October 2003
H.E.A.R. Honors Ray Charles
JRay Charles, singer, pianist, saxophonist, composer, and
band leader, is a towering figure in popular music. He not
only defined modern soul music but also helped escape country
music and influenced dozens of rock singers. He performs with
a gospel fervor that brings to his concerts the atmosphere
of a revival meeting. He commands a huge and widely diversified
audience ranging from adolescents to foreign jazz connoisseurs
and critics, primarily because he started in rhythm and blues,
moved on into jazz, and then entered popular music. He has
been successful with ballads, blues, gospel music, rock 'n'
roll, and Broadway show tunes and still remains true to a
tradition rooted in the blues, spirituals, and Baptist gospel
music of the Deep South.
When Charles was a small child, his family moved to Greenville,
FL, where at the age of five, he started to go blind as a
result of glaucoma. He lost his sight completely within two
years and was placed in the St. Augustine (FL) School for
Blind, a state institution where he learned to read in Braille,
to play the piano and clarinet and to memorize music. He discovered
mathematics and its correlation to music and learned to compose
and arrange music in his head. From St. Augustine's he went
on to working with "traveling hillbilly bands" and rhythm
and blues combinations throughout the South as pianist, clarinetist,
and saxophonist. He also taught himself to arrange and compose
music, both in Braille and by singing the parts to a musician
who would write them down. Moving to the west coast "around
1950," Charles worked as a singer-pianist-arranger and began
to absorb the influences that eventually formed the basis
of his own uninhibited style
I In 1954, he formed his own band and put his sound on record.
At what is now considered to be an "historic" recording session,
he merged gospel with blues in a secular version of the old
gospel tune "My Jesus Is All the World to Me." His recording
of "I Got a Woman" subsequently caught on, and his first really
big hit record, "Georgia on My Mind" in 1959, won a Grammy
Award. Within two years, John S. Wilson, jazz critic of the
New York Times, reported that "almost every aspect of non-classical"
music was being "blanketed" by "the varied talents of a man
named Ray Charles." He cited him as a "pianist of exceptional
range who can move skillfully from basic, root blues to a
modern linear style." He also noted that the small Ray Charles
band had developed intro "one of the best jazz groups played
today" and that Charles' voice "worn through years of whooping
and hollering in his blues performances, shows a rough, leathery
quality in his relaxed approach."
His numerous subsequent hit recordings include "Hit the
Road, Jack," "I Can't Stop Loving You," "Crying Time" and
"Living for the City," all of which won Grammy Awards. His
albums were also hits: "Genius of Ray Charles," also a Grammy
winner, "Genius Plus Soul Equals Jazz" and "Modern Sounds
in Country and Western Music" are among them. Other major
hits include "Busted," "Hard Times," "Ruby," "The Right Time,"
"Let the Good Times Roll," "What'd I Say?" and "Hallelujah
I Love Her So." Many of the tunes he records and most of those
he plays before live audiences are numbers that he has composed.
Charles, also an internationally famous concert performer,
has appeared on stages ranging from Carnegie Hall to the Grand
Ole Opry and in countries from those of Scandinavia to England,
Italy, Spain, and India. He is noted for having been the first
musician to break the previously impenetrable barriers among
soul, jazz, gospel, and pop.
In 1964, he completed an around-the-would tour that included
90 concerts in nine weeks, playing to some 500,000 spectators
from Japan to Algeria. In the autumn of 1961, Charles made
history in Memphis, TN, when for the first time an integrated
audience attended his performance at the municipally owned
and operated city auditorium. He also has to his credit such
films as "Blues Brothers" and a variety of television appearances,
including "Country Comes Home," "Ray Charles--A Man and His
Soul," "A 40th Anniversary Celebration," and "A Tribute to
Martin Luther King, Jr.--A Celebration of His Life." "His
niche is difficult to define," noted Thomas Thompson in his
1966 profile of Charles in Life magazine. "The best blues
singer around? Of course, but don't stop there. He is also
an unparalleled singer of jazz, of gospel, of ballads, even
unlikely enough, of country and western. He has drawn from
each of these musical streams and made a river which he alone
can navigate.
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