(Credits: Far Out / Album Cover)
Tue 11 November 2025 7:55, UK
After The Beatles broke up in 1970, the four quarters set off on solo careers of varying levels of success. John Lennon continued to make music with his wife in the Plastic Ono Band, Paul McCartney continued with Wings, and Ringo Starr embarked on a solo career oft-adorned with all-star collaboration. Meanwhile, George Harrison set about bringing his prolific creativity to the world for the first time, unshackled from the dominion of Lennon and McCartney.
Throughout the 1970s, Harrison remained culturally relevant with a series of highly acclaimed releases highlighted by 1970’s triple album All Things Must Pass and 1973’s follow-up, Living in the Material World.
By the late-1980s, Harrison had hit a notable creative drought. He hadn’t had a high-charting hit since 1981’s ‘All Those Years Ago’, and his previous US number one was 1973’s ‘Give Me Love (Give Me Peace On Earth)’.
In an effort to change the tide, Harrison began working on a new album, to be titled Cloud 9. Working with ELO’s Jeff Lynne as producer, the former Beatle started a new chapter in his career, which yielded a number one single with ‘Got My Mind Set On You’ and ignited a new friendship precursory to the formation of Traveling Wilburys.
The US and UK number one to end Harrison’s drought was an upbeat cover of James Ray’s 1962 original. The late Beatle first discovered Ray’s ‘I’ve Got My Mind Set On You’ in 1963 when visiting his sister Louise at her home in Benton, Illinois. With the insistence of his ever-encouraging sister, Harrison sat in with a popular local group, The Four Vests, for an hour or so at a local club.
George Harrison in the 1980s. (Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
“I went to New York and St Louis in 1963, to look around, and to the countryside in Illinois, where my sister was living at the time,” Harrison recalled in The Beatles Anthology. “I went to record stores. I bought Booker T and the MGs’ first album, Green Onions, and I bought some Bobby Bland, all kinds of things.”
While digging crates, Harrison also found Ray’s eponymous debut album, which included ‘I’ve Got My Mind Set on You’. At the time, Harrison was already aware of Ray’s work; his debut hit single, ‘If You Gotta Make a Fool of Somebody’, was a common feature of early Beatles sets.
Ray, just five feet tall, was commonly known as Little Jimmy Ray during his early musical exploits of the late ’50s. In 1959, he recorded ‘Make Her Mine’ under this moniker, which peaked at number 41 on the Billboard chart. With little further success, Ray disappeared from the music scene, and by 1961, he was homeless, living on a Washington DC rooftop.
While busking on the pavements, Ray was re-discovered by Rudy Clark, a mailman with dreams of becoming a songwriter. 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)’. 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.
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. 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.
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. 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”.
The track became a hit for Harrison with the help of expert musicians like ji Keltner and Jeff Lynne, who sat behind the mixing desk at Harrison’s home studio of Friar Park. “We were all sitting in a room together up in Friar Park,” Keltner told Uncut magazine. “It was a really nice day; I was out on the patio a lot. I had brought from home my E-mu SP-1200, a drum sampling machine. You could sample any sound and then make up a little groove with it. I was having fun with it. George loved the idea of it too – but you know, we’re making a serious record. So, I hadn’t done anything with it.”
Eventually, the beat became a programme which the session musicians would riff over, “Gary Wright, who’s in the back of the room, starts to play these chord patterns on the keys and singing ‘I’ve got my mind set on you,’” he added. “Everybody kind of perked up and George started singing the song, because George was big on knowing the lyrics to all kinds of songs. They all started joining in.”
“Jeff said, ‘OK, Jim, put that down,’ so I made a program of it, they put it on tape, then they all went to town,” Keltner concluded. “It was just a little ditty, but that’s how that song got started.” The track would become a mammoth pop hit, and few know of its sad circumstances.
Today, Ray is remembered mostly for his hand in Harrison’s 1988 comeback classic. Listen to both Ray’s hauntingly foreshadowing original and Harrison’s number one reimagination below.
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