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.
