Van Morrison

Thursday, 11 October 2012

wn.com/van morrison

HAVE I TOLD YOU LATELY THAT I LOVE YOU -- VAN MORRISON (in HD)

Van Morrison - Brown Eyed Girl (Original Version)

Van Morrison - Tupelo Honey - Live with great solo by Pee Wee Ellis

Van Morrison - Born To Sing (Official Video) Live in East Belfast, Sep 2012

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Bath, Somerset
Bath ( or ) is a city in the ceremonial county of Somerset in the south west of England. It is situated west of London and south-east of Bristol. The population of the city is 83,992. It was granted city status by Royal Charter by Queen Elizabeth I in 1590, and was made a county borough in 1889 which gave it administrative independence from its county, Somerset. The city became part of Avon when that county was created in 1974. Since 1996, when Avon was abolished, Bath has been the principal centre of the unitary authority of Bath and North East Somerset (B&NES;).
http://wn.com/Bath_Somerset
Belfast
Belfast () is the capital of and the largest city in Northern Ireland. It is the seat of devolved government and legislative Northern Ireland Assembly. It is the largest urban area in Northern Ireland, the second-largest city in Ireland and the 15th-largest city in the United Kingdom. It is the main settlement in the province of Ulster. The city of Belfast has a population of 267,500 and lies at the heart of the Belfast urban area, which has a population of 483,418. The Belfast metropolitan area has a total population of 579,276. Belfast is also the 100th-largest urban zone in the EU. Belfast was granted city status in 1888.
http://wn.com/Belfast
Berkeley, California
Berkeley ( ) is a city on the east shore of the San Francisco Bay in Northern California, United States. Its neighbors to the south are the cities of Oakland and Emeryville. To the north is the city of Albany and the unincorporated community of Kensington. The eastern city limits coincide with the county line (bordering Contra Costa County), which generally follows the ridge line of the Berkeley Hills. Berkeley is located in northern Alameda County.
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Boston
Boston (pronounced ) is the capital and largest city in Massachusetts, and is one of the oldest cities in the United States. The largest city in New England, Boston is regarded as the unofficial "Capital of New England" for its economic and cultural impact on the entire New England region. Boston city proper had a 2009 estimated population of 645,169, making it the twentieth largest in the country. Boston is also the anchor of a substantially larger metropolitan area called Greater Boston, home to 4.5 million people and the tenth-largest metropolitan area in the country. Greater Boston as a commuting region includes six Massachusetts counties, Essex, Middlesex, Norfolk, Suffolk, Plymouth, and Worcester, all of Rhode Island and parts of New Hampshire; it is home to 7.5 million people, making it the fifth-largest Combined Statistical Area in the United States.
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Camden Town
{{infobox UK place|
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Dalkey
Dalkey () is a town located in Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown County, Ireland. It was founded as a Viking settlement and became an important port during the Middle Ages. According to John Clyn, it was one of the points through which the plague entered Ireland in the mid-14th century. In modern times, Dalkey has become a prosperous seaside suburb and a minor tourist attraction.
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Dublin
http://wn.com/Dublin
Edmonton
Edmonton () is the capital of the Canadian province of Alberta. The city is located on the North Saskatchewan River in the central region of the province, an area with some of the most fertile farmland on the prairies. It is the second largest city in Alberta after Calgary, and is the hub of Canada's sixth-largest census metropolitan area.
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Fairfax, California
Fairfax is an incorporated town in Marin County, California, United States. Fairfax is located west-northwest of San Rafael, at an elevation of 115 feet (35 m). The population is 7,319 at the 2000 census.
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Hollywood Bowl
The Hollywood Bowl is a modern amphitheater in the Hollywood area of Los Angeles, California, United States that is used primarily for music performances. It has a seating capacity of 17,376.
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Ireland
Ireland (,; , ; Ulster Scots: Airlann) is the third-largest island in Europe and the twentieth-largest island in the world. It lies to the northwest of continental Europe and is surrounded by hundreds of islands and islets. To the east of Ireland is Great Britain, separated from it by the Irish Sea. The island is divided between the Republic of Ireland, which covers just under five-sixths of the island, and Northern Ireland, a part of the United Kingdom, which covers the remainder and is located in the northeast of the island. The population of Ireland is approximately 6.2 million people. Just under 4.5 million live in the Republic of Ireland and just under 1.8 million live in Northern Ireland.
http://wn.com/Ireland
Michigan
Michigan () is a U.S. state located in the Great Lakes Region of the United States of America. The name Michigan is a French corruption of the Ojibwe word mishigama, meaning "large water" or "large lake".
http://wn.com/Michigan
Northern Ireland
Northern Ireland (, Ulster Scots: Norlin Airlann) is one of the four countries of the United Kingdom. Situated in the north-east of the island of Ireland, it shares a border with the Republic of Ireland to the south and west. At the time of the 2001 UK Census, its population was 1,685,000, constituting about 30% of the island's total population and about 3% of the population of the United Kingdom.
http://wn.com/Northern_Ireland
Notting Hill Gate
Notting Hill Gate is one of the main thoroughfares of Notting Hill, in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. Historically the street was a location for toll gates, from which it derives its modern name.
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Odyssey Arena
http://wn.com/Odyssey_Arena
Outer Hebrides
The Outer Hebrides (, ) also known as the Western Isles and the Long Island, is an island chain off the west coast of Scotland. The islands are geographically contiguous with Comhairle nan Eilean Siar, one of the 32 unitary council areas of Scotland. They form part of the Hebrides, separated from the Scottish mainland and from the Inner Hebrides by the waters of the Minch, the Little Minch and the Sea of the Hebrides. Scottish Gaelic was formerly the dominant language and remains widely spoken, although in some areas English speakers form a majority.
http://wn.com/Outer_Hebrides
The O2 (Dublin)
The O2 is a 14,000-seat amphitheatre located at North Wall Quay in the Dublin Docklands in Dublin, Ireland, which opened on 16 December 2008. The venue is jointly owned by Live Nation and Harry Crosbie (Amphitheatre Ireland Limited) with Live Nation in charge of programme booking and operating the venue. Amphitheatre Ireland Limited have owned and operated the venue led by Mike Adamson (Live Nation) CEO of Amphitheatre Ireland Limited since 1989. The venue has played host to many world renowned performers.
http://wn.com/The_O2_(Dublin)
Ulster
Ulster () is one of the four provinces of Ireland, located in the north of the island.
http://wn.com/Ulster

