The great black conciliator of the impossible with the non-existent.
Blind, but seeing miles away.
With an eternal smile and eternal rhythm in my soul.
While the "progressive people" across the ocean get up alternately on one knee or the other, we'd better talk about who managed to weave a narrow floorboard out of scattered, multi-colored threads of American carpet - and only on it can one walk into the valleys of reconciliation.
This is the path paved by the black, who once desired equal happiness for all.
For all my brothers.
Any skin color.
Ray Charles was born in the town of Albany, the peach and nut state of Georgia.
In the southeastern United States.
September 23, 1930.
“Even among the poorest blacks,” he recalled in his old age, “we were at the bottom.
At the very foot of the stairs, from where they looked with their heads raised at everyone else.
There was nothing below us - only the earth. "
The first blow went straight to the heart of Ray.
He was five when four-year-old George drowned in front of his eyes, and he could not do anything, although he tried to help.
A severe psychological shock affected Ray's vision.
The light began to fade for him, and by the age of seven it turned into an impenetrable and eternal dusk.
Ray put on dark glasses.
Behind them, his smile seemed almost real ...
Years later, with this inimitable smile of his, he will work wonders.
Quietly making his way into, say, the famous country hit You Are My Sunshine (and you didn’t even know that this is the music of the “white redneck”) and inflicting in it a form of musical defeat, from which the heart sweetly stops and squeezes.
Can we imagine how he felt at this very time?
There, behind the dark glasses forever?
His mom wasn't going to give up.
In any case, she was ready for anything, if only her now only son would break out into the people, managed to grab the smooth, slippery handrails of the devil's staircase of universal equality and non-existent freedoms.
At the age of three, she saw Ray, with the help of a pharmacist neighbor, strum, picking up simple melodies on the piano.
This means music.
At seven she sent her son to St. Augustine's boarding school for the deaf and blind.
God only knows what it cost her ...
At the boarding school, Ray learned the Braille alphabet, faced a feud between blacks and whites, and began to play the piano, organ, saxophone, trombone and clarinet at once!
And damn it, he did it all !!!
Everything except enmity.
Not only that, he also sang in the Baptist choir.
The makings of future success were evident.
But my mother left in 1945.
And he was left alone.
Like many others from the pantheon of immortals.
But if you are lucky enough to survive and live for two, so as not to try real luck?
Moreover, his mother managed to teach him so much - he moved around the house and the street on his own, washed dishes and chopped wood, and in general did everything that they do, not noticing his happiness, day after day sighted people.
And Ray started playing in bands.
It’s strange.
They were mainly jazz and country bands.
A bit atypical choice for a young man with a well-known past.
But, on the other hand, Ray's idols were not only Count Basie and Artie Shaw, but also the legendary Hank Williams - the progenitor of the entire country-style of the American stage.
Ray played.
With whom and wherever.
After the death of his mother, he went to live with her friend in Jacksonville.
But here he felt cramped.
He had nothing to breathe.
His grief at the loss of the person closest to him deprived him of his reason.
And after a while he ended up in Orlando.
Among hunger, poverty and drugs that will devour a good third of his life.
More often than usual, he replaced pianists.
Many people liked his manner of playing.
They listened to him willingly.
But nothing more.
Ray panicked.
He understood that a little more, and everything would be over.
It is over, irrevocably.
On the morning of one day that is worth a thousand ordinary days, Ray Charles will ask a friend to find on the map a not too large and not too small city on the other side of the country, if you draw a line in a straight line.
From Orlando.
Who knows what that line was.
But Ray's next city was Seattle.
Here he begins to record his own songs, rather similar to rhythm and blues.
One of the interesting things of that time is considered to be Baby, Let Me Hold Your Hand.
To be honest, I don’t think it’s so true.
All his things of that time are equally good and sound.
All of them fit, all - not from someone else's shoulder.
They say to him: “Son!
You sing like Nat King Cole. "
Ray denies nothing, grins in a fierce half-face smile and continues to hone his skills, getting ecstatic pleasure from his favorite activity.
Everything changed in the 1950s, when Ray made the only right decision - to be himself.
They say that it was then that God's blessed soul began to appear, permeated with drive, sex, the speed and weight of vinyl.
Ray Charles kneads white and black music of all sorts and styles in a huge dough tub.
Approximately.
As they say, to taste.
Adds to the same and in abundance jazz with orchestrations unthinkable for whites.
He changes his voice.
He does not imitate anyone, he only incredibly enriches his baritone, seasoning it with moans, screams and mournful howls.
He becomes exceptional and one of a kind and records for Atlantic Records I Got a Woman - shrill, desperate and hysterical vocals combined with a fantastic, "savage" arrangement.
This is a breakthrough and success.
Just his first success.
Officially, Ray's main peak is the What'd I Say album, which merged gospel, jazz and blues.
Holiness and fury.
And yet, despite the wild popularity of the song of the same name to the album, it was not put on the air.
The composition looked overly sexy due to Ray's wild vocals.
However, many greats sang it later with poorly concealed pleasure, and Elvis's What'd I Say was included in the fourth gold disc.
Rumor has it that Ray composed it at one of the performances, in order to fill in the extra time that came from, which required, in accordance with the contract, to continue to remain on stage for another long 12 minutes.
And during these 12 minutes, Ray Charles worked on the go, like a careless young god, and the divas who sang along with him simply repeated his own phrases after him.
