With 1970’s “ My Sweet Lord,” Harrison had been the first Beatle to land a #1 single. When he recorded “Got My Mind Set On You,” George Harrison hadn’t made an album in five years, and he hadn’t had a #1 hit since “ Give Me Love (Give Me Peace On Earth)” topped the charts 15 years earlier. Clark lived until last year, when he died at the age of 84. Then, 21 years after that, something similar happened with “Got My Mind Set On You.” (It says sad things about the music industry that Rudy Clark’s two #1 hits both came from floppy-haired white guys covering songs that he’d written for Black artists.) James Ray didn’t live to see “Got My Mind Set On You” turn into a hit, but Rudy Clark did. A year later, the Young Rascals covered “Good Lovin'” and turned it into a #1 hit. In 1965, for instance, Clark wrote “ Good Lovin’” for an R&B vocal group called the Olympics.
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Rudy Clark kept writing songs, and some of those songs became hits. In 1963, Ray died of a drug overdose at the age of 22. Clark also wrote “Got My Mind Set On You.” Soon afterwards, Ray’s label went bankrupt, and his next few singles, released on another label, flopped. One of those songs was “If You Gotta Make A Fool Of Somebody,” Ray’s first single, and it was a hit.
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Clark was an aspiring songwriter who worked as a mailman in New York, and he heard Ray singing in a small club. Ray, a DC native, was a struggling teenage nightclub singer when Rudy Clark found him.
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By the time George Harrison bought that James Ray record, James Ray was dead.