Al Pacino
http://wn.com/Al_Pacino
Andrew Ford
Andrew Ford (born 1957 in Liverpool) is an English and Australian composer, writer and radio presenter.
http://wn.com/Andrew_Ford
Arthur Rimbaud
http://wn.com/Arthur_Rimbaud
Bap Kennedy
Martin "Bap" Kennedy (born 17 June 1962) is a singer-songwriter from Belfast, Northern Ireland and older brother of singer Brian Kennedy. He is noted for writing the song "Moonlight Kiss" which was on the soundtrack for the film Serendipity (starring John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale).
http://wn.com/Bap_Kennedy
Barney Hoskyns
Barney Hoskyns (born 1959) is a British music critic and editor of the online music journalism archive Rock's Backpages.
http://wn.com/Barney_Hoskyns
Beowulf
Beowulf (; in Old English or ) is the conventional title of an Old English heroic epic poem consisting of 3182 alliterative long lines, set in Scandinavia, commonly cited as one of the most important works of Anglo-Saxon literature.
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Bert Berns
http://wn.com/Bert_Berns
Bill Clinton
William Jefferson "Bill" Clinton (born William Jefferson Blythe III, August 19, 1946) is the former 42nd President of the United States and served from 1993 to 2001. At 46 he was the third-youngest president. He became president at the end of the Cold War, and was the first baby boomer president. His wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, is currently the United States Secretary of State. Each received a Juris Doctor (J.D.) from Yale Law School.
http://wn.com/Bill_Clinton
Bob Dylan
http://wn.com/Bob_Dylan
Bob Seger
Robert Clark "Bob" Seger (born May 6, 1945) is an American rock musician and singer-songwriter.
http://wn.com/Bob_Seger
Bono
Paul David Hewson (born 10 May 1960), most commonly known by his stage name Bono ( ), is an Irish singer and musician, best known for being the main vocalist of the Dublin-based rock band U2. Bono was born and raised in Dublin, Ireland, and attended Mount Temple Comprehensive School where he met his future wife, Ali Hewson, and the future members of U2. Bono writes almost all U2 lyrics, often using political, social, and religious themes. During their early years, Bono's lyrics contributed to U2's rebellious and spiritual tone. As the band matured, his lyrics became inspired more by personal experiences shared with members of U2.
http://wn.com/Bono
Brian Hinton
http://wn.com/Brian_Hinton
Bruce Springsteen
Bruce Frederick Joseph Springsteen (born September 23, 1949), nicknamed "The Boss", is an American singer-songwriter who records and tours with the E Street Band. Springsteen is widely known for his brand of Heartland rock infused with pop hooks, poetic lyrics, and Americana sentiments centered on his native New Jersey.
http://wn.com/Bruce_Springsteen
Charlie Parker
http://wn.com/Charlie_Parker
Chris Barber
'''Donald Christopher 'Chris' Barber''' (born 17 April 1930, Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, England) is best known as a jazz trombonist.
http://wn.com/Chris_Barber
Cliff Richard
Sir Cliff Richard, OBE (born Harry Rodger Webb; 14 October 1940) is an English singer, musician, performer, actor, entrepreneur and philanthropist, who has sold over 260 million records worldwide in a career spanning 7 decades.
http://wn.com/Cliff_Richard
Clinton Heylin
Clinton Heylin (born Manchester, England, April 8, 1960) is a British author who has written extensively about popular music.
http://wn.com/Clinton_Heylin
Colin James
Colin James (born Colin James Munn, August 17, 1964, Regina, Saskatchewan) is a Canadian singer-songwriter, guitarist, and record producer who plays in the blues, rock, and neo-swing genres.
http://wn.com/Colin_James
Damien Rice
Damien Rice (born 7 December 1973) is an Irish singer-songwriter and musician. As a musician he plays the guitar, cello, violin, piano and drums.
http://wn.com/Damien_Rice
Dick Rowe
Richard Paul Rowe (9 June 1921 - 6 June 1986) was an A&R; man at Decca Records from the 1950s to the 1960s.
http://wn.com/Dick_Rowe
Don Imus
John Donald "Don" Imus Jr. (born July 23, 1940) is an American radio host, humorist and writer. His nationally-syndicated talk show, Imus in the Morning, is broadcast throughout the United States by Citadel Media and relayed on television by the Fox Business Network.
http://wn.com/Don_Imus
Dr. John
Malcolm John "Mac" Rebennack, Jr. (born November 21, 1940), better known by the stage name Dr. John (also Dr. John Creaux), is an American singer/songwriter, pianist and guitarist, whose music combines blues, pop, jazz as well as Zydeco, boogie woogie and rock and roll.
http://wn.com/Dr_John
Duke Special
http://wn.com/Duke_Special
Ed Sheeran
http://wn.com/Ed_Sheeran
Elton John
Sir Elton Hercules John, CBE (born Reginald Kenneth Dwight; 25 March 1947) is an English singer-songwriter, composer and pianist. He has worked with his songwriting partner Bernie Taupin since 1967; they have collaborated on more than 30 albums to date.
http://wn.com/Elton_John
Elvis Costello
Declan Patrick MacManus (born 25 August 1954), known by the stage name Elvis Costello, is a British singer-songwriter. He came to prominence as an early participant in London's pub rock scene in the mid-1970s and later became associated with the Punk/New Wave genre. Steeped in word play, the vocabulary of Costello's lyrics is broader than that of most popular songs. His music has drawn on many diverse genres; the critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine describes him as a "pop encyclopedia," able to "reinvent the past in his own image".Stephen Thomas Erlewine, [http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql;=10:ly09kect7q70 Get Happy!! [Ryko Bonus Tracks]], Allmusic. Retrieved 17 September 2007.
http://wn.com/Elvis_Costello
Eric Clapton
Eric Patrick Clapton, CBE (born 30 March 1945) is an English blues-rock guitarist and singer-songwriter. Clapton is the only person who has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame three times; as a solo performer, as well as a member of rock bands the Yardbirds and Cream. Throughout his career, Clapton has been viewed by critics and fans alike as one of the most important and influential guitarists of all time, Clapton was ranked fourth in Rolling Stone magazine's list of the "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time" and #53 on their list of the "Immortals: 100 Greatest Artists of All Time". In 2010, Clapton was ranked #4 on ''Gibson's'' Top 50 Guitarists of All Time.
http://wn.com/Eric_Clapton
Eric Lindell
http://wn.com/Eric_Lindell
Eric Wrixon
Eric Wrixon (born 29 June 1947, in Belfast, Northern Ireland) is a musician from Northern Ireland. He was a founder member of both Them and Thin Lizzy. It was Wrixon who came up with the enigmatic band name 'Them' but as he was a minor, his parents declined to sign a recording contract on his behalf and he was replaced prior to recording with the band. He would return to play live with Them on a few occasions in subsequent years.
http://wn.com/Eric_Wrixon
Erik Hage
Erik Hage is an American writer, cultural reporter, and critic born in Albany, New York, in 1969 and raised in Boston and the Catskill-Mountains foothills of New York State. His books include the critical biography The Words and Music of Van Morrison (Greenwood Publishing Group/Praeger, 2009) and the work of literary criticism Cormac McCarthy: A Literary Companion (McFarland & Company, 2010), which was deemed "indispensable," "engaging," and "highly recommended" by Choice, the magazine published by the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) .
http://wn.com/Erik_Hage
Farrah Fawcett
http://wn.com/Farrah_Fawcett
Garth Hudson
Eric Garth Hudson (b. August 2, 1937 in Windsor, Ontario, Canada) is a Canadian multi-instrumentalist. As the organist and keyboardist for Canadian-American rock group The Band, he was a principal architect of the group's unique sound. A master of the Lowrey organ, Hudson's orchestral tone sense and style anticipated many of the sonic advances of the polyphonic synthesizer. His other primary instruments are piano, electronic keyboards, tenor saxophone, soprano saxophone and accordion. He has been a much-in-demand session musician, performing with dozens of artists. He also plays in a duo with his wife, Maud, and in 2002 joined his friend Sneaky Pete Kleinow (died January 6, 2007) in another group, Burrito Deluxe, an offshoot of The Flying Burrito Brothers. He also has his own twelve piece band, The Best!.
http://wn.com/Garth_Hudson
Georgie Fame
Georgie Fame (born Clive Powell, 26 June 1943, Leigh, Lancashire) is a British rhythm and blues and jazz singer and keyboard player. The one-time rock and roll tour musician, who had a string of 1960s hits, is still a popular performer; often working with contemporaries such as Van Morrison and Bill Wyman.
http://wn.com/Georgie_Fame
Glen Hansard
Glen Hansard (born 21 April 1970 in Dublin, Ireland) is the principal songwriter and vocalist/guitarist for Irish rock group The Frames. He is also known for starring in the films Once and The Commitments. Hansard co-wrote the song, "Falling Slowly", which appeared in Once. "Falling Slowly" and his success with the song and performance in Once resulted in Hansard winning an Academy-Award for Best Original Song, and between 2007-2008 earned him no less than ten other major nominations or awards altogether.
http://wn.com/Glen_Hansard
Graham Parker
:For the English sportsman, see Grahame Parker.
http://wn.com/Graham_Parker
Greil Marcus
Greil Marcus (born 1945) is an American author, music journalist and cultural critic. He is notable for producing scholarly and literary essays that place rock music in a much broader framework of culture and politics than is customary in pop music journalism.
http://wn.com/Greil_Marcus
Hal Ketchum
http://wn.com/Hal_Ketchum
Harvey Goldsmith
Harvey Goldsmith CBE (born 4 May 1946 in Edgware, Middlesex) is a British performing arts promoter. He is best known as promoter of rock concerts, charity concerts, television broadcasts for the Prince's Trust and more recently the Teenage Cancer Trust shows at the Royal Albert Hall.
http://wn.com/Harvey_Goldsmith
Homer
http://wn.com/Homer
Ilene Berns
Ilene Berns Born (May 1, 1943) Cleveland, Ohio - record company director.
http://wn.com/Ilene_Berns
Jack Schroer
http://wn.com/Jack_Schroer
Jay Berliner
http://wn.com/Jay_Berliner
Jay Cocks
Jay Cocks (born January 12, 1944) is a film critic and motion picture screenwriter.
http://wn.com/Jay_Cocks
Jef Labes
Jef Labes is an American keyboardist, best known from his work with Van Morrison and Bonnie Raitt. He has also arranged for string and woodwind instruments on numerous albums.
http://wn.com/Jef_Labes
Jelly Roll Morton
Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe (September 20, 1885July 10, 1941), best known professionally as Jelly Roll Morton, was an American ragtime and early jazz pianist, bandleader and composer.
http://wn.com/Jelly_Roll_Morton
Jim Morrison
http://wn.com/Jim_Morrison
Jimi Hendrix
http://wn.com/Jimi_Hendrix
Jimmy Witherspoon
http://wn.com/Jimmy_Witherspoon
Joan Armatrading
Joan Anita Barbara Armatrading, MBE (born 9 December 1950) is a British singer, songwriter, and guitarist. Armatrading is a three-time Grammy Award-nominee and has been nominated twice for BRIT Awards as Best Female Artist. She also received an Ivor Novello award for Outstanding Contemporary Song Collection in 1996. Throughout her career, she has only ever sung the songs that she has written and has not recorded any cover songs.
http://wn.com/Joan_Armatrading
Johannes Heisig
http://wn.com/Johannes_Heisig
John Densmore
John Paul Densmore (born December 1, 1944) is an American musician and songwriter. He is best known as the drummer of the rock group The Doors.
http://wn.com/John_Densmore
John Lee Hooker
