Ray Charles: The 2004 Movie

[ronPrice]

Last night I watched a biopic on Ray Charles and I post my comment below on this TV movie.-Ron in Australia
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RAY CHARLES

The biopic Ray, an October 2004 film, which portrayed Ray Charles’ life and career between 1930 and 1966, was on TDT TV last night.[SUP]1[/SUP] While I was growing-up in Canada in the 1950s there was an American musician, a pioneer in the genre of soul music, who fused rhythm and blues, gospel, and blues styles into his early recordings with Atlantic Records. He also helped racially integrate country and pop music during the 1960s with his success on ABC Records, most notably with his Modern Sounds albums. While with ABC, Ray Charles became one of the first African-American musicians to be given artistic control of his music by a mainstream record company.

Frank Sinatra called Ray Charles the only true genius in show business. “I don't know if Ray was the architect of rock & roll, like Elvis Presley,” said Billy Joel, “but he was certainly the first guy to do a lot of things . . . Who the hell ever put so many styles together and made them work?"[SUP]2[/SUP]—Ron Price with thanks to [SUP]1[/SUP]TDT TV, 11:00 p.m.-2:00 a.m. 24+25/12/’11 and [SUP]2[/SUP]Wikipedia.

You got going, Charles, when I got
going in the mid-1940s.[SUP]1 [/SUP]After your
Atlantic Records contract ended you
signed with ABC Records ,11/’59, the
month after I joined the Baha’i Faith,
obtaining a more liberal contract than
other artists had at the time, while I got
a code to live by in a time of a complex
social transition from the ‘50s to the ‘60s.

Your ‘62 album, Modern Sounds in Country
and Western Music and its sequel Modern
Sounds in Country & Western Music, Vol. 2
helped country into music’s mainstream.[SUP]2[/SUP]
I won’t say anymore here, Charles; what
can I say about your genius for sound?!![SUP]3[/SUP]

[SUP]1[/SUP] Ray Charles’ career began in Jacksonville Florida in 1945; I was in my first year of life in Hamilton Ontario.
[SUP]2 [/SUP]In 1962 Charles founded his own record label Tangerine Records which ABC-Paramount promoted and distributed; 1962 was also a big year for me as I began my travelling-pioneering for the Canadian Baha’i community in Dundas Ontario and finished high school.
[SUP]3 [/SUP]Ray Charles was a master of sounds. His records disclose an extraordinary assortment of slurs, glides, turns, shrieks, wails, breaks, shouts, screams and hollers, all wonderfully controlled, disciplined by inspired musicianship, and harnessed to ingenious subtleties of harmony, dynamics and rhythm. It is either the singing of a man whose vocabulary is inadequate to express what is in his heart and mind or of one whose feelings are too intense for satisfactory verbal or conventionally melodic articulation.(Wikipedia)

Ron Price
25 December 2011

[Music Head]

You're writing skills are superb sir
Just wish you'd show up more.

[ronPrice]

Thanks for your encouraging note, Grumpy Old Man--retired mod. I take nice pills to keep me from being grumpy although, like you, I am retired. Life is busy even in retirement, I find. In these middle years(65-75) of late adulthood(60-80), my days get filled and I can only drop in here occasionally. Still---thanks for your encouraging notes; they were appreciated. You can go to my website at: http://www.ronpriceepoch.com/ if you are keen to read more and, if not, here is another piece in relation to Ray Charles and soul music.-Ron in Tasmania
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SOUL

There are several basic histories of soul music. Generally the late 1950s and early 1960s seem to be the common ground, the common time period, when soul music made its debut. I had just joined the Baha'i Faith then and was too busy with sport, girls and studies, as well as R &R to really get my teeth into soul. In A Brief History of Soul Music by Piero Scaruffi one sees dates for singers and songwriters who turned gospel music into a secular art form.[SUP]1[/SUP]

Various singers like Ray Charles, Nina Simone, Arethra Franklin, Sam Cooke and Otis Redding, among others--created sounds that came out of my little blue radio in these late 1950s and early 1960s as I finished high school and started university. This was my experience of soul mixed as it usually was with rock-and-roll, but I could not have told you soul from R & R, although I knew alot about baseball. My value-system was finding its home in these early years and the Bahá'í Faith became an essential sifting mechanism for my system of meaning and interpretation of society.

Of course there are and were many influences that come/came to make up my set of values and beliefs. Music was for me one of these influences. Soul continued to occupy the edge of my musical space with its sensuality, lust, its primal qualities into the late 1960s and early 1970s as I moved from Canada to Australia. Soul was replaced, I am informed, by funk and disco music. I moved away from rock and roll by the late 1970s. By the early 1970s my life had turned many corners far away from soul music becoming dominated by academic life, marriage and earning a living. –Ron Price with thanks to Piero Scaruffi, History of Popular Music, 2005.

Those years, back then, when
life was so very simple and I
had no idea what was in store
for me down the long....stony
and tortuous—but fascinating
road ahead—I knew nothing
about soul music, but I began
to be interested in the nature
of soul as described in words
of a new religion that was in
Canada by then for about 60
years and had come out of a
country on the edge of western
civilization and even further on
the edge of my life, but it moved
to the centre by my adult years
remaining there all my life-Iran.

Ron Price
20 May 2009
Updated for: MusicDiscussion
Let's Talk Music on: 25/12/'11