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Brother Ray

Ray Charles' Own Story

Contributors

By David Ritz

By Ray Charles

Formats and Prices

Price

$21.99

Price

$28.99 CAD

Format

Format:

  1. Trade Paperback $21.99 $28.99 CAD
  2. ebook $11.99 $15.99 CAD

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.”

  • Barnes & Noble Review, 2/17/12
    One of David Ritz's finest r&b as-told-tos…Rich in insight as well as incident.”

On Sale
Oct 27, 2004
Page Count
384 pages
Publisher
Da Capo Press
ISBN-13
9780306814310

David Ritz

About the Author

David Ritz is the only four-time winner of the Gleason Music Book Award and won the 2013 ASCAP Timothy White award for outstanding musical biography for his book with Buddy Guy. With Marvin Gaye, he also cowrote the song “Sexual Healing”. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife.

Learn more about this author