BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. (AP) — Ray Charles, a transcendent talent who erased musical boundaries between the sacred and the secular with hits such as “What’d I Say,” “Georgia on My Mind” and “I Can’t Stop Loving You,” died Thursday. He was 73.
Charles died of acute liver disease at his Beverly Hills home at 11:35 a.m., surrounded by family and friends, said spokesman Jerry Digney.
Blind by age 7 and an orphan at 15, the gifted pianist and saxophonist spent his life shattering any notion of musical categories and defying easy definition. One of the first artists to record the “blasphemous idea of taking gospel songs and putting the devil’s words to them,” as legendary producer Jerry Wexler once said, Charles’ music spanned soul, rock ’n’ roll, R&B, country, jazz, big band and blues.
He put his stamp on it all with a deep, warm voice roughened by heartbreak from a hardscrabble childhood in the segregated South. Smiling and swaying behind the piano, grunts and moans peppering his songs, Charles’ appeal spanned generations.
His health deteriorated rapidly over the past year, after he had hip replacement surgery and was diagnosed with a failing liver. The Grammy winner’s last public appearance was alongside Clint Eastwood on April 30, when the city of Los Angeles designated the singer’s studios, built 40 years ago, as a historic landmark.
Aretha Franklin called Charles “the voice of a lifetime.”
“He was a fabulous man, full of humor and wit,” she said in a statement. “A giant of an artist, and of course, he introduced the world to secular soul singing.”
“People remember the big hits and the visual image of him, but they forget what an innovator he was in the 1950s as a jazz musician,” said country music singer Marty Stuart. “He made inroads for all of us when he did ’I Can’t Stop Loving You.’ It took country music to places it hadn’t been before.”
“I lost one of my best friends and I will miss him a lot,” Willie Nelson said in a statement. “Last month or so, we got together and recorded ’It Was a Very Good Year,’ by Frank Sinatra. It was great hanging out with him for a day.”
Charles won nine of his 12 Grammy Awards between 1960 and 1966, including the best R&B recording three consecutive years (“Hit the Road Jack,” “I Can’t Stop Loving You” and “Busted”).
His versions of other songs are also well known, including “Makin’ Whoopee” and a stirring “America the Beautiful.” Hoagy Carmichael and Stuart Gorrell wrote “Georgia on My Mind” in 1931, but it didn’t become Georgia’s official state song until 1979, long after Charles turned it into an American standard.
“I was born with music inside me. That’s the only explanation I know of,” Charles said in his 1978 autobiography, “Brother Ray.”
Charles considered Martin Luther King Jr. a friend and once refused to play to segregated audiences in South Africa. But politics didn’t take.
He was happiest playing music, teaming with such disparate musicians as Chaka Khan and Eric Clapton. Pepsi tapped him for TV spots around a powerfully simple “uh huh” theme, and he appeared in movies including “The Blues Brothers.”
“The way I see it, we’re actors, but musical ones,” he once told The Associated Press. “We’re doing it with notes, and lyrics with notes, telling a story. I can take an audience and get ’em into a frenzy so they’ll almost riot, and yet I can sit there so you can almost hear a pin drop.”
Charles was no angel. His womanizing was legendary, and he struggled with a heroin addiction for nearly 20 years before quitting cold turkey in 1965 after an arrest at the Boston airport. Yet there was a sense of humor about even that — he released both “I Don’t Need No Doctor” and “Let’s Go Get Stoned” in 1966.
He later became reluctant to talk about the drug use, fearing it would taint how people thought of his work.
“I’ve known times where I’ve felt terrible, but once I get to the stage and the band starts with the music, I don’t know why but it’s like you have pain and take an aspirin, and you don’t feel it no more,” he once said.
Said John Burk, who worked recently with Charles as producer of the upcoming duets album “Genius Loves Company”: “There were a couple of times where he would say, ’I’m not feeling well today but I’ll take a stab at it … I can come back to it later.’ And he never had to come back to it later.”
He said Charles’ gift was “finding and communicating the human emotion in a song. … That’s what we strive for in the recording process, is to find that human experience.”
Ray Charles Robinson was born Sept. 23, 1930, in Albany, Ga. His father, Bailey Robinson, was a mechanic and a handyman, and his mother, Aretha, stacked boards in a sawmill. His family moved to Greenville, Fla., when Charles was an infant.
“Talk about poor,” Charles once said. “We were on the bottom of the ladder.”
Charles saw his brother drown in his mothers’ laundry tub when he was about 5 as the family struggled through the Depression. His sight was gone two years later. Glaucoma is often mentioned as a cause, though Charles said nothing was ever diagnosed.
After he was sent away, heartbroken, to the state-supported St. Augustine School for the Deaf and the Blind, Charles 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.
His early influences were myriad: Chopin and Sibelius, the Grand Ole Opry, the powerhouse big bands of Duke Ellington and Count Basie, jazz greats Art Tatum and Artie Shaw.
By the time he was 15 his parents were dead and Charles had graduated from St. Augustine.
