Ray Charles

There's a reason Ray Charles was known as "Genius": He could take any kind of song, from country to blues to jazz to soul — a genre which, by the way, he more or less invented — and make it his own. Don't believe us? Just listen to these three chart-topping hits from across his career. Not only did he reinvent Hoagy Carmichael's pop standard "Georgia On My Mind," but the state of Georgia adopted Ray's version as its official song. Across the border in Tennessee, Ray completely retooled country music with the beery heartache of "I Can't Stop Loving You." And who could possibly ignore Ray's trademark growl, pleading his case while the Raelettes run him out of town in the sad-bastard soul of "Hit the Road Jack"?

In Next Steps, we discover how genius loves company, especially in the studio.

Ray was plenty good just by himself, but his mere presence elevated other artists beyond their A-game. Billy Joel, who even gave his daughter her middle name in Ray's honor, said that working with Charles in "Baby Grand (duet with Ray Charles)" was like "an evangelical event." How can you possibly do justice to the recorded-a-zillion-times, Academy Award®-winning tune that the Recording Industry Association of America named "Song of the Century"? Simple: just pair two pop legends, Johnny Mathis and Ray Charles, in a sandpaper-over-velvet duet on "Over The Rainbow." And, finally, the cautiously kittenish Betty Carter tries — almost desperately — to maintain her cool as Charles' sunglassed tomcat turns up the steam heat in "Baby It's Cold Outside."

In Deep Cuts, Ray covers songs by performers who grew up listening to . . . Ray.

While latter-day pop stars ravage the Great American Songbook for material, Ray Charles always had his ears finely tuned to what was going on around him, as we'll hear in our Deep Cuts. The stately bigness of Lennon-McCartney's "The Long and Winding Road" gets a much-needed booster shot of soul, as Ray bends the backing orchestra to his vocal will, always in command, never overpowered. His funk-fortified electric piano snarls while the wah-wacka-wah guitar lays down a greasy groove on Stevie Wonder's "Living for the City," but you gotta skip to about three-and-a-half-minutes in, just to hear Ray in full-blown Pentecostal preacher mode, ticking off a list of all the things that tick him off. And what better way to cap Mr. Charles' incredible career than his sentimental-but-not-schmaltzy reflection on days gone by, in the last-call-nightcap of Paul Simon's "Still Crazy After All These Years."

Sinatra said it, we believe it, and that settles it: Ray Charles was "the only true genius in the business." For more than half a century, the genius moniker stuck to Ray like a shadow, as he dominated pop music in a way that no one else ever will: #1 hits in pop, R&B, and country; 17 GRAMMYS®; countless sold-out concerts. And, oh yeah, he pretty much invented soul. The hits rolled out like a Baptist church congregation when the sermon's done: "Georgia On My Mind." "I Can't Stop Loving You." "Hit the Road Jack." Heck, he even had a hit with "America the Beautiful." And in his final parting gift of the Genius Loves Company album, released just a few short weeks after he passed, Ray went out in a manner befitting his particular genius: at the top of the charts, and forever in our hearts.