[Dixielandjazz] Brother Ray Charles R.I.P.

[TCASHWIGG at aol.com]

Grammy-Winning Crooner Ray Charles Dies
Blind Musician Was a Pioneer of Soul and R&B


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BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. (June 10) - Ray Charles, the Grammy-winning crooner who 
blended gospel and blues in such crowd-pleasers as "What'd I Say" and ballads 
like "Georgia on My Mind," died Thursday, a spokesman said. He was 73.
Just got this folks, One of my personal favorite entertainers has passed.

    Remembering Ray Charles             
            

Charles died at his Beverly Hills home surrounded by family and friends, said 
spokesman Jerry Digney.

Charles last public appearance was alongside Clint Eastwood on April 30, when 
the city of Los Angeles designated the singer's studios, built 40 years ago 
in central Los Angeles, as a historic landmark.

Blind by age 7 and an orphan at 15, Charles spent his life shattering any 
notion of musical boundaries and defying easy definition. A gifted pianist and 
saxophonist, he dabbled in country, jazz, big band and blues, and put his stamp 
on it all with a deep, warm voice roughened by heartbreak from a hardscrabble 
childhood in the segregated South.

"His sound was stunning - it was the blues, it was R&B, it was gospel, it was 
swing - it was all the stuff I was listening to before that but rolled into 
one amazing, soulful thing," singer Van Morrison told Rolling Stone magazine in 
April.

Charles won nine of his 12 Grammy Awards between 1960 and 1966, including the 
best R&B recording three consecutive years ("Hit the Road Jack," "I Can't 
Stop Loving You" and "Busted").

His versions of other songs are also well known, including "Makin' Whoopee" 
and a stirring "America the Beautiful." Hoagy Carmichael and Stuart Gorrell 
wrote "Georgia on My Mind" in 1931 but it didn't become Georgia's official state 
song until 1979, long after Charles turned it into an American standard.

"I was born with music inside me. That's the only explanation I know of," 
Charles said in his 1978 autobiography, "Brother Ray." "Music was one of my parts 
... Like my blood. It was a force already with me when I arrived on the 
scene. It was a necessity for me, like food or water."

Charles considered Martin Luther King Jr. a friend and once refused to play 
to segregated audiences in South Africa. But politics didn't take.

He was happiest playing music, smiling and swaying behind the piano as his 
legs waved in rhythmic joy. His appeal spanned generations: He teamed with such 
disparate musicians as Willie Nelson, Chaka Khan and Eric Clapton, and 
appeared in movies including "The Blues Brothers." Pepsi tapped him for TV spots 
around a simple "uh huh" theme, perhaps playing off the grunts and moans that 
pepper his songs.

"The way I see it, we're actors, but musical ones," he once told The 
Associated Press. "We're doing it with notes, and lyrics with notes, telling a story. 
I can take an audience and get 'em into a frenzy so they'll almost riot, and 
yet I can sit there so you can almost hear a pin drop."

Charles was no angel. He could be mercurial and his womanizing was legendary. 
He also struggled with a heroin addiction for nearly 20 years before quitting 
cold turkey in 1965 after an arrest at the Boston airport. Yet there was a 
sense of humor about even that - he released both "I Don't Need No Doctor" and 
"Let's Go Get Stoned" in 1966.

He later became reluctant to talk about the drug use, fearing it would taint 
how people thought of his work.

"I've known times where I've felt terrible, but once I get to the stage and 
the band starts with the music, I don't know why but it's like you have pain 
and take an aspirin, and you don't feel it no more," he once said.

Ray Charles Robinson was born Sept. 23, 1930, in Albany, Ga. His father, 
Bailey Robinson, was a mechanic and a handyman, and his mother, Aretha, stacked 
boards in a sawmill. His family moved to Gainesville, Fla., when Charles was an 
infant.
            
            
"Talk about poor," Charles once said. "We were on the bottom of the ladder."

