Ray Charles died at 11:35 a.m. (2:35 p.m. ET) yesterday, in Beverly Hills, California. The cause was of complications from liver disease. To quote James Brown:
"We lost a genius and we lost my brother... You've lost a cornerstone of good, and that hurts real bad."
"Music is nothing separate from me," Ray Charles used to say, "It is me... You'd have to remove the music surgically."
Or this way. But even Ray's death can't remove his music from us. Blocritics founder Eric Olsen has some good thoughts over at MSNBC.com, and of course there's a great roundup at Blogcritics.org. All I have to say about Georgia's incomparable Soul Man is this:
In the kingdom of the sighted, the blind man was king.
The world we know is passing away. . .
Ray was my favorite and I was sad to see him go. In a brief elegy I wrote for Ray on my site, I quoted the last part of Walt Whitman's "When Lilacs Last In Dooryard Bloom'd" originally written as an elegy for President Lincoln. It just seemed to fit.
Thanks for your posting on Ray. And was good to find other links you provided as well.
Thanks,
S
www.nonprofiteer.com
Let's go get stoned...