Hit the Road Jack

"Hit the Road Jack" is a song written by rhythm and bluesman Percy Mayfield and first recorded in 1960 as an a cappella demo sent to Art Rupe. It became famous after it was recorded by singer-songwriter-pianist Ray Charles with The Raelettes vocalist Margie Hendricks.

Ray Charles' recording hit number one for two weeks on the Billboard Hot 100, beginning on Monday, October 9, 1961. "Hit the Road Jack" also got a Grammy Award for Best Rhythm and Blues Recording. The song was also number one on the R&B Sides chart for five weeks, thereby becoming Ray Charles' sixth number one on that chart. The song is ranked #387 on the Rolling Stone magazine's list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.

Notable recordings

Ray Charles

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Raymond Charles Robinson (September 23, 1930 – June 10, 2004), professionally known as Ray Charles, was an American singer, songwriter, musician, and composer. He was sometimes referred to as "The Genius", and was also nicknamed "The High Priest of Soul".

He pioneered the genre of soul music during the 1950s by combining rhythm and blues, Gospel, and blues styles into the music he recorded for Atlantic Records. He also contributed to the racial integration of country and pop music during the 1960s with his crossover success on ABC Records, most notably with his two Modern Sounds albums. While he was with ABC, Charles became one of the first African-American musicians to be granted artistic control by a mainstream record company.

Charles was blind from the age of seven. Charles cited Nat King Cole as a primary influence, but his music was also influenced by jazz, blues, rhythm and blues, and country artists of the day, including Art Tatum, Louis Jordan, Charles Brown, and Louis Armstrong. Charles' playing reflected influences from country blues, barrelhouse, and stride piano styles. He had strong ties to Quincy Jones, who often cared for him and showed him the ropes of the "music club industry."

The Road

The Road is a 2006 novel by American writer Cormac McCarthy. It is a post-apocalyptic tale of a journey of a father and his young son over a period of several months, across a landscape blasted by an unspecified cataclysm that has destroyed most of civilization and, in the intervening years, almost all life on Earth. The novel was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction in 2006.

The book was adapted to a film by the same name in 2009, directed by John Hillcoat.

Plot summary

An unnamed father and his young son journey across a grim post-apocalyptic landscape, some years after an unspecified disaster has caused another extinction event, destroying civilization and most life on Earth. The land is filled with ash and devoid of living animals and vegetation. Many of the remaining human survivors have resorted to cannibalism, scavenging the detritus of city and country alike for flesh. The boy's mother, pregnant with him at the time of the disaster, gave up hope and committed suicide some time before the story began, despite the father's pleas. Much of the book is written in the third person, with references to "the father" and "the son" or to "the man" and "the boy".

Hit

Hit is a verb meaning to strike someone or something.

Hit or HIT may also refer to:

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Hit the Road

Hit the Road (1941) is a crime comedy film featuring the Dead End Kids.

Plot summary

Delinquent gang members Tom (Billy Halop), Pig (Huntz Hall), Ape (Bernard Punsly), and String (Gabriel Dell) are trying to break out from the reformatory their confined to, but they are caught and brought to the parole officer Cathy Crookshank (Eily Malyon). All of the gang members are sons of gangsters, which makes it even harder for them to get paroled. They tell their superintendent this, and that they have no sponsor. To remedy this, Miss Crookshank asks the leader of the boys fathers' gang, Valentine (Barton MacLane), to come to her office. Valentine is barely released from prison. He is reluctant to help the boys, arguing that he is a reformed man and is now living on a farm with his wife Molly (Gladys George) and their daughter Pat (Evelyn Ankers). He has also decided to take a new name, "Ryan."

Miss Crookshank explains the boys’ predicament, however, and Valentine agrees to take them in under his wings. One of the younger members of the gang, Pesky, is also taken in by the ex-gangster. The would-be mobsters in reformatory are quite disappointed when they are sent away to the horse-breeding farm in the country instead of out into the city streets. When the boys are transported out to the farm, a gangster named Spike the Butcher (Edward Pawley), who had killed Valentine's men ten years earlier, follows Valentine to his farm in hopes of finishing the job and kill Valentine too. Spike brings his two henchmen, Creeper (John Harmon) and Dingbat (Shemp Howard), to ambush Valentine/Ryan in his new home. Unfortunately for Spike, district attorney Paul Revere Smith (Charles Lang), who is Pat's boyfriend, arrives at the farm at the same time. Later that day the delinquent boys try to steal Valentine's station wagon. Fortunately, the car has a flat tire and an old hunting dog gets in the way of the car, spoiling the boys’ plan to escape.