In the early 1960s, a young British musician found himself flipping through record bins in an American town most people outside Illinois had never heard of. He was not looking for anything in particular. He was simply the kind of person who could not walk past a record store without going inside. What he pulled from that bin would stay with him for more than twenty years.

The later hit is George Harrison’s cover of “Got My Mind Set on You,” which reached number one in both the United States and the United Kingdom in 1987. But the story begins much earlier, with a writer named Rudy Clark and a singer named James Ray whose original recording almost no one outside a small circle of fans ever heard.

Rudy Clark Writes the Song

Rudy Clark was a songwriter working in New York in the early 1960s, a period when the city’s music scene was generating an extraordinary number of songs that would go on to define a generation. Clark had a gift for rhythm and repetition — for writing lines that felt simple on the surface but had a way of sticking in the listener’s mind long after the needle lifted from the groove.

“Got My Mind Set on You” was one of those songs. The premise was straightforward: a man determined, almost stubbornly so, to win the affection of someone he cared about. The repeated phrase at the heart of the lyric was not complicated poetry. It was more like a declaration made over and over until it became a kind of anthem. Clark understood that simplicity, done right, was not a weakness. It was the whole point.

Clark would go on to write other songs that found their way into American music history — including “Good Lovin’,” which became a hit for the Young Rascals in 1966. But in 1962, “Got My Mind Set on You” was just another track waiting for the right voice.

James Ray Records the 1962 Original

That voice belonged to James Ray, a rhythm-and-blues singer from Washington, D.C., who had already shown some early commercial promise. In 1961 he charted with “If You Gotta Make a Fool of Somebody,” a song that reached the top forty and suggested a genuine career might be building. Ray had a soulful, lived-in quality to his voice — the kind of delivery that made even an upbeat song feel like it carried some weight underneath.

When Ray recorded Clark’s “I’ve Got My Mind Set on You” in 1962, the result was a lively, energetic track rooted in the soul and R&B sounds of the era. It appeared on Ray’s album James Ray’s Got His Mind Set on You, released on the Caprice label. By most commercial measures, the record did not make a significant impact. It did not climb the charts the way his earlier single had. Radio did not pick it up in a way that pushed it into the mainstream conversation. For most listeners, it simply never arrived.

James Ray’s career did not continue on an upward path. He passed away in 1964, young and before his talent had found the audience it deserved. The recording he left behind sat largely undiscovered for years — except, as it turned out, by at least one person who heard something in it that he could not forget.

Harrison Finds the Album in Illinois

In 1963, George Harrison traveled to the United States to visit his sister Louise, who was living in Benton, Illinois — a small town in the southern part of the state. Harrison was twenty years old, and The Beatles had not yet broken America. He was traveling quietly, without the weight of fame that would arrive just a few months later when “I Want to Hold Your Hand” changed everything.

During that visit, Harrison did what he always did when he had time and a record store nearby. He browsed. American music was something he and his bandmates had been absorbing for years — Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Carl Perkins, the sounds that had shaped their own playing and writing. In Illinois, away from Liverpool and away from the early pressures of their rising career, he found James Ray’s album.

Something about the track caught him. Whether it was the rhythm, the structure of the repeated phrase, or simply the feel of Ray’s performance, Harrison held onto the memory of that song for a remarkably long time. He did not record it in the 1960s or the 1970s. He carried it quietly through the years, through all the chapters of his life that followed — The Beatles, the solo career, the personal and professional upheavals of the decades in between.

Some songs stay with you that way. Not because they are the most famous thing you ever heard, but because they arrive at exactly the right moment and attach themselves to something you cannot quite name.

Recording With Jeff Lynne in 1987

By the mid-1980s, Harrison’s recording career had moved through several phases. The extraordinary commercial success of “My Sweet Lord” in 1970 had established him as a genuine solo artist. The years that followed brought both creative highs and quieter periods. When he returned to the studio in 1987 to record the album Cloud Nine, he brought in Jeff Lynne as co-producer — a decision that would shape the sound of everything on the record.

Lynne, best known as the architect of Electric Light Orchestra, had a production style built on lush arrangements, layered harmonies, and a studio clarity that gave songs a sense of warmth and space. The two men worked well together, and the collaboration would later extend into the Traveling Wilburys and the 1990s Beatles Anthology sessions. But in 1987, their immediate goal was making an album that felt alive.

Harrison brought Rudy Clark’s song to those sessions. He and Lynne reshaped it for a new era — keeping the momentum and the spirit of the original’s insistence while giving it a glossy, radio-ready production that was unmistakably of its time. The track drove forward with a confident rhythm, and Harrison’s vocal carried the familiar enthusiasm of a man who had genuinely loved this song for decades.

The music video, directed with a playful energy that suited the song’s mood, became a regular presence on music television. It helped introduce Harrison to listeners who had been too young for the height of his 1970s work, and it reminded older fans that the quiet Beatle still had something warm and joyful to offer.

From Obscure Album Track to Number One

“Got My Mind Set on You” was released as a single from Cloud Nine in the autumn of 1987. It climbed to number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in the United States and reached the top of the charts in the United Kingdom as well — Harrison’s first number one single in the UK since “My Sweet Lord” seventeen years earlier. The achievement was not lost on anyone paying attention. A song that had gone almost entirely unheard in its original form had traveled from a small record label in 1962 to the top of the charts in 1987, carried there by one musician’s long memory.

Credit belongs in more than one direction. Rudy Clark wrote a song with a hook simple enough to survive decades and still feel fresh. James Ray recorded it first, and his version remains the original — a genuine piece of early-1960s soul worth seeking out on its own terms. George Harrison recognized something in that original recording that others had missed, and he held onto it long enough to give it a second life.

That is not a common story. Most songs that disappear in their first release simply stay disappeared. The music industry moves quickly, and yesterday’s overlooked album track rarely gets a second chance. What made this case different was one young man in a record store in Illinois, flipping through bins far from home, who heard something the rest of the world had not yet caught up with.

Some musicians collect songs the way other people collect memories — carefully, over a long time, without quite knowing when they will need them. Harrison was that kind of musician. He kept James Ray’s recording somewhere in the back of his mind through all of it: the fame, the decades, the long journey from Benton, Illinois, to a recording studio in 1987. And when the moment was finally right, he brought it back.

A song that almost no one heard in 1962 became one of the biggest hits of 1987. It is the kind of story that reminds you why it is always worth stopping to flip through the record bins — because you never quite know what you might find, or how long it might stay with you.