John Lee Hooker (August 22, 1917 – June 21, 2001) was an American blues singer-songwriter and guitarist, born near Clarksdale, Mississippi. Hooker began his life as the son of a sharecropper, William Hooker, and rose to prominence performing his own unique style of what was originally closest to Delta blues. He developed a 'talking blues' style that was his trademark. Though similar to the early Delta blues, his music was metrically free. John Lee Hooker could be said to embody his own unique genre of the blues, often incorporating the boogie-woogie piano style and a driving rhythm into his masterful and idiosyncratic blues guitar and singing. His best known songs include "Boogie Chillen'" (1948) and "Boom Boom" (1962).
http://wn.com/John_Lee_Hooker
John Platania
John Platania is a well-known session musician, guitar player, and record producer.
http://wn.com/John_Platania
Jon Landau
Jon Landau (born 1947) is an American music critic, manager and record producer, most known for his association in all three capacities with Bruce Springsteen.
http://wn.com/Jon_Landau
Junior Wells
Junior Wells (December 9, 1934January 15, 1998), born Amos Wells Blakemore Jr., was a blues vocalist and harmonica player and recording artist based in Chicago, who was also famous for playing with Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy, Bonnie Raitt, The Rolling Stones and Van Morrison.
http://wn.com/Junior_Wells
Kevin Rowland
Kevin A. Rowland (born 17 August 1953, Wolverhampton) is an English singer-songwriter and former frontman for the pop band, Dexys Midnight Runners, which had several hits in the early 1980s, the most notable being "Geno" and "Come On Eileen".
http://wn.com/Kevin_Rowland
L. Ron Hubbard
http://wn.com/L_Ron_Hubbard
Lead Belly
http://wn.com/Lead_Belly
Leonard Cohen
Leonard Norman Cohen, CC, GOQ (born 21 September 1934) is a Canadian singer-songwriter, musician, poet and novelist. Cohen published his first book of poetry in Montreal in 1956 and his first novel in 1963. His work often deals with the exploration of religion, isolation, sexuality and interpersonal relationships. Famously reclusive, having once spent several years in a Zen Buddhist monastery, and possessing a persona frequently associated with mystique, he is extremely well-regarded by critics for his literary accomplishments, for the richness of his lyrics, and for producing an output of work of high artistic quality over a five-decade career.
http://wn.com/Leonard_Cohen
Lester Bangs
Leslie Conway "Lester" Bangs (December 13, 1948 – April 30, 1982) was an American music journalist, author and musician. He wrote for Creem and Rolling Stone magazines, and has been called one of the "most influential" voices in rock criticism.
http://wn.com/Lester_Bangs
Levon Helm
Mark Lavon Helm (born May 26, 1940), best known as Levon Helm, is an American rock multi-instrumentalist and actor who achieved fame as the drummer and frequently lead and backing vocalist for the R&B;/rock group The Band. Helm is known for his deeply soulful, country-accented voice, and creative drumming style highlighted on many of The Band's recordings, such as "The Weight", "Up on Cripple Creek", "Ophelia" and "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down". His 2007 comeback album Dirt Farmer earned the Grammy Award for Best Traditional Folk Album in February 2008, and in November of that year, Rolling Stone magazine ranked him #91 in the list of The 100 Greatest Singers of All Time. In 2010, Electric Dirt, his 2009 follow-up to Dirt Farmer, won the first ever Grammy Award for Best Americana Album, an inaugural category in 2010.
http://wn.com/Levon_Helm
Liam Neeson
Liam John Neeson (born 7 June 1952) is an Irish actor who has been nominated for an Oscar, Golden Globe and a BAFTA.
http://wn.com/Liam_Neeson
Lonnie Donegan
Lonnie Donegan MBE (29 April 1931 – 3 November 2002) was a skiffle musician, with more than 20 UK Top 30 hits to his name. He is known as the "King of Skiffle" and is often cited as a large influence on the generation of British musicians who became famous in the 1960s. The Guinness Book of British Hit Singles & Albums states Donegan was "Britain's most successful and influential recording artist before The Beatles. He chalked up 24 successive Top 30 hits, and was the first UK male to score two U.S. Top 10s".
http://wn.com/Lonnie_Donegan
Mark Knopfler
Mark Freuder Knopfler OBE (born 12 August 1949) is a British guitarist, singer, songwriter, record producer and film score composer.
http://wn.com/Mark_Knopfler
Martin Scorsese
Martin Charles Scorsese (; born November 17, 1942) is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, actor, and film historian. He is the founder of the World Cinema Foundation and a recipient of the AFI Life Achievement Award for his contributions to the cinema, and has won awards from the Oscars, Golden Globe, BAFTA, and Directors Guild of America. Scorsese is president of The Film Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to film preservation.
http://wn.com/Martin_Scorsese
Michelle Rocca
Michelle Rocca (born Dublin, Ireland, 1961) is a Dublin socialite who initially achieved a degree of fame as the wife of footballer John Devine before becoming for a lengthy period the girlfriend, and later, the wife of Van Morrison. She is the daughter of Paddy and Maureen Rocca and granddaughter of Italian immigrant Egidio Rocca who founded the successful business, Rocca Tiles.
http://wn.com/Michelle_Rocca
Muddy Waters
McKinley Morganfield (April 4, 1915April 30, 1983), known as Muddy Waters, was an American blues musician, generally considered "the Father of blues". Blues musicians Big Bill Morganfield and Larry "Mud Morganfield" Williams are his sons. A major inspiration for the British blues explosion in the 1960s, Muddy was ranked #17 in Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time.
http://wn.com/Muddy_Waters
Nick Drake
http://wn.com/Nick_Drake
Oscar Wilde
http://wn.com/Oscar_Wilde
Paolo Nutini
Paolo Giovanni Nutini (born 9 January 1987) is a Scottish Singer, Songwriter and Musician from Paisley. Both his parents are Scottish, although his father is of Italian descent, from Barga, Tuscany, and his family has been in Scotland for three generations.
http://wn.com/Paolo_Nutini
Patti Smith
Patricia Lee "Patti" Smith (born December 30, 1946) is an American singer-songwriter, poet and visual artist, who became a highly influential component of the New York City punk rock movement with her 1975 debut album Horses. Called the "Godmother of Punk", she integrated the beat poetry performance style with three-chord rock. Smith's most widely known song is "Because the Night", which was co-written with Bruce Springsteen and reached number 13 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1978. In 2005, Patti Smith was named a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture, and in 2007, she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
http://wn.com/Patti_Smith
Phil Lynott
http://wn.com/Phil_Lynott
Ray Charles
Ray Charles Robinson (September 23, 1930June 10, 2004), better known by his shortened stage name Ray Charles, was an American musician. Ray was a pioneer in the genre of soul music during the 1950s by fusing rhythm & blues, gospel, and blues styles into his early recordings with Atlantic Records. He also helped racially integrate country and pop music during the 1960s with his crossover success on ABC Records, most notably with his Modern Sounds albums. While with ABC, Charles became one of the first African-American musicians to be given artistic control by a mainstream record company.
http://wn.com/Ray_Charles
Ray Lamontagne
http://wn.com/Ray_Lamontagne
Rick Danko
http://wn.com/Rick_Danko
Rickie Lee Jones
Rickie Lee Jones (born November 8, 1954) is an American vocalist, musician, songwriter, and producer. Over the course of a three-decade career, Jones has recorded in various musical styles including rock, R&B;, blues, pop, soul, and jazz standards.
http://wn.com/Rickie_Lee_Jones
Ritchie Yorke
http://wn.com/Ritchie_Yorke
Robbie Robertson
http://wn.com/Robbie_Robertson
Robert Pattinson
Robert Thomas Pattinson (born 13 May 1986) is an English actor, model, musician, and producer. Born and raised in London, Pattinson started out his career by playing the role of Cedric Diggory in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Later, he landed the leading role of Edward Cullen in the film adaptations of the Twilight novels by Stephenie Meyer, and came to worldwide international fame. Pattinson was ranked as one of the highest paid actors in Hollywood based on 2009 earnings. In 2010, Pattinson was named one of Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People in The World, and also in the same year Forbes ranked him as one of the most powerful celebrities in the world in the Celebrity 100. His upcoming films include Bel Ami, Water For Elephants, Unbound Captives, and .
http://wn.com/Robert_Pattinson
Rod Stewart
Roderick David "Rod" Stewart, CBE (born 10 January 1945) is a British singer-songwriter born and raised in London, England and currently residing in Epping. He is of Scottish and English lineage.
http://wn.com/Rod_Stewart
Roger Kellaway
Roger Kellaway (born November 1, 1939) is an American composer, arranger, and pianist.
http://wn.com/Roger_Kellaway
Samuel Coleridge
http://wn.com/Samuel_Coleridge
Seamus Heaney
Seamus Heaney (born 13 April 1939, ) is an Irish poet, writer and lecturer who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995 and the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2006. He currently lives in Dublin.
http://wn.com/Seamus_Heaney
Shadows of Knight
'''
http://wn.com/Shadows_of_Knight
Shana Morrison
Shana Morrison, born Shana Caledonia Morrison, on April 7, 1970, in Kingston, New York, is an American singer-songwriter and the daughter of Northern Irish singer-songwriter, Van Morrison, and his ex-wife, Janet (Planet) Rigsbee Minto.
http://wn.com/Shana_Morrison
Sinéad O'Connor
http://wn.com/Sinéad_O'Connor
Sonny Terry
Saunders Terrell, better known as Sonny Terry (24 October 1911 - 11 March 1986) was a blind blues musician. He was most widely known for his energetic blues harmonica style, which frequently included vocal whoops and hollers, and imitations of trains and fox hunts.
http://wn.com/Sonny_Terry
Ted Templeman
Ted Templeman (born October 24, 1944, in Santa Cruz, California) is an American record producer.
http://wn.com/Ted_Templeman
Tom Jones (singer)
Sir Thomas John Woodward, OBE (born 7 June 1940), known by his stage name Tom Jones, is a Welsh singer. Jones is particularly noted for his powerful voice.
http://wn.com/Tom_Jones_(singer)
Tom Petty
Thomas Earl "Tom" Petty (born October 20, 1950) is an American singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist. He is the frontman of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and was a founding member of the late 1980s supergroup Traveling Wilburys and Mudcrutch. He has also performed under the pseudonyms of Charlie T. Wilbury, Jr. and Muddy Wilbury.
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Ulster Scots people
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Van Morrison, OBE (born George Ivan Morrison; 31 August 1945) is a Northern Irish singer-songwriter and musician. His live performances at their best are regarded as transcendental and inspired; while some of his recordings, such as the studio albums Astral Weeks and Moondance, and the live album ''It's Too Late to Stop Now'', are widely viewed as among the greatest ever made.
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Van Morrison
Van Morrison at Marin Civic Center, 2007
Background information
Birth name	George Ivan Morrison
Also known as	Van the Man The Belfast Cowboy
Born	(1945-08-31) 31 August 1945 (age 66)
Origin	Belfast, Northern Ireland
Genres	Rock, blues, rhythm and blues, folk, blue-eyed soul, celtic, rock and roll, jazz fusion, country, soft rock
Occupations	Singer-songwriter, musician
Instruments	Vocals, guitar, harmonica, saxophones, keyboards, drums, tambourine, ukulele
Years active	1958–present
Labels	Decca Bang Warner Bros. London Mercury Exile/Polydor Verve Point Black Virgin Universal Blue Note Lost Highway Listen to the Lion/EMI Manhattan
Associated acts	Them
Website	www.vanmorrison.com

