Ray Charles: 1930-2004
by Andy Stilp

The emergence of rock 'n' roll did little to reinforce the historical basics of proper piano posture. Over the past 40 years, rock has permitted Billy Joel's under-the-legging, Stevie Wonder's head-swimming and Elton John's mike-smooching, not to mention numerous artists who've sat or leaned upon pianos or abused them with "Great Balls of Fire" covers. This tolerance has evolved to include such modern standard bearers as Tori Amos, iconic for crotching anything in reach, and Ben Folds, who half-stands like a bent clothes hanger for more leverage. Even Vanessa Carlton, reigning piano vanguard, took her 88 into traffic for her first video.

Ray Charles was the piano's best friend, and now that he's gone, piano teachers everywhere had best turn in their metronomes. Watch Charles during any performance; for him, it wasn't the histrionics or attention drawn to bouncing around or flaunting his flexibility. His motion was a basic one — left and right, left and right, always seated, always dressed well, always in sync.

It's interesting, then, how it wasn't what Charles played that made magic. It was how he played it. Top of mind, some of the tunes we know him for — "Georgia On My Mind," "American the Beautiful," "You Are My Sunshine," "Yesterday," the Pepsi promotion, "Eleanor Rigby," "Hit the Road Jack" — and not a single one written by him, but they're all his, because a Ray Charles version is the best way to hear a song. (Though two of Charles' best songs, "I've Got a Woman" and "What'd I Say", were written from his hand.)

Charles brought a power to his performances, manifested in expertise with rhythm and tempo. The Man in Sync pulled his listeners out of their seats by buffeting them with a perfectly timed series of pulses, be it slowly or quickly. Put on "What'd I Say" or "Hallelujah I Love Her So" (another Charles original), and there isn't head that isn't bobbing head or hips that aren't swaying in the house. By the end of the song, you wish you had a piece for him to play, just to hear how much better the Ray Charles version sounded.

No matter what you pinned on Charles, the music, that Ray Charles sound, always won out. Blindness? Maybe you, too, forgot about this little detail. Drugs? He dropped heroin cold turkey and came back cheekily with "Let's Go Get Stoned." Poverty? Shoot, he was coping with both that and vision loss when he learned how to score music in Braille as a teenager. Racism? Jim Crow-caliber racism? He pushed forward with the Ray Charles sound regardless.

The Ray Charles sound was "soul," in that it was an amalgamation of R&B, country, jazz, blues and rock, and someone decided to brand it. Any song was fair game. With such a broad base, he had friends in every corner of the industry, highlighted by magnates such as Quincy Jones and Willie Nelson. In fact, as recently as March, he had been working on a duet album with James Taylor, Norah Jones, B.B. King, Bonnie Raitt and Nelson, another "crossover" king.

Yet with Charles, "crossover" seems like a dirty word. He didn't need to cross anything; as the roster above suggests, the genres came to his table and fought for his attention. He was a member of the jazz, rock 'n' roll and rhythm and blues halls of fame, in addition to his induction in March into the NAACP Image Awards Hall of Fame. Although he had been touring as recently as 2002, he was frail and terse at the Image awards, tipping us that this induction served more for summation than for momentum.

Legacy aside, Charles' mettle might be best measured in 1984's "Seven Spanish Angels," a duet with Nelson from the Friendship album. Both men recorded "Georgia On My Mind," a matchup Charles wins hands-down, but consider "Angels" a controlled experiment of sorts: Consistent melody, consistent tempo, common factors at all points, with Nelson and Charles our subjects. Nelson's parts smack with the muted twang that united hippies and cowboys in the free-loving '60s, but they're a straight delivery of cleanly sung lyrics. When Charles comes in, be it for his lines or over the top of Nelson, you can hear it in his voice: this power, this "soul." You can even hear him keeping his tempo, the tempo that pushes his songs so surely forward. By its close, "Angels" sounds like a Ray Charles song, with special guest and intruder Willie Nelson.

The Man in Sync wasn't a mere legend. Up against legends, he still came out on top. What do you label that perch on the pantheon? Master? King? God? For now, since there's only one man worthy of such heights, let's just call him Ray.

E-mail Andy Stilp at info at andystilp dot com.