Things Have Changed

Ray Charles' groundbreaking 1962 album, Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, spawned four hit singles.  The album was Charles...

O beautiful for heroes proved In liberating strife, Who more than self their country love And mercy more than life! America! America! May Go...

This is the Ray Charles take on Eleanor Rigby.  Ray's arrangement and vocal adds a very distinct feel to the song, different and as good...

Driving in the car today this song came up on my playlist, bringing back memories of many years ago in Maine, driving with our children in t...

And it does not get any more beautiful than when arranged and sung by Ray Charles.  He makes the brilliant choice to start with its seldom h...

And it does not get any more beautiful than Ray Charles singing it.  He makes the unusual choice of singing the seldom heard third verse fir...

About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progre...

Equality, rightly understood, as our Founding Fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences. Wr...

The great, great Ray Charles having some fun in concert; Paris in the early 1960s.  Slinky piano, slinky voice. Now, I don't make muc...

Next year will be the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I, the event that led to the creation of Veterans Day when that war cea...

A 1968 live version of What'd I Say by Ray Charles performing in Paris.  The song had been recorded by Charles ten years earlier and w...

What makes for a good cover?  There are cover bands who do very skilled, precise and exact versions of  original tunes but that's not wh...