--- Ray Charles
Quickly now, as if even he participated in the excitement over the unknown, he greedily reassembled himself into--- into a movie of Ray Charles. Then he enlarged the screen, degree by degree, like a documentary on the Industry. The moon occupied one lens of his sunglasses, and he laid out his piano keys across a shelf of the sky, and he leaned over them as though they truly were the row of giant fishes to feed a hungry multitude. A fleet of jet planes dragged his voice over us who were holding hands.
--- Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers (1966)
It's almost unfathomable. We've lost the High Priest, the Genius of Soul, the just-plain Genius, a man whose contribution to music has not been bettered and only occasionally been equalled. The tributes, I'm sure, will be effusive tomorrow once the musicologists have had time to digest the news and prepare their articles. I'll try not to say too much here, but I will say this: in a world of egos and icons, of superstars and idols, Ray was something else. He was a titan in the truest sense of that word. Modern music's debt to him is immense and probably beyond measure, with everyone from Bob Dylan to Bruce Springsteen, from the Beatles to Garth Brooks, from Van Morrison to Johnny Cash, Elvis to the Rolling Stones, Stevie Wonder to James Brown, owing more than most of us can now imagine to Ray's own very particular influence. In short, he was The Real Thing. He didn't just make a difference. He was the difference.
The world just got smaller, a little greyer, and a lot less interesting.
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