Ray Charles 1930–2004 BY TED DROZDOWSKI

Ray Charles defined "soul" as "when you take a song and make it part of you, a part that’s so true, so real, people think it must have happened to you. Soul is like electricity, like a spirit, a drive, a power." For millions of listeners, the sound of Ray Charles was the definition of "soul." His voice, a midnight fog that could envelop any lyric in mellow sadness or bring the promise of a sunny new morning, was unmistakable. His blend of musicianship, his ear for composition and arrangements, his innate sense of swing, and his ability to make almost any song or style his own were all unequaled. And his death from liver cancer at age 73 a week ago Thursday, after a year of health problems including hip-replacement surgery, removes a cornerstone from the foundation of American popular music.

Although Charles often insisted that "soul" wasn’t a genre but was "the way you live your life," he created a new musical sound in the mid ’50s that came to be known by that name. It was a fusion of the melismatic swoops and the rhythmic authority of African-American spiritual music with the slurs, scales, tones, and corporal themes of the blues.

He did so initially in a string of singles that include "I Got a Woman," "Hallelujah I Love Her So," "Drown in My Own Tears," and "Lonely Avenue," released in 1955 and ’56, that paralleled the birth of rock and roll. Charles was a peer in the recording field to Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Buddy Holly, Little Richard, and Elvis Presley, who covered "I Got a Woman" on his debut album and on The Ed Sullivan Show. But he made it clear that he was never a part of their revolution. "I’ve never given myself a lick of credit for inventing it [rock] or having anything to do with its birth," he explained to David Ritz, the co-author of his 1978 autobiography Brother Ray (Da Capo). "My stuff was more adult. It was more difficult for teenagers to relate to. My stuff was more filled with despair than anything you’d associate with rock and roll. Since I couldn’t see people dancing, I didn’t write jitterbugs or twists. I wrote rhythms that moved me. My style requires pure heart singing."

Nonetheless, Charles had a way of making distinctions regarding the origins of the songs he chose to perform irrelevant, as anyone who has ridden the deep emotional currents of his versions of Hank Williams’s "Your Cheatin’ Heart," the Billie Holiday–associated "Gloomy Sunday," and the Beatles’ "Yesterday" can attest. At Atlantic Records from 1952 to 1960, he reached maturity as an artist. By then, he had performed in jazz combos, done solo gigs, and played and written charts for sessions in New Orleans’s seminal R&B and rock scene, including the studio date that yielded Guitar Slim’s blues classic "The Things That I Used To Do." He’d been a bandleader and an arranger for R&B singer Ruth Brown and bluesman Lowell Fulsom and had cut his first discs, mostly in the mold of Nat King Cole and Charles Brown, for the Swingtime label. He found greater commercial success in later years with other labels, but aside from his signature version of Hoagy Carmichael’s "Georgia on My Mind," his soulful transformations of country music for ABC Records in the early ’60s, and his rendition of "America the Beautiful," which became a balm for our wounded nation after the September 11 terrorist attacks, his Atlantic recordings are the crown jewels of his career.

Over the past few decades, Charles’s concerts typically ended with the announcement, "Ladies and gentlemen, you have just been entertained by the legendary genius of soul." He was nicknamed "The Genius" while at Atlantic. "We started calling him that simply because we genuinely thought of him as a genius," Atlantic Records co-founder and chairman Ahmet Ertegun told journalist Robert Palmer. "His whole approach to music had elements of genius in it. His concept of music is very, very different from anybody else’s. His style of piano playing and his style of singing are very personal. He has many imitators. A lot of them are great, but it’s not the same thing. They’re not Ray Charles."

Charles was born into poverty as Ray Charles Robinson on September 23, 1930, in Albany, Georgia. His father, Bailey Robinson, was an itinerant railroad worker who, Charles believed, was probably not married to his mother, Aretha. Both Aretha and his father’s first wife raised him. Although he was born with sight, he fell victim to a strain of glaucoma that robbed him of his vision by the time he was seven. Three years earlier, he’d experienced his first tragedy when he witnessed his younger brother George drown in a washtub. Bailey died when he was 10; Aretha died five years later.