Sounds like the truth.
In the spirit of Ray Charles.
Always ready to jump into the abyss of improvisation.
And yet Ray's most powerful breakthrough, who had already laid the foundation for soul, was the 1962 double album Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, recorded on ABC Records.
Because it was in this album that the great blind seer tried to combine the incompatible and reconcile the irreconcilable.
He tried, with all sincerity and openness, to create something new that could unite such a motley and such a scattered America.
To the gallery page
Did he succeed?
Did anyone who heard those songs appreciate the sacrifices made by Ray Charles on the altar of the All-American Brotherhood of White and Black? ..
It was a time of great hits and eternal standards - Georgia On My Mind and Hit the Road Jack.
Do not list everything.
He was not shy of politics, with all possible fervor and faith he helped with money and a word to Martin Luther King, thought about his own sermons, but he could not - drugs, so badly darkening his life, deprived him of confidence in the accuracy of his word.
Words, but not music.
He sacredly and devoutly idolized President Kennedy and perceived his assassination as a personal disaster, as the end of the true struggle for equality of everyone who is hidden under the shadow of the Stars and Stripes Jack.
He released the single Basted - the day after Kennedy's death.
Single.
The only weapon available to the sighted blind.
In the sixties, he could hardly keep himself within the bounds of accepted decency, all the while teetering on the brink of arrest and imprisonment for possession of heroin.
Drugs.
He still managed to survive them.
And come to the seventies.
And reassemble yourself.
And go on stage.
And to speak to all of us with our new and sonorous voice.
He wanted extremely simple things.
So that we live in peace.
To avoid killing each other.
To open their hearts to love for their neighbors and for the Lord.
It seems to me, though it is unbearably difficult to say, that he wanted from us the almost impossible.
Almost unthinkable in our arranged, disgustingly comfortable world.
He wanted us to be happy.
So let us at least be merciful ...
What more can we wish from the unfortunate blind musician, who only saw his mother and the sunlight in his childhood?
You know, you can talk endlessly about his music, about how incredibly great his repertoire was, about how deftly he learned to handle a synthesizer, almost indistinguishable from imitating an electric guitar on it.
We can talk about all of his 70 number albums.
About the purity and clarity of the material presented by him.
But...
Perhaps it is worth talking about a person?
About a man who was blind, but also rode a bicycle and a motorcycle.
And he always shaved exclusively in front of the mirror.
About a man who terribly disliked giving autographs just because he did not see what exactly he had to sign.
About a man who never looked blind, but always - seeing for miles !!!
You know, his single Georgia on My Mind became the official anthem of the state of Georgia, the state where he was born.
It means something.
When a simple song about a girl named Georgia becomes an anthem.
American state.
Billy Joel, who adores and adores Ray Charles, once mustered the courage to say, “It might sound blasphemous, but I think Ray Charles was more important than Elvis Presley.
I don't know if Ray was one of the creators of rock 'n' roll, but he was definitely the first in a lot of things ... Who the hell has ever mixed so many styles together to make it work ?! "
I cannot be recorded as a fan of Billy Joel, but I forgive him for this passage.
If only because it is almost entirely true.
Nearly.
And the truth, completely pure, will be given to us to learn in other times.
He has 12 children from nine different princesses.
Its princesses.
During his lifetime, the heirs gave him 20 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.
He loved life in all its manifestations, I tell you!
And yes!
Before each concert, he happily drank a glass of gin and coffee - for courage and heightened enthusiasm!
Or here's another!
Divine story!
In 1985, Ray sang at the inauguration of Ronald Reagan.
But it is known that he was a staunch Democrat, while Reagan was a staunch Republican.
And what?!
Ray agreed to play for an unheard-of fee of $ 100 thousand for those times, which he did not fail to send to charity immediately after the performance.
And his agent, the imperturbable Joe Adams, responded to all the press attacks with a simple and understandable match: "Yes, for that kind of money, we would have performed at a meeting of the Ku Klux Klan !!!"
He has been inducted into all the Halls of Fame.
He is the owner of one of the most recognizable voices in the world of rock and jazz.
He is included in the list of the greatest performers, taking the tenth place in it.
You can easily find him in the Blues Brothers movie, with John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd.
And he has seventeen Grammys.
And who would count them.
But what did he say about himself?
About myself:
“Music has been in the world for a long time and will be after me.
I was just trying to leave my mark, to do something good in music.
Something people will remember. "
He departed for his planet at the age of 73 on June 10, 2004, from his home in Beverly Hills.
After his departure, in a strange way, more and more of his albums continue to be released.
Some of them receive a Grammy.
So who is he?
A man with black glasses and a well-fitting suit?
A man with a dazzling smile and an enchanting voice?
A man who has been tapping himself to the beat with one or the other foot in shining patent leather boots all his life?
He, the equivalent of our happiness, about which we no, no, and we are trying to forget forever.
But he doesn't.
Doesn't let us forget what happiness it is.
Even if you saw the sun and your mother only in early childhood.
“I won't live forever,” Ray Charles used to say.
- I have enough mind to understand this, thank God.
It's not how long I will live, the only question is how beautiful my life will be. "
Oh Mr. Charles.
She is beautiful, your life.
She is very, very beautiful!
The point of view of the author may not coincide with the position of the editorial board.