#Ray charles tv#

As it was, he was still able to attend a private screening with the crew.Īlbums by Ray Charles that have their own page: He was set to attend the premiere had he lived. His early life, rise to fame, dalliances with drug addiction and involvement in the civil rights movement are chronicled in the Academy Award-winning Biopic Ray, released only a few months after his death. Ray's influence on other singers and musicians cannot be understated Frank Sinatra called him 'the only true genius' in popular music, Billy Joel was hugely influenced by his piano playing and singing, the members of The Beatles all expressed their admiration for his achievements, with Paul McCartney crediting him as his reason for getting into music, and his song 'What'd I Say' was allegedly the first song Mick Jagger performed as a member of The Rolling Stones.

#Ray charles tv#

Although he struggled with drug addiction and sporadic success after the 1960s, interest in his music was renewed thanks to his appearance in The Blues Brothers in 1980, reinforced by being the musical spokesperson for a popular TV ad campaign for Diet Pepsi, and he remained popular until his death from cancer in 2004. Subsequently, he joined a major label ( ABC-Paramount) and decided to explore new sounds, including Jazz, Pop and especially Country, which earned him some of his biggest hits, including 'Georgia On My Mind', 'Hit the Road Jack' and 'I Can't Stop Loving You' (a song which is now credited for helping to popularise country outside of its traditional audiences). While this music provoked some controversy at the time, these songs are now recognised as some of the first soul songs and established Ray as the pioneer of a whole new genre.

Although he recorded a few minor hits, his big break came when he was signed to Atlantic Records in the early 1950s and recorded songs such as 'Mess Around' (written by Atlantic co-founder and president Ahmet Ertegun), 'I Got A Woman', 'Hallelujah, I Love Her So' and 'What'd I Say', which combined raw, passionate gospel energy with boogie-influenced music and secular lyrics. Losing his sight to an infection at a young age and educated in music at a school for the blind, Ray became a talented musician and multi-instrumentalist who got his start singing and playing piano and organ with country and blues bands in the 1940s. One of the first performers to fuse R&B and Gospel Music to create the Soul genre in The '50s, he also exerted a major influence on the development of the Rock & Roll genre. Ray Charles Robinson (Septem– June 10, 2004) was an American musician.

It was a necessity for me - like food or water.' It was a force already within me when I arrived on the scene. Like my ribs, my kidneys, my liver, my heart. Charles lives in Texas and teaches at the University of Houston.'I was born with music inside me. But there’s a difference between these images and real humans.” In each of his paintings, notions of beauty, ugliness, nostalgia, and violence emerge and converge, reminding us that we cannot divorce ourselves from a past that has led us to where we are, who we have become, and how we are portrayed. Charles says, “Aunt Jemima is just an image, but it almost automatically becomes a real person for many people, in their minds. “I’m trying to deal with present and past stereotypes in the context of today’s society.” Caricatures of African American experience, such as Aunt Jemima, are represented in Charles’s work as ordinary depictions of blackness, yet are stripped of the benign aura that lends them an often-unquestioned appearance of truth. Charles draws comparisons between Sambo, Mammy, and minstrel images of an earlier era and contemporary mass-media portrayals of black youths, celebrities, and athletes-images he sees as a constant in the American subconscious.