A Uniter, Not A Divider

      Yes, the blog's project of educating some of you on the significance of Ray Charles continues, this time with an Op-Ed piece from The New York Times in which Bob Herbert writes, "Whether he intended to or not, Ray had opened fire on two very distinct cultures at one and the same time: the white-bread mass culture that was on its guard against sexuality of any kind (and especially the black kind), and the black religious community, which felt that gospel was the Lord's music, and thus should be off-limits to the wild secular shenanigans that Ray represented." (You can read the rest of the article here.)  Now go and turn on the radio.  And no turning on a classical station just to be a smart-ass. ;-)

      See also some of these choice bits:

• from The Desert Sun:  ""America the Beautiful"? When Ray sang it, yes it was. //
  You want a constitutional amendment? Ray’s "America the Beautiful" as the national anthem, right now. End of discussion. // See, he took all of that -- country, soul, gospel, rhythm and blues -- tore off the labels and replaced them with a new one: American."
  
• from Don Grady, syndicated: "The two “Country and Western” albums Ray Charles released in the early 1960s were, to me, a tremendous backdrop to the civil rights battles going on at the time. Instead of being a powerful anthem about the evils of prejudice, the albums were a mosaic of how the lives of working-class black and white Americans were all too similar. The songs begged a question: How can two cultures be so far apart when the men and women in them share the common problems of making their paychecks stretch, dealing with heartbreaks, working hard from sunrise to sunset, and relying on God and family to get through tough times? In those two albums, Ray Charles subtly told rural whites and urban blacks that their differences were much smaller than they perceived, and there were common bonds between them that cried out to be recognized."
  
• from a collection of editorial statements, this from the Dallas Morning News: "The death Thursday of Ray Charles at age 73 silences one of the most distinctively American voices in all of popular music and leaves a hole in our culture that will be impossible to fill. It's as if the Mississippi River dried up overnight."
  
• this from Newsday, on the ironies of timing (and race relations):  "Like Reagan, he too was apparently true to himself. But his musical campaign took a far different path. It led him to bridge, rather than deepen, differences. He played everything - classical music, traditionally "black" rhythm and blues songs, traditionally "white" country music standards."
  
• from the Macon Telegraph: "It seemed like he not only loved America, he was America." See also the very funny "Ray Charles Syllogism" which has been in the air for as long as I can remember.

    The more heretical among you-- well, almost all of you, if you're bothering to read this site-- may like this from The Spoof. My favourite is the comment by OJ.