Listen to both Ray’s hauntingly foreshadowing original and Harrison’s number one reimagination below. Today, Ray is remembered mostly for his hand in Harrison’s 1988 comeback classic. Remembering the single, Harrison decided to honour Ray’s memory some 25 years later with a ramped-up pace and the omission of some of the song’s more negative lyrics: “Everywhere I go, you know / Bad luck follows me / Every time I’ve fallen in love / You know I’m left in misery”. Ray’s original recording of ‘I’ve Got My Mind Set on You’ is notably mournful in tone, reflective of his desperate condition in the early ’60s. Sadly, these subsequent efforts slipped under the radar of the charts, and in 1963 (the exact date is unknown), Ray was found dead after a drug overdose. Spurred by this success, Ray set about recording Clark’s ‘I’ve Got My Mind Set on You’ and a scattering of other hopeful tracks for his debut album. After getting signed by Caprice Records, Ray recorded Clark’s ‘If You Gotta Make a Fool of Somebody’, a huge hit on Billboard’s R&B chart that reached number 22 on the Hot 100 in 1962. Clark would later write or co-write classics like ‘Everybody Plays the Fool’, ‘Good Lovin”, and ‘It’s In His Kiss (The Shoop Shoop Song)’. While busking on the pavements, Ray was re-discovered by Rudy Clark, a mailman with dreams of becoming a songwriter. The way you jumbled up the lyrics sounds creepy, but it wasnt sung that way: he repeats 'Ive got my mind set on you' 4 times, but never says 'Ive got my mind set on you, child'. With little further success, Ray disappeared from the music scene, and by 1961, he was homeless, living on a Washington DC rooftop. In 1959, he recorded ‘Make Her Mine’ under this moniker, which peaked at number 41 on the Billboard chart.
Ray, just five feet tall, was commonly known as Little Jimmy Ray during his early musical exploits of the late ’50s.
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