Ray Charles, legend of soul, dies American master of styles was 73
Ray Charles, one of the most influential singers of the 20th century, who in the 1950s blended gospel and blues to create soul, and in later recordings demonstrated his mastery of jazz, standards, and country and western, died yesterday at his Los Angeles home. He was 73.
A spokesman said Mr. Charles died of complications from liver disease.
"He was a fabulous man, full of humor and wit," singer Aretha Franklin said in a statement. "A giant of an artist, and of course, he introduced the world to secular soul singing."
In the pantheon of postwar American popular music, only Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra exceeded Mr. Charles in impact. No singer, it's safe to say, exceeded him in ability.
"He gave himself to every song he sang," Presley biographer Peter Guralnick said yesterday. "What was most remarkable about his work was the way he synthesized nearly every strand of the American musical tradition, and infused it with an individual passion and the unmistakable sound of his unique voice."
Mr. Charles's best-known nicknames, "The Genius" and "Brother Ray," suggest how highly regarded he was by fellow musicians and the special place he held among African-Americans, a place he came to hold in the national culture as a whole. His stature was underscored when after Sept. 11, 2001, radio stations across the country turned to his rendition of "America the Beautiful" as an anthem of national solace and solidarity.
Mr. Charles's ability to make an age-old patriotic standard sound fresh and all his own indicates the phenomenal strength and character of his voice. That voice -- an earthy, powerful baritone equally adept at shriek, croon, or shout -- had a command of seemingly all American popular music.
Mr. Charles's hit recordings ranged from the riotous exuberance of "I've Got a Woman" and "Hit the Road Jack" to the C&W sorrowfulness of "I Can't Stop Loving You," and "You Don't Know Me," to the Tin Pan Alley nostalgia of "Georgia On My Mind." Like Mr. Charles's voice, each of those recordings long ago entered the nation's collective musical memory.
"I was born with music inside me. That's the only explanation I know of," Mr. 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."
Although his commercial popularity peaked nearly 40 years ago, Mr. Charles toured constantly, played to sell-out crowds, and continued to be a major figure. When such rock royalty as Bruce Springsteen, Michael Jackson, Billy Joel, and Bob Dylan gathered in 1985 to make the benefit recording "We Are the World," Mr. Charles dominated the performance.
"His sound was stunning -- it was like blues, it was R&B, it was gospel, it was swing . . . all rolled into one amazing, soulful thing," singer Van Morrison said in a Rolling Stone interview in April.
The winner of 12 Grammy Awards, Mr. Charles was among the inaugural inductees of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, in 1986. That same year he was one of the recipients of the Kennedy Center Honors.
Mr. Charles's final recording, "Genius Loves Company," which consists of duets with Willie Nelson, Diana Krall, and Gladys Knight, among others, will be released Aug. 31.
Mr. Charles's personal life contributed to his legend. Its harshness can be heard in the terrifying bleakness of "Lonely Avenue" or the keening melancholy of "Drown in My Own Tears." At 5, he saw his brother drown. Shortly after, he developed glaucoma and by the age of 7 was blind. (His thick black sunglasses became Mr. Charles's talisman, as instantly recognizable as Luciano Pavarotti's white handkerchief or Garth Brooks's cowboy hat.) His parents had both died by the time he was 17.
Mr. Charles was married twice and notoriously promiscuous. He could be imperious on the bandstand. He spent nearly two decades battling heroin addiction, finally shaking off the drug for good after being arrested at Logan Airport in 1965. It was a mark of his pridefulness -- and sense of humor -- that soon thereafter he recorded "I Don't Need No Doctor" and "Let's Go Get Stoned."
That incongruity mirrored the fundamental dynamic of Mr. Charles's music, an ability to bring together the sacred and the profane -- or, as he once put it, "a crossover between gospel music and the rhythm patterns of the blues." The call-and-response format of "What'd I Say" comes right out of the church choir. Yet that formal spirituality is at the furthest remove from the ardent carnality of the song's content.