Charles saw his brother drown in the tub his mother used to do laundry when 
he was about 5 as the family struggled through poverty at the height of the 
Depression. His sight was gone two years later. Glaucoma is often mentioned as a 
cause, though Charles said nothing was ever diagnosed. He said his mother 
never let him wallow in pity.

"When the doctors told her that I was gradually losing my sight, and that I 
wasn't going to get any better, she started helping me deal with it by showing 
me how to get around, how to find things," he said in the autobiography. "That 
made it a little bit easier to deal with."

Charles began dabbling in music at 3, encouraged by a cafe owner who played 
the piano. The knowledge was basic, but he was that much more prepared for 
music classes when he was sent away, heartbroken, to the state-supported St. 
Augustine School for the Deaf and the Blind.

Charles learned to read and write music in Braille, score for big bands and 
play instruments - lots of them, including trumpet, clarinet, organ, alto sax 
and the piano.

"Learning to read music in Braille and play by ear helped me develop a damn 
good memory," Charles said. "I can sit at my desk and write a whole arrangement 
in my head and never touch the piano. .. There's no reason for it to come out 
any different than the way it sounds in my head."

His early influences were myriad: Chopin and Sibelius, country and western 
stars he heard on the Grand Ole Opry, the powerhouse big bands of Duke Ellington 
and Count Basie, jazz greats Art Tatum and Artie Shaw.

By the time he was 15 his parents were dead and Charles had graduated from 
St. Augustine. He wound up playing gigs in black dance halls - the so-called 
chitlin' circuit - and exposed himself to a variety of music, including hillbilly 
(he learned to yodel) before moving to Seattle.

He dropped his last name in deference to boxer Sugar Ray Robinson, patterned 
himself for a time after Nat "King" Cole and formed a group that backed rhythm 
'n' blues singer Ruth Brown. It was in Seattle's red light district were he 
met a young Quincy Jones, showing the future producer and composer how to write 
music. It was the beginning of a lifelong friendship.

Charles developed quickly in those early days. Atlantic Records purchased his 
contract from Swingtime Records in 1952, and two years later he recorded "I 
Got a Woman," a raw mixture of gospel and rhythm 'n' blues, inventing what was 
later called soul. Soon, he was being called "The Genius" and was playing at 
Carnegie Hall and the Newport Jazz Festival.

His first big hit was 1959's "What'd I Say," a song built off a simple piano 
riff with suggestive moaning from the Raeletts. Some U.S. radio stations 
banned the song, but Charles was on his way to stardom.

Veteran producer Jerry Wexler, who recorded "What'd I Say," said he has 
worked with only three geniuses in the music business: Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin 
and Charles.

"In each case they brought something new to the table," Wexler told the San 
Jose Mercury News in 1994. Charles "had this blasphemous idea of taking gospel 
songs and putting the devil's words to them. ... He can take a gem from Tin 
Pan Alley or cut to the country, but he brings the same root to it, which is 
black American music."

Charles released "Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, Volumes 1 and 
2" in the early '60s, a big switch from his gospel work. It included "Born to 
Lose," "Take These Chains From My Heart (And Set Me Free)" and "I Can't Stop 
Loving You," some of the biggest hits of his career.

He made it a point to explore each medium he took on. Country sides were 
sometimes pop-oriented, while fiddle, mandolin, banjo and steel guitar were added 
to "Wish You Were Here Tonight" in the '80s. Jones even wrote a choral and 
orchestral work for Charles to perform with the Roanoke, Va., symphony.

Charles' last Grammy came in 1993 for "A Song for You," but he never dropped 
out of the music scene. He continued to tour and long treasured time for 
chess. He once told the Los Angeles Times: "I'm not Spassky, but I'll make it 
interesting for you."

"Music's been around a long time, and there's going to be music long after 
Ray Charles is dead," he told the Washington Post in 1983. "I just want to make 
my mark, leave something musically good behind. If it's a big record, that's 
the frosting on the cake, but music's the main meal."

Associated Press writer Dave Zelio contributed to this report



6/10/04