray leaves the Copyright Royalty Tribunal in 1989, after eight years of federal service, and Washington might reasonably have expected him to slow down. He doesn’t. What follows is a third act nobody would have scripted for him: a return home, a museum raised back from the dead, a shelf of institutional honors, a book, and — deep into his tenth decade — one more thing still being built.

Texas

There are Texas years first. For two decades, Eddie Ray works as an independent consultant to the record business he knows from every angle — sales, distribution, publishing, the label desk — while clients around the country keep calling on the man who once built Imperial’s national network from nothing, station by station. He also starts writing in a new form: five small books of poetry, self-published, with plain, direct titles — Natural Expression, Straight From the Heart, Reflections on the Joys & Sorrows of the Heart, Thorns and Roses, Up from the Mountains.

In 1991, a health scare arrives that is supposed to slow him down. It doesn’t hold. Friends keep finding him exactly where he’s always been — on a rehearsal floor in East Berlin readying a performance, at a Hollywood dinner table with his old friend Lou Rawls, in a Culver City office trading notes with the next generation of industry lawyers. A man who has spent his whole life doing the extra few things doesn’t stop doing them over one bad year.

Home to the Mountains

Then, in time, the road turns back toward home. The music man returns to North Carolina — to the same mountains that, decades earlier, had no high school willing to teach him — and sets about making sure the state’s music is never forgotten again.

The North Carolina Music Hall of Fame had been founded years before and had gone quiet, its original home in Thomasville shuttered. Eddie Ray helps bring it back to life, serving as the institution’s Operations Director and Vice Chairman, working alongside Mike Curb — the teenager he once mentored at the Capitol Tower, now a power in his own right — and a devoted board, to move the museum to Kannapolis and build, from very little, the working foundation of a modern institution. Its first office is a converted city jail; today the Hall of Fame occupies a home of its own on Dale Earnhardt Boulevard. The record man who once sold country music through the back doors of the segregated South now welcomes the whole state’s music home under one roof.

2009

That October night in Kannapolis is the same one this story opened with — only now it’s this chapter’s turn to stand inside it. Mike Curb — the teenager he once handed a producer’s contract, then a label of his own — steps up to hand him his own induction plaque. The tribute reaches all the way back to the grandfather born enslaved, honoring the distance between that auction block and this stage. He takes his place among the Hall’s roster of honorees, inducted into the very institution he had just spent years helping to rebuild.

That same year, the Recording Academy sends its own tribute: a certificate marking fifty years of membership, a number he will carry past sixty in all, serving afterward for years as one of the Academy’s trustees. BMI’s own citation for “Hearts of Stone” hangs nearby — recognition for a song still finding new singers decades after the Jewels first cut it. Co-writer of a number-one record, inductee, and institution-builder, all in the same season.

The Book

By then, Eddie Ray has also started setting his own record straight, in his own words. In Kannapolis, a few blocks from the Hall of Fame, he meets Barbara Jackson Hall — a longtime television news reporter, talk-show host, and magazine editor who by 2009 directs a small-business center at a local community college. Together they write Against All Odds: The Incredible Life Story of Eddie Ray — the record of a life that runs from a stock boy’s job in Milwaukee to the executive suites of Capitol and MGM, the grandson of a man once sold at auction becoming the first African-American executive of a major American record company. He titles it the only thing it could be called. It is filled, cover to cover, with sixty years of encounters — Ricky Nelson and Fats Domino, Allen Toussaint and Mike Curb, Irma Thomas and Pink Floyd — the kind of book built to stand alongside the other untold stories of influential African Americans in American music.

Rhodes Curb, via YouTube

Woven into its pages is also a brief page written in memory of his daughter Teresa, his “angel daughter” — often on my mind, he writes, forever in my heart — one thread, gently placed, in a very long tapestry.

Because that had always been his word for a life: a tapestry. Every mentor, every hardship, every door that opened after one had closed — another thread. By his tenth decade the tapestry holds a Hall of Fame rebuilt with his own hands, a shelf of self-published poetry, a college he founded from nothing, a presidential appointment, a number-one song, a memoir — and a family: a father, grandfather, and patriarch of a blended family that grew across three chapters of his life, with Jeanette by his side. Those who know him describe the same habits, repeated for decades: he remembers every name, answers every call, shows up early and stays late, writes the note, makes the introduction, takes the meeting with the young stranger nobody else has time for.

Still Building

At ninety-seven, an age when most men are long done building anything, Eddie Ray builds one more thing: The Ray Foundation, established to carry music and the arts forward to the next generation. His family carries that work forward today. Around it, the fuller record of his career — the photographs, letters, records, and pages of more than sixty years in the business — is gathered into The Eddie Ray Library of Creative Excellence, so that anyone who wants to pick up a thread of that tapestry still can.

That weave is unfinished on purpose. There is always room for one more thread, one more name remembered, one more young person given the five minutes nobody else would give them. To every young person watching, told what they cannot do, his own life is the answer: the odds can be beaten. He beat them. It is the same lesson his father gave him at a Franklin bus stop, the year a sixteen-year-old boy left home carrying a stack of books tied in twine:

It’s those extra few things you do that make you stand out.

His father, Andrew Ray