Brother Ray: Ray Charles’ Own Story - Ray Charles, David Ritz

Category: Autobiography & Biographies, Misc. Non-fiction
Language: English
Keywords: Autobiography Biography Memoir Music Nonfiction

Written by Ray Charles, David Ritz
Read by Andrew L. Barnes
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 128 Kbps

Ray Charles (1930-2004) led one of the most extraordinary lives of any popular musician. In Brother Ray, he tells his story in an inimitable and unsparing voice, from the chronicle of his musical development to his heroin addiction to his tangled romantic life. Overcoming poverty, blindness, the loss of his parents, and the pervasive racism of the era, Ray Charles was acclaimed worldwide as a genius by the age of thirty-two. By combining the influences of gospel, jazz, blues, and country music, he invented, almost single-handedly, what became known as soul. And throughout a career spanning more than a half century, Ray Charles remained in complete control of his life and his music, allowing nobody to tell him what he could and couldn’t do.As the Chicago Sun-Times put it, Brother Ray is “candid, explicit, sometimes embarrassing, often hilarious, always warm, touching and deeply human-just like his music.”