Ray Charles

Buy an English language CD in Japan and you're likely to find the accompanying booklet includes the songs' lyrics reprinted in the native tongue - but just how accurate might they be? Far be it from me to diss the fine efforts of interpreters operating anywhere in the world, but it's common for localised idioms, metaphors and euphemisms to flummox even the most accomplished scholars of linguistics. Sometimes they have to resort to guesswork. Translating the often obliq... MORE

Excuse me for bein' a bit trite, but ain't nobody ever done it better...  

The one thing I got from my father, besides the usual platitudes, was that music could calm a person down. See my father fought in WWII and wasn't a very pleasant man, BUT he did like certain types of music. My love of Johnny Cash came from an early age because of my father. He also loved Spike Jones and Herb Alpert. For Christmas my sister took my dad's old Johnny Cash albums and had them burned to CD's. Every crackle, hiss and pop of the analog vinyl is there on those ... MORE

As a result of emscee's recent post and the discussion that followed, a few of us were inspired to try to track down a clip of a legendary (we think so, anyway) SNL bit, in which Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Jane Curtin, Laraine Newman, John Belushi, and our beloved Gilda Radner performed a giddy, brilliant, extremely white version of the Ray Charles classic for an amused (one hopes) Ray Charles. Happily (you wouldn't believe how happily), I just found this. (Efforts to pos... MORE

All right, so Sterfish has inspired me to come clean and admit that not only have I been listening to every Christmas post, and loving them, but I've got a few jewels of my own. This is a classic song, and the best version I've ever heard. I love the simplicity and earnestness of "Little Drummer Boy" in it's composition. Ray Charles' version of this holiday tune is as honest and bare as his renditions of "It's Not Easy Being Green" and "Georgia". What I love most abo... MORE

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Here is my entry for Funky Friday. Not particularly funky, but it will get you off of your seat. Enjoy.

Yahoo!SEATTLE - Starbucks Corp.'s push into entertainment moved further from the coffeehouse shelves Monday as the company launched a record label based on its existing Hear Music brand. The world's largest specialty coffee retailer said it would partner with Concord Music Group, which controls several other labels and helped Starbucks sell the Grammy-winning "Genius Loves Company," an album of Ray Charles duets. -Any band on the Starbucks label must feel like this... MORE

...back in the band days, whenever the bus arrived at a gig in "BFE" (the sticks) that we just KNEW was going to suck (you get a feel for these things after a couple of years) or those "salamander-shrinkin' moments" when we had to play in front of a hostile crowd, I'd roll up to the mic and blurt out, in a thick, Elvis-y accent: "We're the good ole boys!" to get a laugh out of everybody sweating bullets on stage/ any other musician in the place...I recall that when the goi... MORE

As the years go passing by, great artists emerge more and more from their background. We can see them more clearly because their quality persists, while lesser artists turn blurry on the way to being forgoten. Ray Charles, like Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Aretha, will continue to grow in stature for years and years to come: the Genius is beecoming a Giant. If you don't believe me, read my book, Ray Charles: Man and Music. It's goodd--I wo... MORE

I bought this entire album on iTunes and noticed that, on the duet with Norah Jones "Here We Go Again" there is a loud buzzing electronic noise between 3:00 - 3:05. Very jarring. I thought "Great. iTunes sold me a defective track, or my computer couldn't handle it". Then I received the actual CD as a gift. I re-loaded that track to correct the problem, but the exact same noise is there. Has anyone else experienced this with their copy? Is this a massive error on the ... MORE

Ray Charles - 'When Your Lover Has Gone'. No other explanation necessary.

I recently saw the movie Ray with Jamie Foxx (who was awesome by the way) and discovered Ray Charles. Of course, I knew who he WAS, but never really looked into his music. I remember him more from soda commercials than his music. But after seeing the movie I downloaded a bunch of song and wow, the man deserves his fame. I am really really shocked he didn't come out of Motown though.