Ray Charles saw the tributaries of blues, gospel, and country flowing together, Sean Elder wrote of the musician, during his 37th world tour. Charles, nicknamed the Genius by colleagues, died on this day in 2004.
Most show-business handles are the creations of public-relations people; only money and propaganda keep them in place. But Ray Charles got his from the people he was working with, who started calling him the Genius around November of 1954, when “I Got a Woman” roared onto the R. & B. charts. The sobriquet stuck, though the Genius himself chalks it all up to luck. “It’s just like when a manager makes a business decision,” he once said of those early gospel-inspired recordings.
Charles is one of the musicians who secularized gospel music for a crossover audience, replacing the Lord with objects of carnal devotion, and he did it with a success that even Sam Cooke couldn’t touch. But his real genius was being himself. At the age of five, he watched his little brother fall into a washbasin and drown; he lost his sight at seven; and his mother died when he was fourteen. As a young man, he buried the pain of those experiences, crooning as a lounge act.
This month, Charles celebrates his sixty-seventh birthday; he’ll be on the road, on his thirty-seventh world tour, complete with the Raelettes and a sixteen-piece orchestra. Simultaneously, Rhino Records is releasing “Genius & Soul: The 50th Anniversary Collection,” a five-CD boxed set. Though the Genius stopped writing songs in the sixties, he has never stopped reinventing them. Listen to “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning” on his 1977 album, “True to Life.
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