Ray Charles – Yes Indeed! album art
Cover of the 1958 release, designed by Marvin Israel.
Yes Indeed! is the third album by Ray Charles, released in 1958 by Atlantic. It was the second of three Atlantic LPs that compiled Charles’ hit singles for the label.
The originally release from 1958 came with a cover design by Marvin Israel, featuring all-lowercase letters for the artist’s name and the title. For the 1964 re-release shown below, Loring Eutemey turned up the typographic volume quite a bit and even added a second exclamation mark to the title.
Source: https://www.flickr.com Uploaded to Flickr by Bart Solenthaler and tagged with “futuradisplay”. License: All Rights Reserved.
Cover of the 1964 re-release, designed by Loring Eutemey with a photo by Jim Marshall.
2 Comments on “Ray Charles – Yes Indeed! album art”
The original cover may follow the 1960s trend of not putting black artists on the covers of their albums, for fear of racist distributors and record stores not covering. This also happened with james brown and shirelles records.
Thanks, Matt. That’s an interesting observation. This sad phenomenon is related to women writers having to choose a male or gender-neutral pen name to increase their marketability, like Andre Norton. If this was indeed the reason to choose a photo of cheering white girls over a portrait of the artist, then it must have been at the instigation of the marketing department, and not the designer. Marvin Israel had no problem with showing photos of black artists, see Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers With Thelonious Monk (1958) or Ray Charles’ self-titled debut album for Atlantic Records from 1957.