RAY CHARLES, 73 Singer, pianist pioneered melding of musical styles

Charles learned to read and write music in Braille as a child.
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
PHILADELPHIA -- Singer and pianist Ray Charles, whose ebullient recordings melded jazz, blues, gospel and R & amp;B into the basic DNA of soul music, died of acute liver disease Thursday morning at his Beverly Hills home. He was 73.
The dapper dynamo, blind since age 7, had been in declining health since hip replacement surgery last year. He made his last public appearance at an April 30 ceremony to designate his Los Angeles studio a historic landmark.
"He was a fabulous man, full of humor and wit," Aretha Franklin said of Charles, whose hits included "Georgia on My Mind," "Hit the Road Jack," "Busted," and "I Can't Stop Loving You." "And, of course, he introduced the world to secular soul singing."
Charles began as a journeyman arranger and pianist, but he quickly blossomed into a renegade who trampled stylistic boundaries. His innovations were so sweeping they came to be taken for granted.
Cross-over style
Before him, blues singers just sang the blues, jazzers rarely ventured into gospel, and rhythm-and-blues was a simple dance style. Ray Charles changed all that: He crossed big-band horns with R & amp;B jump rhythms, sang torchy songs about long-gone love as though they were hymns, and brought a refreshingly urbane perspective to country music.
"He encompassed all formats before they were 'formats,"' the record producer T-Bone Burnett once said.
Those smash-ups weren't petri dish experiments: Everything Charles did, from his rowdy early blues to his oft-heard "America the Beautiful," was powerful, gut-level, and utterly honest.
Synthesizing genres became Charles' trademark. His first million-selling single, 1959's "What'd I Say," which he composed, mixed blues, Latin boogaloo and gospel call-and-response into an infectious swirl.
Hard worker
It didn't matter what stylistic starting point the man known as "the Genius" chose: Throughout a career that spanned six decades, yielded 12 Grammy Awards (nine between 1960 and 1966) and included performances for four presidents, Charles never sounded out of place and regularly took the music into unexpected directions. He was an old-school road warrior who insisted on spontaneity: Even on an ordinary night in an unremarkable auditorium, he and his backing singers, the Raelettes, could be ferocious.
"I give my best, and I expect everybody up there with me to do the same," Charles told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1998. "I don't expect any more out of any musician than I expect out of Ray Charles."
Hard childhood
Charles was born Sept. 23, 1930, in Albany, Ga., and soon moved with his family to Gainesville, Fla. His father was a mechanic, and his mother, Aretha, worked in a sawmill. Economically, Charles recalled in his autobiography, "Brother Ray," "we were on the bottom of the ladder."
Charles was able to see as a boy -- at age 5, he watched his younger brother drown in a tub -- but gradually lost his sight. Glaucoma has been mentioned as a cause, though Charles said nothing was ever diagnosed.
While attending the state-supported St. Augustine (Fla.) School for the Deaf and the Blind, Charles learned to read and write music in Braille, and began to play different instruments: saxophone (which he sometimes played as an adult), organ, clarinet and trumpet. By the time he graduated, at 15, his parents were dead. He supported himself playing dances and "hillbilly" music, and in 1947, after two years of scuffling, he impulsively moved to Seattle.
There he taught music to Quincy Jones, and began working with blues and jazz groups. Within a year, he said in his biography, Charles began to use heroin. The drug was his regular companion until 1965, when he quit cold turkey after being arrested for heroin possession. He took a year off, then resumed his rigorous touring schedule.
Career took off
Charles was signed to Atlantic in 1953. His initial singles didn't take off, and it wasn't until he recorded "I Got a Woman" in 1954 that the label sensed potential: The song reached No. 2 on the R & amp;B charts in 1955.
Then came a string of hits -- "What'd I Say" in 1959, "Georgia on My Mind" the following year, "Hit the Road Jack" in 1961 and others -- that nailed down the basic elements of soul music. Though others, notably Sam Cooke and Jackie Wilson, made contributions to the style, Charles' hard-driving R & amp;B rhythm, deep gospel vocalizing, and command of jazz, blues and other flavors made his work a beacon for others.
Charles went well beyond that initial style. He was a fearless experimenter who, in his early years, recorded with vibraphonist Milt Jackson of the Modern Jazz Quartet, saxophonist David "Fathead" Newman and vocalist Betty Carter. And he stunned the world with "Modern Sounds," the country collection that reaffirmed Charles' genius touch at melding styles and approaches.
Though he rejected strict definitions of music, in 1968 Charles provided a Time magazine interviewer with his perspective on soul. Soul, he said, "is a force that can light a room. The force radiates from a sense of selfhood, a sense of knowing where you've been and what it means. Soul is a way of life -- but it's always the hard way."
By that definition, Ray Charles was the complete human embodiment of soul.