The sheer forcefulness of Mr. Charles's singing makes it easy to overlook his musicianship. His earliest vocal influences were Nat "King" Cole and the suave blues singer Charles Brown. Like Cole, Mr. Charles was a gifted jazz pianist. He recorded an album of instrumentals with the Modern Jazz Quartet's Milt Jackson, an album of standards with big band and strings ("The Genius of Ray Charles"), and memorably duetted with the jazz singer Betty Carter.
Perhaps the clearest indicator of Mr. Charles's musical versatility was the two volumes of "Modern Sounds in Country Music," which he recorded in the early '60s. The first volume held down the number one spot on the Billboard chart for 14 weeks in 1962. Long before the term "crossover" existed, Mr. Charles defined the concept.
Ray Charles Robinson was born Sept. 23, 1930, in Albany, Ga. His father, Bailey Robinson, was a mechanic. His mother, Aretha Robinson, worked in a sawmill.
A cafe owner who played the piano introduced Mr. Charles to music when he was 3. At the St. Augustine (Fla.) School for the Deaf and Blind, he learned to read and write music in Braille. He also learned to play piano, trumpet, clarinet, organ, and alto saxophone.
"Learning to read music in Braille and play by ear helped me develop a damn good memory," Mr. Charles once 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 from the way it sounds in my head."
Mr. Charles's mother died when he was 15. He left school and began playing professionally in Jacksonville, then throughout Florida. Not wanting to be confused with the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson, he dropped his surname.
Mr. Charles moved to Seattle when he was 18. He played in a piano trio and formed a lifelong friendship with a young trumpeter named Quincy Jones. The two would later collaborate on the album "Genius+Soul=Jazz." Mr. Charles backed the R&B singer Ruth Brown and became musical director for blues singer Lowell Fulson. He recorded his first single, "Confession Blues," in 1949.
On his early recordings, Mr. Charles's debt to Cole and Brown is obvious. The transformation came in 1954. "Ray just seemed to be another rhythm-and-blues singer," Atlantic Records' Jerry Wexler said in a 1962 interview. "But he suddenly broke out of a cocoon that we didn't even know he was weaving."
Mr. Charles's series of recordings for Atlantic over the next five years made him a star and altered the nature of popular music. He began a long-time collaboration with the tenor saxophonist David "Fathead" Newman and added a quartet of female backup singers, the Raelettes.
In 1959, Mr. Charles left Atlantic for ABC-Paramount. He was nearly as gifted a businessman as he was a performer: The new label offered him not just a higher royalty but also ownership of his master recordings, something unheard of for African-American performers at that time. Later, he recorded on his own label, first Tangerine, then Crossover.
The rock revolution began to make Mr. Charles, then still only in his 30s, seem passe. Nonetheless, he remained a figure to be reckoned with. On Aretha Franklin's "Live at the Fillmore West," he and Franklin -- for all intents and purposes, his artistic daughter -- famously duetted on "Spirit in the Dark." On his top-rated NBC variety series, the comedian Flip Wilson had a recurring character, Geraldine, who would erupt in excitement at the mention of Mr. Charles's name.
In 1980, Mr. Charles appeared in the film "The Blues Brothers." He performed "America the Beautiful" at the 1984 Republican convention. In 1990, he was frequently seen on television, appearing in a popular series of ads for Diet Pepsi, singing "You got the right one, baby, uh-huh!"
By then, Mr. Charles had become as much a part of American culture as Pepsi or Coke, an icon transcending race, age, and style. Yet the essence of his art --whether pitching soft drinks, singing for Ronald Reagan, or performing "Georgia On My Mind" for the umpteenth time -- remained rooted in soul.
Asked by Time magazine in 1968 to define soul, Mr. Charles said, "It's a force that can light a room. The force radiates from a sense of selfhood, a sense of knowing where you've been and what it means. Soul is a way of life -- but it's always the hard way."
Mr. Charles leaves 12 children, 20 grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren.
A memorial is planned for next week at Los Angeles's First AME Church, with burial at Inglewood Cemetery.
Material from the Associated Press was used in this report. 