Van Morrison, OBE (born George Ivan Morrison; 31 August 1945) is a Northern Irish singer-songwriter and musician. His live performances at their best are regarded as transcendental^[1]^[2]^[3] and inspired;^[4]^[5]^[6] while some of his recordings, such as the studio albums Astral Weeks and Moondance, and the live album It's Too Late to Stop Now, are widely viewed as among the greatest ever made.^[7]^[8]^[9]

Known as "Van the Man" to his fans,^[10] Morrison started his professional career when, as a teenager in the late 1950s, he played a variety of instruments including guitar, harmonica, keyboards and saxophone for various Irish showbands covering the popular hits of the day. He rose to prominence in the mid-1960s as the lead singer of the Northern Irish R&B band Them, with whom he recorded the garage band classic "Gloria". His solo career began under the pop-hit oriented guidance of Bert Berns with the release of the hit single "Brown Eyed Girl" in 1967. After Berns' death, Warner Bros. Records bought out his contract and allowed him three sessions to record Astral Weeks in 1968.^[11] Even though this album would gradually garner high praise, it was initially poorly received; however, the next one, Moondance, established Morrison as a major artist,^[12] and throughout the 1970s he built on his reputation with a series of critically acclaimed albums and live performances. Morrison continues to record and tour, producing albums and live performances that sell well and are generally warmly received, sometimes collaborating with other artists, such as Georgie Fame and The Chieftains. In 2008 he performed Astral Weeks live for the first time since 1968.

Much of Morrison's music is structured around the conventions of soul music and R&B, such as the popular singles "Brown Eyed Girl", "Jackie Wilson Said (I'm in Heaven When You Smile)", "Domino" and "Wild Night". An equal part of his catalogue consists of lengthy, loosely connected, spiritually inspired musical journeys that show the influence of Celtic tradition, jazz, and stream-of-consciousness narrative, such as Astral Weeks and lesser-known works such as Veedon Fleece and Common One.^[13]^[14] The two strains together are sometimes referred to as "Celtic Soul".^[15]

Morrison has received considerable acclaim, including six Grammy Awards, being inducted into both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and appearing on several "Greatest Artists" lists.

Life and career [link]

Early life and musical roots: 1945–64 [link]

George Ivan (Van) Morrison was born on 31 August 1945, at 125 Hynford Street, Bloomfield, East Belfast, Northern Ireland as the only child of George Morrison, a shipyard electrician, and Violet Stitt Morrison, a singer and tap dancer in her youth.^[16] Van Morrison's family roots descend from the Ulster Scots population that settled in Belfast.^[17]^[18]^[19] From 1950 to 1956, Morrison, who began to be known as "Van" during this time, attended Elmgrove Primary School.^[20] Morrison's father had what was at the time one of the largest record collections in Ulster (acquired during his sojourn in Detroit, Michigan in the early 1950s),^[21] and the young Morrison grew up listening to artists such as Jelly Roll Morton, Ray Charles, Lead Belly, and Solomon Burke;^[20]^[22] of whom Morrison later said, "If it weren't for guys like Ray and Solomon, I wouldn't be where I am today. Those guys were the inspiration that got me going. If it wasn't for that kind of music, I couldn't do what I'm doing now."^[23] His father's record collection exposed him to various musical genres, such as the blues of Muddy Waters; the gospel of Mahalia Jackson; the jazz of Charlie Parker; the folk music of Woody Guthrie; and country music from Hank Williams and Jimmie Rodgers,^[20] while the first record he ever bought was by blues musician Sonny Terry.^[24] When Lonnie Donegan had a hit with "Rock Island Line", written by Huddie Ledbetter (Lead Belly), Morrison felt he was familiar with and able to connect with skiffle music as he had been hearing Lead Belly before that.^[25]^[26]

Morrison's father bought him his first acoustic guitar when he was eleven, and he learned to play rudimentary chords from the song book, The Carter Family Style, edited by Alan Lomax.^[27] A year later, when he was twelve years old, Morrison formed his first band,^[28] a skiffle group, "The Sputniks", named after the recently launched Soviet satellite, Sputnik 1.^[29] In 1958, the band played at some of the local cinemas, and Morrison took the lead, contributing most of the singing and arranging. Other short-lived groups followed – at fourteen, he formed Midnight Special, another modified skiffle band and played at a school concert.^[27] Then, when he heard Jimmy Giuffre playing saxophone on "The Train and The River", he talked his father into buying him a saxophone,^[30] and took lessons in tenor sax and music reading.^[31] Now playing the saxophone, Morrison joined with various local bands, including one called Deanie Sands and the Javelins, with whom he played guitar and shared singing. The line-up of the band was lead vocalist Deanie Sands, guitarist George Jones and drummer, vocalist Roy Kane.^[32] Later the four main musicians of the Javelins, with the addition of Wesley Black as pianist, became known as the Monarchs.^[33]

Morrison attended Orangefield High School, leaving in July 1960 with no qualifications.^[34] As a member of a working-class community, it was expected that he would get a regular full-time job,^[33] so after several short apprenticeship positions, he settled into a job as a window cleaner— later alluded to in his songs, "Cleaning Windows" and "Saint Dominic's Preview".^[35] However, he had been developing his musical interests from an early age and continued playing with the Monarchs part-time. Young Morrison also played with the Harry Mack Showband, the Great Eight, with his older workplace friend, Geordie (G. D.) Sproule, whom he later named as one of his biggest influences.^[36]

At age 17, he toured Europe for the first time with the Monarchs, now calling themselves the International Monarchs. This Irish showband,^[37] with Morrison playing saxophone, guitar and harp, in addition to back-up duty on bass and drums, toured steamy clubs and US Army bases in Scotland, England, and Germany, often playing five sets a night.^[32] While in Germany, the band recorded a single, "Boozoo Hully Gully"/"Twingy Baby", under the name Georgie and The Monarchs. This was Morrison's first recording, taking place in November 1963 at Ariola Studios in Cologne with Morrison on saxophone; it made the lower reaches of the German charts.^[38]^[39]

Upon returning to Belfast in November 1963, the group disbanded,^[40] so Morrison connected with Geordie Sproule again and played with him in the Manhattan Showband along with guitarist Herbie Armstrong. When Armstrong auditioned to play with Brian Rossi and the Golden Eagles, Morrison went along and was hired as a blues singer.^[41]

Them: 1964–66 [link]

Main article: Them (band)

The roots of Them, the band that first broke Morrison on the international scene, came in April 1964 when Morrison responded to an advert for musicians to play at a new R&B club at the Maritime Hotel – an old dance hall frequented by sailors.^[42] The new R&B club needed a band for its opening night; however, Morrison had left the Golden Eagles (the group with which he had been performing at the time), so he created a new band out of The Gamblers, an East Belfast group formed by Ronnie Millings, Billy Harrison, and Alan Henderson in 1962.^[43]^[44] Eric Wrixon, still a schoolboy, was the piano player and keyboardist.^[45] Morrison played saxophone and harmonica and shared vocals with Billy Harrison. They followed Eric Wrixon's suggestion for a new name, and The Gamblers morphed into Them, their name taken from the Fifties horror movie Them!.^[46]

The band's strong R&B performances at the Maritime attracted attention. Them performed without a routine and Morrison ad libbed, creating his songs live as he performed.^[47] While the band did covers, they also played some of Morrison's early songs, such as "Could You Would You", which he had written in Camden Town while touring with The Manhattan Showband.^[48] The debut of Morrison's "Gloria" took place on stage here. Sometimes, depending on his mood, the song could last up to twenty minutes. Morrison has stated that "Them lived and died on the stage at the Maritime Hotel," believing that the band did not manage to capture the spontaneity and energy of their live performances on their records.^[49] The statement also reflected the instability of the Them lineup, with numerous members passing through the ranks after the definitive Maritime period. Morrison and Henderson would remain the only constants, and a highly unsuccessful version of Them even soldiered on after Morrison's departure.^[50]

Dick Rowe of Decca Records became aware of the band's performances, and signed Them to a standard two-year contract. In that period, they released two albums and ten singles, with two more singles released after Morrison departed the band. They had three chart hits, "Baby, Please Don't Go" (1964), "Here Comes the Night" (1965), and "Mystic Eyes" (1965),^[51] though it was the b-side of "Baby, Please Don't Go", the garage band classic, "Gloria",^[52] that went on to become a rock standard covered by Patti Smith, The Doors, Shadows of Knight, Jimi Hendrix and many others.^[53]

	"Gloria" noicon Morrison's garage rock classic was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999. As described by Paul Williams: "Van Morrison's voice a fierce beacon in the darkness, the lighthouse at the end of the world. Resulting in one of the most perfect rock anthems known to humankind."^[54]
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Building on the success of their singles in the United States, and riding on the back of the British Invasion, Them undertook a two month tour of America in May and June 1966 that included a residency from 30 May to 18 June at the Whisky a Go Go in Los Angeles.^[55] The Doors were the supporting act on the last week,^[56] and Morrison's influence on The Doors singer, Jim Morrison, was noted by John Densmore in his book Riders On The Storm. Brian Hinton relates how "Jim Morrison learned quickly from his near namesake's stagecraft, his apparent recklessness, his air of subdued menace, the way he would improvise poetry to a rock beat, even his habit of crouching down by the bass drum during instrumental breaks."^[57] On the final night, the two Morrisons and the two bands jammed together on "Gloria".^[58]^[59]^[60]

