Ray Charles Dies
Legendary musician passes away at 73.
June 10, 2004 - At a little before 1:00 PM PST on Thursday June 10th, 2004, Yahoo News reported that legendary gospel and blues musician Ray Charles passed away. He was 73.
Ray Charles Robinson was born Sept. 23, 1930, in Albany, Georgia. His father, Bailey Robinson, was a mechanic and a handyman, and his mother, Aretha, stacked boards in a sawmill. His family moved to Gainesville, Florida, when Charles was an infant.
Charles began dabbling in music at 3, encouraged by a cafe owner who played the piano. But apart from the music he came to love, his early life was dotted with tragedy. He saw his brother drown in the tub his mother used to do laundry when he was about 5 as the family struggle through poverty at the height of the Depression. By the time he was 7 he had lost his sight. And although Glaucoma was often mentioned as a cause, 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 his autobiography. "That made it a little bit easier to deal with."
He soon after enrolled in the state-supported St. Augustine School for the Deaf and the Blind where he 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. By the time he was 15 both of his parents were dead. Upon graduating from St. Augustine, Charles began playing gigs in black dance halls before relocating to Seattle.
It was in Seattle that he first met Quincy Jones and showed the burgeoning producer/composer how to writer music. It was also here that he dispensed with 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.
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.
Over the course of his career Charles won a total of 12 Grammy Awards, nine of them between the years of 1960 and 1966, including the best R&B recording three consecutive years in a row for the songs "Hit the Road Jack," "I Can't Stop Loving You" and "Busted." His first really big hit came in 1959 with "What'd I Say," a song built off a simple piano riff with suggestive moaning from the Raeletts. In fact it was the amorous backing vocals of the Raeletts that caused several radio stations in America to ban the song, not that this form of censorship hindered Charles' career.
"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."
In the early '60s Charles released Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, Volumes 1 and 2. While a huge departure from his early, signature gospel work, the album some of the biggest hits of his illustrious career, including "Born to Lose," "Take These Chains From My Heart (And Set Me Free)" and "I Can't Stop Loving You."
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. But when it came to his music, he was rather candid about his legacy.
In a 1983 interview with the Washington Post Charles mused, "Music's been around a long time, and there's going to be music long after Ray Charles is dead. 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."
Prior to his death, Ray Charles made his last public appearance on April 30th, when his studios, build 40 years ago in central Los Angeles, were designated as a historic landmark by the city.
-- IGN Music
