Ray Charles #1088

Caption from poster__     " I never wanted to be famous.  I only wanted to be great."   Ray Charles died from acute liver disease Thursday June 10, 2004. He was 73. He left behind a long list of hits and Grammy awards and the musicians he influenced are as diverse in genre as the music he wrote, arranged, performed and recorded. The great Ray Charles was an explorer who returned time and again from expeditions across musical boundaries to give us, in his own unique way, melodious stories and charts of his adventures. In so doing he changed what had previously been only a black and white territorial paper map of American music into a 3-D, solid terrain model, full of color. Ray Charles Robinson was born Sept. 23, 1930, in Albany, Ga. His father, Bailey Robinson, was a mechanic and a handyman, and his mother, Aretha, stacked boards in a sawmill. His family moved to Greenville, Fla., when Charles was an infant. Young Ray grew up during the Great Depression, a period when there was almost