Toward the end of the tour the band members became involved in a dispute with their manager, Decca Records' Phil Solomon, over the revenues paid to the band; that, coupled with the expiry of their work visas, meant the band returned from America dejected. After two more concerts in Ireland, Them split up. Morrison concentrated on writing some of the songs that would appear on Astral Weeks, while the remnants of the band reformed in 1967 and relocated in America.^[61]

Start of solo career with Bang Records and "Brown Eyed Girl" – 1967 [link]

	"Brown Eyed Girl" noicon Morrison's classic 1967 hit single which appeared on the album Blowin' Your Mind!. In 2007, it was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.^[62]
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Bert Berns, Them’s producer and composer of their 1965 hit, "Here Comes the Night", persuaded Morrison to return to New York to record solo for his new label, Bang Records.^[63] Morrison flew over and signed a contract he had not fully studied.^[64] Then, during a two-day recording session at A & R Studios starting 28 March 1967, eight songs were recorded, originally intended to be used as four singles.^[65] Instead, these songs were released as the album Blowin' Your Mind! without Morrison being consulted. He said he only became aware of the album's release when a friend mentioned on a phone call that he had just bought a copy of it. He later commented to Donal Corvin in a 1973 interview: "I wasn't really happy with it. He picked the bands and tunes. I had a different concept of it."^[66]

However, from these early sessions emerged "Brown Eyed Girl". Captured on the 22nd take on the first day,^[67] this song was released as a single in mid-June 1967,^[68] reaching number ten in the US charts in 1967. "Brown Eyed Girl" became Morrison's most played song and over the years it has remained a classic; forty years later in 2007, it was the fourth most requested song of DJs in the US.^[69]

Following the death of Berns in 1967, Morrison became involved in a contract dispute with Berns' widow that prevented him from performing on stage or recording in the New York area.^[70] The song "Big Time Operators", released in 1993, is thought to allude to his dealings with the New York music business during this time period.^[71] He then moved to Boston, Massachusetts, and was soon confronted with personal and financial problems; he had "slipped into a malaise" and had trouble finding concert bookings.^[72] However, through the few gigs he could find, he regained his professional footing and started recording with the Warner Bros. Records label.^[73]^[74] The record company managed to buy out his contract with Bang Records. Morrison fulfilled a clause that bound him to submit thirty-six original songs within a year to Web IV Music, Berns' music publishing company, by recording thirty-one songs in one session; however, Ilene Berns thought the songs "nonsense music ... about ringworms" and didn't use them.^[75]^[76] The throwaway compositions would come to be known as the "revenge" songs.^[77]

[edit] Astral Weeks – 1968

Main article: Astral Weeks

"Astral Weeks is about the power of the human voice – ecstatic agony, agonising ecstacy. Here is an Irish tenor reborn as a White Negro – a Caucasian Soul Man – pleading and beseeching over a bed of dreamy folk-jazz instrumentation: acoustic bass, brushed drums, vibes and acoustic guitar, the odd string quartet – and of course flute."

Barney Hoskyns – Mojo^[78]

	Astral Weeks noicon The 1968 title song featuring the opening lines of the album: "If I ventured in the slipstream between the viaducts of your dream". His early voice was described as "flinty and tender, beseeching and plaintive".^[79]
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His first album for Warner Bros. Records was Astral Weeks (which he had already performed in several clubs around Boston), a mystical song cycle, often considered to be his best work and one of the best albums of all time.^[80]^[81] Morrison has said, "When Astral Weeks came out, I was starving, literally."^[82] Released in 1968, the album eventually achieved critical acclaim, but it originally received an indifferent response from the public. To this day, it remains in an unclassifiable music genre and has been described variously as hypnotic, meditative, and as possessing a unique musical power.^[80] It has been compared to French Impressionism and mystical Celtic poetry.^[83]^[84]^[85] A 2004 Rolling Stone magazine review begins with the words: "This is music of such enigmatic beauty that thirty-five years after its release, Astral Weeks still defies easy, admiring description."^[86] Alan Light would later describe Astral Weeks as "like nothing he had done previously—and really, nothing anyone had done previously. Morrison sings of lost love, death, and nostalgia for childhood in the Celtic soul that would become his signature."^[15] It has been placed on many lists of best albums of all time.^[7] In the 1995 Mojo list of 100 Best Albums, it was listed as number two and was number nineteen on the Rolling Stone magazine's The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time in 2003.^[87]^[88] In December 2009, it was voted the top Irish album of all time by a poll of leading Irish musicians conducted by Hot Press magazine.^[89]^[90]

[edit] From Moondance to Into the Music: 1970–79

Morrison's third solo album, Moondance, which was released in 1970, became his first million selling album and reached number twenty-nine on the Billboard charts.^[91]^[92]^[93] The style of Moondance stood in contrast to that of Astral Weeks. Whereas Astral Weeks had a sorrowful and vulnerable tone, Moondance restored a more optimistic and cheerful message to his music.^[94] The title track, although not released in the US as a single until 1977, received heavy play in FM radio formats.^[95] "Into the Mystic" has also gained a wide following over the years.^[96]^[97] The single released was "Come Running", which reached the American Top 40.^[98] Moondance was both well received and favourably reviewed. Lester Bangs and Greil Marcus had a combined full page review in Rolling Stone, stating that Morrison now had "the striking imagination of a consciousness that is visionary in the strongest sense of the word."^[99] "That was the type of band I dig," Morrison said of the Moondance sessions. "Two horns and a rhythm section – they're the type of bands that I like best." He produced the album himself as he felt like nobody else knew what he wanted.^[100] Moondance was listed at number sixty-five on the Rolling Stone magazine's The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.^[88] In March 2007, Moondance was listed as number seventy-two on the NARM Rock and Roll Hall of Fame list of the "Definitive 200".^[101]

Over the next few years, he released a succession of albums, starting with a second one in 1970. His Band and the Street Choir had a free, more relaxed sound than Moondance, but not the perfection, in the opinion of critic Jon Landau who felt like "a few more numbers with a gravity of 'Street Choir' would have made this album as perfect as anyone could have stood."^[102] It contained the hit single "Domino", which charted at number nine in the Billboard Hot 100.^[103]

In 1971, he released another well-received album, Tupelo Honey.^[104] This album produced the hit single "Wild Night" that was later covered by John Mellencamp. The title song has a notably country-soul feel about it^[105] and the album ended with another country tune, "Moonshine Whiskey". Morrison said he originally intended to make an all country album.^[106] The recordings were as live as possible – after rehearsing the songs the musicians would go into the studio and play a whole set in one take.^[107] His co-producer, Ted Templeman, described this recording process as the "scariest thing I've ever seen. When he's got something together, he wants to put it down right away with no overdubbing."^[108]

Released in 1972, Saint Dominic's Preview, revealed Morrison's break from the more accessible style of his previous three albums and moving back towards the more daring, adventurous, and meditative aspects of Astral Weeks. The combination of two styles of music demonstrated a versatility not previously found in his earlier albums.^[109] Two songs, "Jackie Wilson Said (I'm in Heaven When You Smile)" and "Redwood Tree", reached the Hot 100 singles chart.^[98] The songs "Listen to the Lion" and "Almost Independence Day" are each over ten minutes long and employ the type of poetic imagery not heard since Astral Weeks.^[109]^[110] It was his highest charting album in the US until his Top Ten debut on Billboard 200 in 2008.^[111]

He released his next album Hard Nose the Highway in 1973 receiving mixed, but mostly negative, reviews. The album contained the popular song "Warm Love" but otherwise has been largely dismissed critically.^[112] In a 1973 Rolling Stone review, it was described as: "psychologically complex, musically somewhat uneven and lyrically excellent."^[113]

During a three-week vacation visit to Ireland in October 1973, Morrison wrote seven of the songs that would make up his next album, Veedon Fleece.^[114] Though it attracted scant initial attention, its critical stature grew markedly over the years—with Veedon Fleece now often considered to be one of Morrison's most impressive and poetic works.^[115]^[116] In a 2008 Rolling Stone review, Andy Greene writes that when released in late 1974: "it was greeted by a collective shrug by the rock critical establishment" and concludes: "He's released many wonderful albums since, but he's never again hit the majestic heights of this one."^[117] "You Don't Pull No Punches, But You Don't Push the River", one of the album's side closers, exemplifies the long, hypnotic, cryptic Morrison with its references to visionary poet William Blake and to the seemingly Grail-like Veedon Fleece object.^[118]

Morrison would not release a follow-up album for another three years. After a decade without taking time off, he said in an interview, he needed to get away from music completely and ceased listening to it for several months.^[119] Also suffering from writer's block, he seriously considered leaving the music business for good.^[120] Speculation that an extended jam session would be released either under the title Mechanical Bliss, or Naked in the Jungle, or Stiff Upper Lip, came to nothing,^[121] and Morrison's next album was A Period of Transition in 1977, a collaboration with Dr. John, who had appeared at The Last Waltz concert with Morrison in 1976. The album received a mild critical reception and marked the beginning of a very prolific period of song making.

