Well-wishers urge ailing 'Brother Ray' to hit the road
I'm sure I'm not alone in wishing Ray Charles a speedy recovery from the hip problem that temporarily took him off the road last week. Charles, also known to fans as 'The Genius' and 'Brother Ray', turned 72 last September and is experiencing the sort of problems that unfortunately usually go with a combination of advancing years and unremittingly hard work.
He was about a month into a North American tour when he decided he had better scrub the next few dates to undergo treatment in Los Angeles, where he had supposedly played his 10,000th gig, at the famous Greek Theatre, back on May 23. Unless somebody has been keeping unusually meticulous records for more than half a century, I imagine some guesswork must have gone into identifying that particular engagement as reaching the magic number, but it's still a remarkable statistic.
Charles is not known for taking long holidays, and that means, by my reckoning, that if you date his performing career from the formation of his Maxim Trio in 1947 he has played an average of around 180 gigs a year for 56 years. That doesn't, of course, take into account countless recording sessions and frequent film and television appearances. No wonder a few of his joints are wearing out.
Apparently Charles plans to resume the punishing schedule a little later this month, and it clearly takes more than a dodgy hip to keep Brother Ray off the road. After all he hasn't exactly had an easy life. Glaucoma blinded him at the age of six, and during what was arguably the most creative phase of his career he was functioning with a serious heroin habit.
Having started out modestly as a Nat 'King' Cole Trio copyist, sometime in the early 1950s Charles got a sudden burst of creative energy which propelled him to become one of the most significant influences on popular music of the second half of the 20th century.
Recent years have seen him operating in mostly middle-of-the-road territory which makes it easy to forget how important some of his earlier work is, but nobody has done more than Ray Charles to break down the barriers between popular music's many diverse traditions - mostly by failing to pay any attention to them. His most famous act of fusion, of course, was the single-handed creation during the early 1950s of what we now call 'soul' music, taking the forms and feeling of gospel music and applying them to secular subject matter derived from the blues. This was revolutionary.
I've Got A Woman, released in 1955, ditched the Nat Cole smoothness and instead featured Charles' uniquely grainy vocals confessing the blues over an unmistakably gospel backing. On other records he went further and fitted new lyrics to well-known gospel tunes. Talkin' 'Bout You started out life as Talkin' 'Bout Jesus and How Jesus Died was transformed into Lonely Avenue.
This was hugely controversial at the time, and for some musicians it still is. Performers such as Big Bill Broonzy played both gospel and blues, but kept them strictly separate. You did not mix the music to which you partied on Saturday night with the music to which you repented the following day in church. Church, said Broonzy, censoriously, was where Charles should be singing.
Ray Charles, however, saw no reason why church music shouldn't be played in bars. Neither did he see any reason why a black man with a solid reputation as a blues and jazz musician should not also record country songs, leading to the groundbreaking Modern Sounds In Country And Western Music in 1962 which included his hit version of I Can't Stop Loving You.
His discography is a stunningly eclectic one, and the plethora of soul and country hits - like What'd I Say on the one hand and Take These Chains From My Heart on the other - tends to obscure the extent of his involvement in jazz. This is considerable. Notable jazz recordings with which Charles has been involved range from his Soul Brothers album, recorded with Milt Jackson of the Modern Jazz Quartet in 1958, and his 1961 collaboration with Quincy Jones, Genius Plus Soul Equals Jazz, to the My Kind Of Jazz album in 1970 and Porgy And Bess with Cleo Laine in 1976.
It is true that his output in recent years has been more predictable than of yore, but every innovator eventually runs out of steam, and the gravel voice and pounding piano still have the old magic.
Nothing keeps Ray Charles down for long. Let's hope for a quick convalescence and that by August 22, when he is scheduled to resume the tour, he's in shape to take the advice he gets nightly from The Raelettes - Hit The Road Jack.
