After Ronald Reagan's death, Ray Charles's version of "Amazing Grace," one of Reagan's favorite songs, kept popping up on radio and TV. Why not? At the 1984 Republican convention, Charles sang "America the Beautiful," which he originally cut in 1972 for an album called A Message From the People. Then on June 10, Charles himself died at age 73 of liver problems--the final echo from seventeen years of heroin addiction in his younger days.

Brother Ray really was a Great Communicator, a shining example of pop culture as melting pot. In that way and others--his fierce individuality and self-reliance and drive to electrify mass audiences with his art--he was one of Louis Armstrong's truest heirs. Like Armstrong, Charles mingled art and entertainment so gracefully that he seduced fans into listening to stuff they never would have otherwise. And with his daring synthesis of gospel and secular music, he changed the way America sang, starting in 1955, when his leering "I Got a Woman" scorched America's airwaves and got him excoriated by churchgoers across the land for turning a spiritual into a sexual paean. Over the next few years, he forged soul music's erotic foreplay out of country-blues hollers and gospel's repentant moans and joyful cries. That made him a rebel hero to a generation of multicolored Americans.

He was as American as a taco. It's impossible to imagine what the past fifty years would sound like without him.

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