	"Wavelength" noicon Morrison sings the opening lines in falsetto and synthesizers mimic the sounds of the short wave radio stations that he listened to as a boy.
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Into the Music: "The album's last four songs, "Angelou", "And the Healing Has Begun", and "It's All in the Game/You Know What They're Writing About" are a veritable tour-de-force with Morrison summoning every vocal trick at his disposal from "Angelou's climactic shouts to the sexually-charged, half-mumbled monologue in "And the Healing Has Begun" to the barely audible whisper that is the album's final sound." (Scott Thomas Review')

The following year, Morrison released Wavelength; it became at that time the fastest-selling album of his career and soon went gold.^[122] The title track became a modest hit, peaking at number forty-two. Making use of 1970s synthesizers, it mimics the sounds of the shortwave radio stations that he listened to in his youth.^[123] The opening track, "Kingdom Hall" evoked Morrison's own childhood experiences attending church with his mother^[122] and foretold a religious theme that would be more evident in his next album, Into the Music.^[124]

Considered by Allmusic as "the definitive post-classic-era Morrison",^[125] Into the Music, was released in the last year of the 1970s. Songs on this album for the first time alluded to the healing power of music, which would become an abiding interest of Morrison's.^[126] "Bright Side of the Road" was a joyful, uplifting song that would appear on the soundtrack of the movie, Michael.^[127]

[edit] Common One to Avalon Sunset: 1980–89

With his next album, the new decade found Morrison following his muse into uncharted territory and merciless reviews.^[128]^[129] In February 1980, Morrison and a group of musicians traveled to Super Bear, a studio in the French Alps, to record (on the site of a former abbey) what is considered to be the most controversial album in his discography; later "Morrison admitted that his original concept was even more esoteric than the final product."^[130]^[131] The album, Common One, consisted of six songs, each of varying length. The longest, "Summertime in England", lasted fifteen and one-half minutes and ended with the words,"Can you feel the silence?". NME magazine's Paul Du Noyer called the album "colossally smug and cosmically dull; an interminable, vacuous and drearily egotistical stab at spirituality: Into the muzak."^[130] Even Greil Marcus, whose previous writings had been favourably inclined towards Morrison, said: "It's Van acting the part of the 'mystic poet' he thinks he's supposed to be."^[128] Morrison insisted that the album was never "meant to be a commercial album."^[128] Biographer Clinton Heylin concludes: "He would not attempt anything so ambitious again. Henceforth every radical idea would be tempered by some notion of commerciality."^[131] Later the critics would reassess the album more favourably with the success of "Summertime in England".^[131] Lester Bangs wrote in 1982, "Van was making holy music even though he thought he was, and us [sic] rock critics had made our usual mistake of paying too much attention to the lyrics."^[128]

Morrison's next album, Beautiful Vision, released in 1982, had him returning once again to the music of his Northern Irish roots.^[132] Well received by the critics and public, it produced a minor UK hit single, "Cleaning Windows", that referenced one of Morrison's first jobs after leaving school.^[133] Several other songs on the album, "Vanlose Stairway", "She Gives Me Religion", and the instrumental, "Scandinavia" show the presence of a new personal muse in his life: a Danish public relations agent, who would share Morrison's spiritual interests and serve as a steadying influence on him throughout most of the 1980s.^[134] "Scandinavia", with Morrison on piano,^[135] was nominated in the Best Rock Instrumental Performance category for the 25th Annual Grammy Awards.^[136]

Much of the music Morrison released throughout the 1980s continued to focus on the themes of spirituality and faith. His 1983 album, Inarticulate Speech of the Heart was "a move towards creating music for meditation" with synthesisers, uilleann pipes and flute sounds and four of the tracks were instrumentals.^[137] The titling of the album and the presence of the instrumentals were noted to be indicative of Morrison's long-held belief that "it's not the words one uses but the force of conviction behind those words that matters."^[135] During this period of time, Morrison had studied Scientology and gave "Special Thanks" to L. Ron Hubbard on the album's credits.^[138]

A Sense of Wonder, Morrison's 1985 album, pulled together the spiritual themes contained in his last four albums, which were defined in a Rolling Stone review as: "rebirth (Into the Music), deep contemplation and meditation, (Common One); ecstasy and humility (Beautiful Vision); and blissful, mantra like languor (Inarticulate Speech of the Heart)."^[139] The single, "Tore Down a la Rimbaud" was a reference to Rimbaud and an earlier bout of writer's block that Morrison had encountered in 1974.^[140] In 1985, Morrison also wrote the musical score for the movie, Lamb starring Liam Neeson.^[141]

Morrison's 1986 release, No Guru, No Method, No Teacher, was said to contain a "genuine holiness...and musical freshness that needs to be set in context to understand."^[142] Critical response was favourable with a Sounds reviewer calling the album "his most intriguingly involved since Astral Weeks" and "Morrison at his most mystical, magical best."^[143]^[144] It contains the song, "In the Garden" that, according to Morrison, had a "definite meditation process which is a 'form' of transcendental meditation as its basis. It's not TM".^[142] He entitled the album as a rebuttal to media attempts to place him in various creeds.^[145] In an interview in the Observer he told Anthony Denselow:

There have been many lies put out about me and this finally states my position. I have never joined any organisation, nor plan to. I am not affiliated to any guru, don't subscribe to any method and for those people who don't know what a guru is, I don't have a teacher either.^[146]

After releasing the "No Guru" album, Morrison's music appeared less gritty and more adult contemporary with the well-received 1987 album, Poetic Champions Compose, considered to be one of his recording highlights of the 1980s.^[147] The romantic ballad from this album, "Someone Like You", has been featured subsequently in the soundtracks of several movies, including 1995's French Kiss, and in 2001, both Someone Like You and Bridget Jones's Diary.^[127]^[148]

In 1988, he released Irish Heartbeat, a collection of traditional Irish folk songs recorded with the Irish group, The Chieftains, which reached number 18 in the UK album charts. The title song, "Irish Heartbeat", was originally recorded on his 1983 album Inarticulate Speech of the Heart.^[149]

The 1989 album, Avalon Sunset, which featured the hit duet with Cliff Richard "Whenever God Shines His Light" and the ballad "Have I Told You Lately" (on which "earthly love transmutes into that for God."(Hinton),^[150] reached 13 on the UK album chart. Although considered to be a deeply spiritual album,^[151] it also contained "Daring Night" which "deals with full, blazing sex, whatever it's churchy organ and gentle lilt suggest."(Hinton)^[152] Morrison's familiar themes of "God, woman, his childhood in Belfast and those enchanted moments when time stands still" were prominent in the songs.^[153] He can be heard calling out the change of tempo at the end of this song, repeating the numbers "1 – 4" to cue the chord changes (the first and fourth chord in the key of the music). He often completed albums in two days, frequently releasing first takes.^[154]^[155]

[edit] The Best of Van Morrison to Back on Top: 1990–99

The early to middle 1990s were commercially successful for Morrison with three albums reaching the top five of the UK charts, sold-out concerts, and a more visible public profile; but this period also marked a decline in the critical reception to his work.^[156] The decade began with the release of The Best of Van Morrison; compiled by Morrison himself, the album was focused on his hit singles, and became a multi-platinum success remaining a year and a half on the UK charts. Allmusic determined it to be "far and away the best selling album of his career."^[96]^[157] After Enlightenment which included the hit singles "Real Real Gone" and the title cut in 1990, an ambitious double album "Hymns to the Silence" was released the following year, his only double studio album. Another compilation album, The Best of Van Morrison Volume Two was released in January 1993, followed by Too Long in Exile in June, another top five chart success.^[158] The 1994 live double album A Night in San Francisco received favourable reviews as well as commercial success by reaching number eight on the UK charts.^[159]^[160]^[161]^[162] 1995's Days Like This also had large sales – though the critical reviews were not always favourable.^[163] This period also saw a number of side projects, including the live jazz performances of 1996's How Long Has This Been Going On, from the same year Tell Me Something: The Songs of Mose Allison, and 2000's The Skiffle Sessions - Live In Belfast 1998, all of which found Morrison paying tribute to his early musical influences.

In 1997, Morrison released The Healing Game. The album received mixed reviews, with the lyrics being described as "tired" and "dull",^[164] though critic Greil Marcus praised the musical complexity of the album by saying: "It carries the listener into a musical home so perfect and complete he or she might have forgotten that music could call up such a place, and then populate it with people, acts, wishes, fears."^[165] The following year, Morrison finally released some of his previously unissued studio recordings in a two-disc set, The Philosopher's Stone. His next release, 1999's Back on Top, achieved a modest success, being his highest charting album in the US since 1978's Wavelength.^[166]

Recent years: 2000 - present [link]

Van Morrison continued to record and tour in the 2000s, often performing two or three times a week.^[167] He formed his own independent label, Exile Productions Ltd, which enables him to maintain full production control of each album he records, which he then delivers as a finished product to the recording label that he chooses, for marketing and distribution.^[168]

The album, Down the Road released in May 2002, received a good critical reception and proved to be his highest charting album in the US since 1972's Saint Dominic's Preview.^[111] It had a nostalgic tone, with its fifteen tracks representing the various musical genres that Morrison had previously covered—including R&B, blues, country and folk;^[169] one of the tracks was written as a tribute to his late father George, who had played a pivotal role in nurturing his early musical tastes.^[20]

Morrison's 2005 album, Magic Time, debuted at number twenty-five on the US Billboard 200 charts upon its May release, some forty years after Morrison first entered the public's eye as the frontman of Them. Rolling Stone listed it as number seventeen on The Top 50 Records of 2005.^[170] Also in July 2005, Morrison was named by Amazon as one of their top twenty-five all-time best-selling artists and inducted into the Amazon.com Hall of Fame.^[171] Later in the year, Morrison also donated a previously unreleased studio track to a charity album, Hurricane Relief: Come Together Now, which raised money for relief efforts intended for Gulf Coast victims devastated by hurricanes, Katrina and Rita.^[172] Morrison composed the song, "Blue and Green", featuring Foggy Lyttle on guitar. This song was released in 2007 on the album, The Best of Van Morrison Volume 3 and also as a single in the UK. Van Morrison was a headline act at the international celtic music festival, The Hebridean Celtic Festival in Stornoway Outer Hebrides in the summer of 2005.^[173]

He released an album with a country music theme, entitled Pay the Devil, on 7 March 2006 and appeared at the Ryman Auditorium where the tickets sold out immediately after they went on sale.^[174] Pay the Devil debuted at number twenty-six on The Billboard 200 and peaked at number seven on Top Country Albums.^[175]^[176] Amazon Best of 2006 Editor's Picks in Country listed the country album at number ten in December 2006. Still promoting the country album, Morrison's performance as the headline act on the first night of the Austin City Limits Music Festival on 15 September 2006 was reviewed by Rolling Stone magazine as one of the top ten shows of the 2006 festival.^[177] In November 2006, a limited edition album, Live at Austin City Limits Festival was issued by Exile Productions, Ltd. A later deluxe CD/DVD release of Pay the Devil, in the summer of 2006 contained tracks from the Ryman performance.^[178] In October 2006, Morrison had released his first commercial DVD, Live at Montreux 1980/1974 with concerts taken from two separate appearances at the Montreux Jazz Festival.

