Ray Charles Robinson, pompously nicknamed by the American media “the genius,” the “high priest of soul,” or more simply “Brother Ray,” was in fact, at his beginnings, just a small-town boy whose ambition was limited to making a living from his singing and piano playing. Raised on the blues and jazz, a small place in the sun of success alongside his brothers who, like him in the early 1950s, had helped popularize the nascent "Rhythm 'n Blues," would probably have been enough for him. But our man was the only one to possess the ultimate weapon, an unsuspected secret weapon: Gospel, whose accents, ecstasies, and trances, until then confined to places of worship, he had the audacity and "genius" to transpose onto secular stages, much to the dismay of his African-American brethren. This album brings together the emblematic tracks from his most creative period at Atlantic, 1953 to 1961, accompanied by a biography illustrated by José Correa.
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