Remembering Ray Charles: Performing Live Through The Decades
By Andy Kahn Jun 10, 2018 • 7:01 am PDT
Today marks 14 years since the death of renowned musician Ray Charles who passed away in 2004 at the age of 73. The blind pianist was part of the inaugural class of inductees into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, one of the many prestigious honors bestowed upon the beloved Georgia-native. This week’s Sunday Cinema remembers Brother Ray with a series of live performance videos spanning each decade between the 1960s and 2000s.
Charles began playing piano publicly while a teenager in the 1940s and began his professional career in earnest in the 1950s. Among his best-known songs was his early hit “What’d I Say” and the collection of videos below begins with a performance of the song from Brazil in 1963. Charles also had the ability to make other people’s songs his own, as evidenced by a 1972 performance on the Dick Cavett Show of The Beatles “Eleanor Rigby” and Don Gibson’s “I Can’t Stop Loving You” (which was a single on Charles’ breakthrough album Modern Sounds In Country And Western Music).
Throughout his career, Charles collaborated with musicians from across music genres and generations. In 1984, he accompanied outlaw country legend Willie Nelson on a performance of “Seven Spanish Angels” which they recorded together on Charles’ album Friendship. The state of Georgia named Charles’ rendition of “Georgia On My Mind” as its official song. Charles can be seen performing the Hoagy Carmichael and Stuart Gorrell original at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland in 1997. Charles was also known for his command of “America The Beautiful” and his arrangement stands among the most recognizable and beloved. The set of videos below concludes with his emotional rendition of the tune at the World Series in New York City just weeks after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.
