Ray Charles: Man and Music, Updated Commemorative Edition

In 1954, Atlantic Records honchos Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler visited an Atlanta club where one of their artists was gigging. Ray Charles and his band blew into a new song when the men entered. It was "I Got a Woman," the tune that marked the blind Albany, Georgia-born singer-pianist's evolution from an able imitator of Nat "King" Cole and Charles Brown into an artist who would transform American music. In Ray Charles: Man and Music, veteran music journalist Michael Lydon imbues the familiar story with fresh detail upon fresh detail. Charles's early years spent scuffling on the chitlin circuit, his embrace of everything from pop chestnuts and country hits to hip jazz as an audaciously eclectic record maker, and the many hours given over to womanizing and a heroin addiction at the height of his stardom are given a cinematic immediacy here. More than most artists, Charles followed his instincts to huge artistic rewards and the love of many listeners who recognized their own voices in his sound. Lydon captures as much of the offstage man as is likely to ever make it to the page--the man who himself once insisted, "My life was what it was. Whatever it became, I made it so." --Rickey Wright