A new double CD compilation album The Best of Van Morrison Volume 3 was released in June 2007 containing thirty-one tracks, some of which were previously unreleased. Morrison selected the tracks, which ranged from the 1993 album Too Long in Exile to the song "Stranded" from the 2005 album Magic Time.^[179] On 3 September 2007, Morrison's complete catalogue of albums from 1971 through 2002 were made available exclusively at the ITunes Store in Europe and Australia and during the first week of October 2007, the albums became available at the US ITunes Store.^[180]

Still on Top - The Greatest Hits, a thirty-seven track double CD compilation album was released on 22 October 2007 in the UK on the Polydor label. On 29 October 2007, the album charted at number two on the Official UK Top 75 Albums—his highest UK charting.^[181] The November release in the US and Canada contains twenty-one selected tracks.^[182] The hits that were released on albums with the copyrights owned by Morrison as Exile Productions Ltd.—1971 and later—had been remastered in 2007.

Keep It Simple, Morrison's 33rd studio album of completely new material was released by Exile/Polydor Records on 17 March 2008 in the UK and released by Exile/Lost Highway Records in the US and Canada on 1 April 2008.^[183] It comprised eleven self-penned tracks. Morrison promoted the album with a short US tour including an appearance at the SXSW music conference,^[184]^[185] and a UK concert broadcast on BBC Radio 2. In the first week of release Keep It Simple debuted on the Billboard 200 chart at number ten, Morrison's first Top Ten charting in the US.^[186]

Live performances [link]

A smiling Van Morrison performing at the Marin Civic Center, 2007.

By 1972, after being a performer for nearly ten years, Morrison began experiencing stage fright when performing for audiences of thousands, as opposed to the hundreds as he had experienced in his early career. He became anxious on stage and would have difficulty establishing eye contact with the audience. He once said in an interview about performing on stage, "I dig singing the songs but there are times when it's pretty agonizing for me to be out there." After a brief break from music, he started appearing in clubs, regaining his ability to perform live, albeit with smaller audiences.^[32]

The 1974 live double album, It's Too Late to Stop Now, has been on lists of greatest live albums of all time.^[9]^[187]^[188]^[189]^[190] Biographer Johnny Rogan states that "Morrison was in the midst of what was arguably his greatest phase as a performer."^[191] Performances on the album were from tapes made during a three month tour of the US and Europe in 1973 with the backing group The Caledonia Soul Orchestra. Soon after recording the album, Morrison restructured the Caledonia Soul Orchestra into a smaller unit, the Caledonia Soul Express.^[192]

Morrison performs in 1976 at The Band's final concert filmed for The Last Waltz.

On Thanksgiving Day 1976, Morrison performed at the farewell concert for The Band. Morrison's first live performance in several years, he considered skipping his appearance until the last minute, even refusing to go on stage when they announced his name. His manager, Harvey Goldsmith, said he "literally kicked him out there."^[193] Morrison was on good terms with The Band as near-neighbours in Woodstock, and they had the shared experience of stage-fright. At the concert, he performed two songs. His first was a rendition of the classic Irish song Too Ra Loo Ra Loo Ral.^[194] His second song was "Caravan", from his 1970 album Moondance. Greil Marcus, in attendance at the concert, wrote: "Van Morrison turned the show around...singing to the rafters and ...burning holes in the floor. It was a triumph, and as the song ended Van began to kick his leg into the air out of sheer exuberance and he kicked his way right offstage like a Rockette. The crowd had given him a fine welcome and they cheered wildly when he left."^[195] The filmed concert served as the basis for Martin Scorsese's 1978 film, The Last Waltz.^[196]

During his association with The Band, Morrison acquired the nicknames: "Belfast Cowboy" and "Van the Man". When Morrison sang the duet "4% Pantomime" (that he co-wrote with Robbie Robertson), Richard Manuel calls him, "Oh, Belfast Cowboy". It would be included in The Band's album Cahoots. When he left the stage, after performing "Caravan" on The Last Waltz, Robertson calls out "Van the Man!"^[124]

On 21 July 1990, Morrison joined many other guests for Roger Waters' massive performance of The Wall - Live in Berlin with an estimated crowd of between three hundred thousand to half a million people and broadcast live on television.^[197] He sang "Comfortably Numb" with Roger Waters, and several members from The Band: Levon Helm, Garth Hudson and Rick Danko. At concert's end, he and the other performers sang "The Tide Is Turning".

Morrison performed before an estimated audience of sixty to eighty thousand people when US President Bill Clinton visited Belfast, Northern Ireland on 30 November 1995. His song "Days Like This" had become the official anthem for the Northern Irish peace movement.^[198]

Van Morrison continued performing concerts in the 2000s throughout the year rather than touring.^[167] Playing few of his best-known songs in concert, he has firmly resisted relegation to a nostalgia act.^[199]^[200] During a 2006 interview, he told Paul Sexton:

I don't really tour. This is another misconception. I stopped touring in the true sense of the word in the late 1970s, early 1980s, possibly. I just do gigs now. I average two gigs a week. Only in America do I do more, because you can't really do a couple of gigs there, so I do more, 10 gigs or something there.^[201]

	Astral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl noicon The 2008 titled song, "Astral Weeks (I Believe I've Transcended)" with the opening lines: "If I ventured in the slipstream between the viaducts of your dream" shows "a deeper, louder roar than the blue-eyed soul voice of his youth – softer on the diction – but none the less impressively powerful."^[202]
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On 7 and 8 November 2008, at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, California, Morrison performed the entire Astral Weeks album live for the first time. The Astral Weeks band featured guitarist Jay Berliner, who played on the album that was released forty years previously in November 1968. Also featured on piano was Roger Kellaway. A live album entitled Astral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl resulted from these two performances.^[203] The new live album on CD was released on 24 February 2009,^[204] followed by a DVD from the performances.^[205] The DVD, Astral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl: The Concert Film was released via Amazon Exclusive on 19 May 2009. In February and March 2009, Morrison returned to the US for Astral Week Live concerts, interviews and TV appearances with concerts at Madison Square Garden and at the Beacon Theatre in in New York City.^[206]^[207] He was interviewed by Don Imus on his Imus in the Morning radio show and put in guest appearances on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon and Live with Regis and Kelly.^[208]^[209]^[210] Morrison continued with the Astral Weeks performances with two concerts at the Royal Albert Hall in London in April^[211]^[212] and then returned to California in May 2009 performing the Astral Weeks songs at the Hearst Greek Theatre in Berkeley, the Orpheum Theatre in Los Angeles, California and appeared on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.^[213] Morrison filmed the concerts at the Orpheum Theatre so that they could be viewed by Farrah Fawcett, confined to bed with cancer and who therefore could not attend the concerts.^[214]^[215]

In addition to It's Too Late to Stop Now and Astral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl, Morrison has released three other live albums: Live at the Grand Opera House Belfast in 1984; A Night in San Francisco in 1994 that Rolling Stone magazine felt stood out as: "the culmination of a career's worth of soul searching that finds Morrison's eyes turned toward heaven and his feet planted firmly on the ground";^[159] and The Skiffle Sessions - Live in Belfast 1998 recorded with Lonnie Donegan and Chris Barber and released in 2000.

Morrison performs at the Edmonton Folk Music Festival in 2010.

Morrison was scheduled to perform at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 25th anniversary concert on 30 October 2009, but cancelled.^[216] In an interview on 26 October, Morrison told his host Don Imus that he had planned to play "a couple of songs" with Eric Clapton (who had cancelled on 22 October due to gallstone surgery),^[217] but that they would do something else together at "some other stage of the game".^[218]

Morrison performed for the Edmonton Folk Music Festival in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada on 4 August 2010 as the headline act for the fundraiser and scheduled as second day headliner at the Feis 2011 Festival in London's Finsbury Park on 19 June 2011.^[219]^[220]^[221]

Morrison appeared in concert at Odyssey Arena in Belfast on 3 February and at The O2 in Dublin on 4 February 2012. These were his first performances in Belfast and Dublin for over a decade.^[222] He will appear at the 46th Montreux Jazz Festival as a headliner on 7 July 2012.^[223]

Collaborations [link]

During the 1990s, Morrison developed a close association with two vocal talents at opposite ends of their careers: Georgie Fame (with whom Morrison had already worked occasionally) lent his voice and Hammond organ skills to Morrison's band; and Brian Kennedy's vocals complemented the grizzled voice of Morrison, both in studio and live performances.

The 1990s also saw an upsurge in collaborations by Morrison with other artists, a trend continuing into the new millennium. He recorded with Irish folk band The Chieftains on their 1995 album, The Long Black Veil. Morrison's song, "Have I Told You Lately" would win a Grammy Award for Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals in 1996.^[224]

He also produced and was featured on several tracks with blues legend John Lee Hooker on Hooker's 1997 album, Don't Look Back. This album would win a Grammy Award for Best Traditional Blues Album in 1998 and the title track "Don't Look Back", a duet featuring Morrison and Hooker, would also win a Grammy Award for "Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals" in 1998.^[225] The project capped a series of Morrison and Hooker collaborations that began in 1971 when they performed a duet on the title track of Hooker's 1972 album Never Get Out of These Blues Alive. On this album, Hooker also recorded a cover of Morrison's "T.B. Sheets".^[226]

Morrison additionally collaborated with Tom Jones on his 1999 album Reload, performing a duet on "Sometimes We Cry", and he also sang vocals on a track entitled "The Last Laugh" on Mark Knopfler's 2000 album, Sailing to Philadelphia.^[227] In 2004, Morrison was one of the guests on Ray Charles' album, Genius Loves Company, featuring the two artists performing Morrison's "Crazy Love".

