Music legend Ray Charles dies aged 73

RAY CHARLES, the Grammy-winning blues singer who blended gospel and blues in classics such as What'd I Say, Hit the Road, Jack, and heartfelt ballads like Georgia on My Mind, died yesterday. He was 73.

He died surrounded by family and friends, said spokesman Jerry Digney.

Charles's last public appearance was alongside Clint Eastwood on April 30 when the city of Los Angeles designated the singer's studios, built 40 years ago in central Los Angeles, as a historic landmark. Blind by the age seven and an orphan at 15, Charles spent his life shattering any notion of musical boundaries and defying easy definition.

"I was born with music inside me. That's the only explanation I know of," Charles said in his 1978 autobiography, Brother Ray. "Music was one of my parts ... Like my blood. It was a force already with me when I arrived on the scene. It was a necessity for me, like food or water."

Charles considered Martin Luther King Jr a friend and once refused to play to segregated audiences in South Africa. But politics didn't take.

He was happiest playing music, smiling and swaying behind the piano as his legs waved in rhythmic joy. His appeal spanned generations: He teamed with such disparate musicians as Willie Nelson, Chaka Khan and Eric Clapton, and appeared in movies including The Blues Brothers.

"The way I see it, we're actors, but musical ones," he once said. "We're doing it with notes, and lyrics with notes, telling a story. I can take an audience and get 'em into a frenzy so they'll almost riot, and yet I can sit there so you can almost hear a pin drop."

Charles was certainly no angel. He could be mercurial and his womanising was legendary. He also struggled with a heroin addiction for nearly 20 years before quitting cold turkey in 1965 after being arrested in Boston.

He later became reluctant to talk about the drug use, fearing it would taint how people thought of his work. "I've known times where I've felt terrible, but once I get to the stage and the band starts with the music, I don't know why but it's like you have pain and take an aspirin, and you don't feel it no more."