Word: raye
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Blinded at six by glaucoma, schooled in classical, gospel and every form of popular music, he came to Atlantic Records in 1953, when the company?s boss, Ahmet Ertegun, bought Charles? Swingtime Records contract for $2,500. Ray brought with him a pioneering blend of gospel melodies, rhythm-and-blues raunch, a suavely swingin? piano groove ? la Nat Cole and the imposing sound of a big band behind him (though typically he worked with only six sidemen). Oh, and an epochal vocal style that would make him the 20th century?s dominant and longest-lived emissary of soul music...
...Henry Pleasants, in his ear-opening book "The Great American Popular Singers," gets to the heart of Charles? vocal achievement: ?Sinatra, and Bing Crosby before him, had been a master of words. Ray Charles is a master of sounds. His records disclose an extraordinary assortment of slurs, glides, turns, shrieks, wails, breaks, shouts, screams and hollers, all wonderfully controlled, disciplined by inspired musicianship, and harnessed to ingenious subtleties of harmony, dynamics and rhythm... It is either the singing of a man whose vocabulary is inadequate to express what is in his heart and mind or of one whose feelings...
...After four verses of 12-bar blues, the song rollicks into some of Charles? swingin? lounge piano, then returns to the vocal, in a squealing release - ?Say, have you heard, baby/ Ray Charles is in town/ Let?s mess around till the midnight hour/ See what he?s puttin? down? - that prefigures no fewer than three Atlantic songs: Charles? own ?Let the Good Times Roll? and ?Mess Around? and Wilson Pickett?s ?In the Midnight Hour.? The song ends with generic barks (?Come on! Come on, child!?) that are pretty much grunts with consonants. A listener needs no English...
...What?s the difference between religious and sexual ecstasy, between philosophical and emotional anguish? In the First Church of Ray, not much. Several Charles songs were blues adaptations of gospel airs: from ?Talkin? ?Bout Jesus? to ?Talkin? ?Bout You,? from ?This Little Light of Mine? to ?This Little Girl of Mine,? from ?How Jesus Died? to the Doc Pomus composition ?Lonely Avenue.? The first number was Charles? most popular tune thus far; the second was covered, and nicely revamped as rockabilly, by the Everly Brothers; the third (?My covers, they feel like lead/ And my pillow, it feels like stone...
...Anyway, that was the reaction of the kids of 1959, who made ?What?d I Say? Ray?s (and Atlantic?s) first million-selling single. I like to think they responded as much to the musical craft of the piece as to its hedonistic invitation to ?shake that thing.? The song?s break from earlier Charles work was evident from the first note: on an electric piano that sounded like a guitar with a mitten muffling the strings. It was blues, all right, but with a Latin accent, thanks to great cymbal, conga and stick work by Milt Turner...