HIT THE ROAD, RAY:

Ray Charles, master of music who combined blues, gospel, country, dies at 73 (ANTHONY BREZNICAN, 6/10/04, AP)

Ray Charles, the blind singer and piano player who erased musical boundaries with classic hits such as What'd I Say, Hit the Road Jack and the melancholy ballad Georgia on My Mind, died today. He was 73.

Charles died of acute liver disease at his Beverly Hills home at 11:35 a.m., surrounded by family and friends, said spokesman Jerry Digney.

The Grammy winner's 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." [...]

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.

One of the most poignant things I've ever read, maybe by Greil Marcus or Peter Guralnick, was that no one ever had worse friends than Ray Charles, a blind guy who got addicted to heroin.

MORE:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/11/arts/music/11CHAR.html>Ray Charles, Bluesy Essence of Soul, Is Dead at 73 (JON PARELES and BERNARD WEINRAUB, 6/11/04, NY Times)

Drivin' That Dynaflow: His voice reedy and smooth, high-pitched and grumbling at
the same time, Ray Charles made every kind of American music his own. (VERLYN KLINKENBORG, 6/12/04, NY Times)

The beauty of teen pop is that it believes that love belongs only to the very young. Maybe so, but with one vocal phrase Ray Charles could make it plain that real need — the real complexity of sexual passion — comes with age. He was singing many of the same words as the bands I listened to, but he meant something entirely different. Even his piano said so. I don't know what I would have done as a kid if I'd heard a song like "Greenbacks," about the dire economy of love, or "It Should've Been Me," that ode to sexual envy. Songs like that were far too grown-up for young ears, far too full of the blues.

Ray Charles made every kind of American music his own, and he repaid every kind of American music with his keen attention.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 10, 2004 5:07 PM