It's the way that the movie business works. It took 15 years to raise the money to make the biopic of Ray Charles life. It got done in the end, as they say, but Ray himself couldn't wait around to see its release: he died at the age of 73, in June of last year.
Now the movie is big business, and the Charles legend has been re-invigorated. It's a final blue twist to a life saga that was full of pain and frustration – as well as artistic triumph on a grand scale. For anyone unfamiliar with his oeuvre, Ray Charles was one of those few who – as a musician, singer and songwriter – thoroughly deserve the tag of genius. He was a huge and acknowledged influence on the work of Van Morrison, among other later titans, and the film, and its soundtrack, give a taste of the greatness of the man – but there were enough twists and turns in a career that began in the 40s to ensure that any collection of 17 tracks is only beginning to scratch the surface of the surface.
But what a surface! From the opening boogie woogie of 'Mess Around', Ray delivers a series of killer punches. Almost all of the tracks have become part of the canon, offering up memorable and brilliant renditions of blues, soul, jump, r'n'b and country classics that everyone with a deep or abiding interest in music will already be familiar with.
There's his first hit 'I Got A Woman' and the monumental 'Hallelujah, I Love Her So', among a plethora of cuts from the '50s and early ’60s produced by Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler for Atlantic. There's the peerless 'What'd I Say', one of his own songs, and his definitive cover of Percy Mayfield's 'Hit The Road Jack'. And there's the crushing melancholia that no one does better of country influenced cuts like 'You Don't Know Me' and Don Gibson's desolate 'I Can't Stop Loving You'.
There are two versions in the movie of the Hoagy Carmichael/Stuart Gorrell classic 'Georgia' and its appropriate. The man from Albany, Georgia had made the song his own and his 1960 studio take remains one of the outstanding moments in modern pop, if that word is adequate to describe such a soulful thing as this. But Ray Charles was a magnificent, inspirational live performer and the 1976 reading emphasises that, one more time, with remarkable feeling.
Catch the movie, and hear the music. Ray is a corker from start to finish.