Ray Charles was one of the greatest musicians of all time. He embodied the term genius, for there was hardly a music genre in which he did not excel, whether gospel, blues, rock, country, or soul (Inductees pp). By combining the elements of gospel and blues, Charles created what came to be known as soul music (Inductees pp). During the 1950's, while signed with Atlantic Records, he broke down the barriers between sacred and secular music and fostered "a crossover between gospel music and the rhythm patterns of the blues" (Inductees pp). Over the decades, Charles also used elements of country and western, as well as big-band and jazz into his music (Inductees pp). Ray Charles is considered to be "as complete and well-rounded a musical talent as this century has produced" (Inductees pp).
Ray Charles Robinson was born in 1930 in Albany, Georgia, but grew up in Greenville, Florida (Ray pp). When Charles was six years old he began losing his sight from glaucoma after traumatically watching his brother drown in the washtub his mother used for laundry (Ray pp). At the age of seven, he enrolled in the St. Augustine School for the Deaf and Blind where he studied piano, clarinet and alto saxophone, composed for big bands, and learned to read and write music in Braille (Ray pp). He stayed at St. Augustine for eight years and in 1945, at the age of fifteen, Charles was orphaned, he then bean performing in local bands around Florida (Ray pp). In 1948, with $600 savings, he moved to Seattle and formed the Maxim Trio, a group "grounded in the style of Nat King Cole and Charles Brown (Ray pp). The following year the Trio had a major R& B. hit with 'Confession Blues' on the Downbeat label (Ray pp). During the early 1950's Charles toured with blues artist Lowell Fulson and had R& B. hits with 'Baby Let Me Hold Your Hand,' and 'Kiss Me Baby' on Los Angeles-based Swingtime Label, then in 1952 Atlantic Records bought his recording contract from Swingtime for $2,500 (Ray pp).
Charles abandoned the Nat King Cole style and began adapting gospel music techniques to blues lyrics and soon had a hit with 'It Should Have Been Me' and by 1954 he had formed his own band (Ray pp). That same year he also arranged and played piano on Guitar Slim's top R& B. hit 'The Things I Used to Do' for Specialty Records and in 1955 had a hit in both the R& B. And pop fields with his own composition 'I've Got A Woman' (Ray pp).
Working with top studio musicians Charles consistently had hits on the R& B. charts throughout the late 1950's with 'A Fool for You,' Drown In My Own Tears,' Hallelujah I Love Her So,' and Lonely Avenue, the recording debut of his female backup group the Raelettes (Ray pp). This is also the era of Charles' "feverish call-and-response classic 'What'd I Say,' all sung in his gruff, soulful voice and accompanied by the "percussive punctuations of his piano and the horn section (Inductees pp). The release of this top R& B. hit established Charles as a popular recording artist and a pioneer of soul music (Ray pp).
Since Atlantic was still basically an R& B. organization, Charles moved to ABC-Paramount Records in late 1959 and through 1961 had top pop hits with 'Georgia on My Mind,' 'Hit the Road Jack,' 'Ruby,' and 'Unchain My Heart' (Ray pp). Charles also recorded Genius + Soul = Jazz for Impulse, an ABC jazz subsidiary label, "yielding a near smash pop/top R& B. hit with the instrumental 'One Mint Julip'" (Ray pp). This album and one he recorded with Betty Carter for ABC-Paramount made Charles increasingly popular with both black and white jazz fans (Ray pp).
In 1962 Charles formed Ray Charles Enterprises, comprised of Tangerine Records, Tangerine Music, and Racer Music Company, and opened studios and offices in Los Angeles in 1963 (Ray pp). Also in 1962 Charles "claimed the unlikeliest of genres as his own with Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, and album that topped the Billboard chart for 14 weeks (Inductees pp). By this time he was recording with forty piece orchestras and full vocal choruses, and the phenomenal popularity of this album produced crossover smashes such as 'I Can't Stop Loving You,' 'Born to Lose,' and 'You Don't Know Me' (Ray pp). The following year Charles released second volume with crossover hits, 'You Are My Sunshine,' 'Your Cheating Heart,' and Take These Chains From My Heart' (Ray pp). With ABC Charles had...
He encourages people to come aboard a train being engineered in "weirdo abandon" by musicians who "dramatized a sense of what it is to be American" (1987, p. 10). Christgau, another writer who sees the correlation between this music and the greater society in which it occurred, adds: "rock criticism embraced a dream or metaphor of perpetual revolution. . . . Worthwhile bands were supposed to change people's lives,
Rock 'N Roll Music - the Diary of Youth Rock n' roll is best described as a "hybrid of many musical styles: white country and western, black guitar blues and rhythm and blues, and both black and white gospel music." (De Curtis) Rock ' roll began in the early 1950's as a dancing music strictly for teenagers and became known in the 1960's as simply rock music. This was because rock no
Censorship in Music Censorship Under the Guise of Protecting the Children Rock and Roll Culture Hip Hop Culture Is Censorship in Music Viable and Does it Make a Difference? There have been many attempts by society control music. Governmental statutes, agency regulations, business controls and parents have all tried to censor the music. Sometimes they have succeeded and sometimes they have not. The examination of various aspects of rock and rap music censorship involves general
Some Chinese researchers assert that Chinese flutes may have evolved from of Indian provenance. In fact, the kind of side-blown, or transverse, flutes musicians play in Southeast Asia have also been discovered in Africa, India, Saudi Arabia, and Central Asia, as well as throughout the Europe of the Roman Empire. This suggests that rather than originating in China or even in India, the transverse flute might have been adopted through the
And Rock 'n' Roll. Quite distant from the sounds of Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, and other groups that are firmly a part of the Rock 'n' Roll from the era, there is nonetheless a certain rhythm and feel to this song that makes it a peripheral form of Rock 'n' Roll, and of the more popular songs of the style and the era (Eder 2011). It is also somewhat
Discovering Statistics Music Valence and Gender Influence Word Recall Task A person's state of arousal can determine how well their memory functions. This phenomenon is readily apparent when persons experiencing a traumatic event find it difficult to ever escape these memories, memories that can recur unbidden in people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Recent research examining the influence of relaxing music found a similar effect, such that relaxing music impairs memory coding
Our semester plans gives you unlimited, unrestricted access to our entire library of resources —writing tools, guides, example essays, tutorials, class notes, and more.
Get Started Now