Ray Charles Records Views

General Goods

LOS ANGELES, Calif.

Charles had always played for other people, but he wanted his own band. He decided to leave Florida for a large city, but Chicago and New York City were too big. After asking a friend to look in a map and note the city in the United States that was farthest from Florida, he moved to Seattle in 1947[12] (where he first met and befriended a 14 year old Quincy Jones)[18][19] and soon started recording, first for the Down Beat label as the Maxin Trio with guitarist G.D. McKee and bassist Milton Garrett, achieving his first hit with Confession Blues in 1949. The song soared to #2 on the R&B charts. He joined Swing Time Records and under his own name ( Ray Charles to avoid being confused with boxer Sugar Ray Robinson)[10] recorded two more R&B hits, Baby, Let Me Hold Your Hand (#5) in 1951 and Kissa Me Baby (#8) in 1952. The following year, Swing Time folded and Ahmet Ertegün signed him to Atlantic Records.[12]

Sinatra, and Bing Crosby before him, had been masters of words. Ray Charles is 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. He can’t tell it to you. He can’t even sing it to you. He has to cry out to you, or shout to you, in tones eloquent of despair — or exaltation. The voice alone, with little assistance from the text or the notated music, conveys the message.

Get it Now: Amazon a– iTunes The Genius of Ray Charles Atlantic 1312 Released October, 1959 This is the all-American pop album Ray Charles had always dreamed of recording, with a full orchestra and strings. Quincy Jones and Ralph Burns wrote the charts. Atlantic Records0’ VP Jerry Wexler stated that they had wanted to use the o“Geniuss” title, but held back for two years. On this album, there was absolutely no doubt that the time was right and the title fit. The album won the 1960 Grammy Award in the Pop category for l“Best Vocal Performance 9– Albume” as well as the 1960 Grammy for =“Best Rhythm h& Blues Performances” on n“Let The Good Times Roll.3”