Music [link]

Vocals [link]

It is at the heart of Morrison’s presence as a singer that when he lights on certain sounds, certain small moments inside a song—hesitations, silences, shifts in pressure, sudden entrances, slamming doors—can then suggest whole territories, completed stories, indistinct ceremonies, far outside anything that can be literally traced in the compositions that carry them.

Greil Marcus^[228]

Featuring his characteristic growl—a mix of folk, blues, soul, jazz, gospel, and Ulster Scots Celtic influences—Morrison is widely considered by many rock historians to be one of the most unusual and influential vocalists in the history of rock and roll.^[229]^[230]^[231] Critic Greil Marcus has gone so far as to say that "no white man sings like Van Morrison."^[232] In his 2010 book, Marcus wrote, "As a physical fact, Morrison may have the richest and most expressive voice pop music has produced since Elvis Presley, and with a sense of himself as an artist that Elvis was always denied."^[233]

As Morrison began live performances of the 40 year old album Astral Weeks in 2008, there were comparisons to his youthful voice of 1968.—His early voice was described as "flinty and tender, beseeching and plaintive".^[79] Forty years later, the difference in his vocal range and power were noticeable but reviewers and critic's comments were favourable: "Morrison's voice has expanded to fill his frame; a deeper, louder roar than the blue-eyed soul voice of his youth – softer on the diction – but none the less impressively powerful."^[202] Morrison also commented on the changes in his approach to singing: "The approach now is to sing from lower down [the diaphragm] so I do not ruin my voice. Before, I sang in the upper area of my throat, which tends to wreck the vocal cords over time. Singing from lower in the belly allows my resonance to carry far. I can stand four feet from a mic and be heard quite resonantly."^[234]

Songwriting and lyrics [link]

Morrison has written hundreds of songs^[235]^[236] during his career with a recurring theme reflecting a nostalgic yearning for the carefree days of his childhood in Belfast.^[237] Some of his song titles derive from familiar locations in his childhood such as: "Cyprus Avenue" (a nearby street), "Orangefield" (the boys school he attended), "On Hyndford Street" (where he was born). Also frequently present in Morrison's best love songs is a blending of the sacred-profane as evidenced in "Into the Mystic" and "So Quiet in Here".^[238]^[239]

Beginning with his 1979 album, Into the Music and the song "And the Healing Has Begun", a frequent theme of his music and lyrics has been based on his belief in the healing power of music combined with a form of mystic Christianity. This theme has become one of the predominant qualities of his work.^[240]

His lyrics show an influence of the visionary poets William Blake and W. B. Yeats^[241] and others such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth.^[242] Biographer Brian Hinton believes "like any great poet from Blake to Seamus Heaney he takes words back to their origins in magic...Indeed, Morrison is returning poetry to its earliest roots – as in Homer or Old English epics like Beowulf or the Psalms or folk song – in all of which words and music combine to form a new reality."^[238] Another biographer John Collis believes that Morrison's style of jazz singing and repeating phrases preclude his lyrics from being regarded as poetry or as Collis asserts: "he is more likely to repeat a phrase like a mantra, or burst into scat singing. The words may often be prosaic, and so can hardly be poetry."^[243]

Morrison has described his songwriting method by remarking that: "I write from a different place. I do not even know what it is called or if it has a name. It just comes and I sculpt it, but it is also a lot of hard work doing the sculpting."^[234]

Performance style [link]

"Van Morrison is interested, obsessed with how much musical or verbal information he can compress into a small space, and, almost, conversely, how far he can spread one note, word, sound, or picture. To capture one moment, be it a caress or a twitch. He repeats certain phrases to extremes that from anybody else would seem ridiculous, because he's waiting for a vision to unfold, trying as unobtrusively as possible to nudge it along...It's the great search, fueled by the belief that through these musical and mental processes illumination is attainable. Or may at least be glimpsed."

Lester Bangs^[244]

Critic Greil Marcus argues that given the truly distinctive breadth and complexity of Morrison's work, it is almost impossible to cast his work among that of others: "Morrison remains a singer who can be compared to no other in the history of rock & roll, a singer who cannot be pinned down, dismissed, or fitted into anyone's expectations."^[245] Or in the words of Jay Cocks: "He extends himself only to express himself. Alone among rock's great figures—and even in that company he is one of the greatest—Morrison is adamantly inward. And unique. Although he freely crosses musical boundaries—R. and B., Celtic melodies, jazz, rave-up rock, hymns, down-and-dirty blues—he can unfailingly be found in the same strange place: on his own wavelength."^[246]

His transcendental signature style came into full expression with his 1968 classic, Astral Weeks.^[247] This musical art form was based on stream of consciousness songwriting and emotional vocalizing of lyrics that have no basis in normal structure or symmetry. His live performances are dependent on building dynamics with spontaniety between himself and his band, whom he controls with hand gestures throughout, sometimes signaling impromptu solos from a selected band member. The music and vocals build towards a hypnotic and trance-like state that depends on in-the-moment creativity. Scott Foundas with LA Weekly wrote "he seeks to transcend the apparent boundaries of any given song; to achieve a total freedom of form; to take himself, his band and the audience on a journey whose destination is anything but known."^[248] A reviewer described it as "This transcendent moment of music when the song and the singer are one thing not two, neither dependent on the other or separate from the other but melded to the other like one, like breath and life..."^[249]^[237]

Morrison has said he believes in the jazz improvisational technique of never performing a song the same way twice and except for the unique rendition of the Astral Weeks songs live, doesn't perform a concert from a preconceived set list.^[199] Morrison has said he prefers to perform at smaller venues or symphony halls noted for their good acoustics.^[250] His ban against alcoholic beverages, which made entertainment news during 2008, was an attempt to prevent the disruptive and distracting movement of audience members leaving their seats during the performances.^[251] In a 2009 interview, Morrison stated: "I do not consciously aim to take the listener anywhere. If anything, I aim to take myself there in my music. If the listener catches the wavelength of what I am saying or singing, or gets whatever point whatever line means to them, then I guess as a writer I may have done a day's work."^[252]

Genre [link]

The music of Van Morrison has encompassed many genres since his early days as a blues and R&B singer in Belfast. Over the years he has recorded songs from a varying list of genres drawn from many influences and interests. As well as blues and R&B, his compositions and covers have moved between pop music, jazz, rock, folk, country, gospel, Irish folk and traditional, big band, skiffle, rock and roll, new age, classical and sometimes spoken word ("Coney Island") and instrumentals.^[253] Morrison defines himself as a soul singer.^[254]

Some of Morrison's music has been classified in a genre of its own and referred to as "Celtic soul"^[15] or what biographer Brian Hinton referred to as a new alchemy called "Caledonian soul."^[238] Another biographer, Ritchie Yorke quoted Morrison as believing that he has "the spirit of Caledonia in his soul and his music reflects it."^[255] According to Yorke, Morrison claimed to have discovered "a certain quality of soul" when he first visited Scotland (his Belfast ancestors were of Ulster Scots descent) and Morrison has said he believes there is some connection between soul music and Caledonia. Yorke relates that Morrison "discovered several years after he first began composing music that some of his songs lent themselves to a unique major modal scale (without sevenths) which of course is the same scale as that used by bagpipe players and old Irish and Scottish folk music."^[255]

Caledonia [link]

The name "Caledonia" has played a prominent role in Morrison's life and career. Biographer Ritchie Yorke had pointed out already by 1975 that Morrison has referred to Caledonia so many times in his career that he "seems to be obsessed with the word."^[255] In his 2009 biography, Erik Hage found that "Morrison seemed deeply interested in his paternal Scottish roots during his early career, and later in the ancient countryside of England, hence his repeated use of the term Caledonia (an ancient Roman name for Scotland/northern Britain)."^[256] As well as being his daughter's middle name, it's the name of his first production company, his studio, his publishing company, two of his backing groups, and he also recorded a cover of the song, "Caldonia" (with the name spelled "Caledonia") in 1974.^[255] Morrison used "Caledonia" in what has been called a quintessential Van Morrison moment in the song, "Listen to the Lion" with the lyrics, "And we sail, and we sail, way up to Caledonia".^[257] As late as 2008, Morrison used "Caledonia" as a mantra in the live performance of the song, "Astral Weeks" recorded at the two Hollywood Bowl concerts.^[252]

Influence [link]

Morrison's influence can readily be heard in the music of a diverse array of major artists and according to The Rolling Stone's Encyclopedia of Rock and Roll (Simon & Shuster, 2001), "his influence among rock singers/song writers is unrivaled by any living artist outside of that other prickly legend, Bob Dylan. Echoes of Morrison's rugged literateness and his gruff, feverish emotive vocals can be heard in latter day icons ranging from Bruce Springsteen to Elvis Costello".^[229] His influence includes U2 (Bono was quoted saying "I am in awe of a musician like Van Morrison. I had to stop listening to Van Morrison records about six months before we made The Unforgettable Fire because I didn't want his very original soul voice to overpower my own.");^[258] John Mellencamp ("Wild Night");^[259] Jim Morrison;^[260] Joan Armatrading (the only musical influence she will acknowledge);^[261] Rod Stewart;^[262] Tom Petty;^[263] Rickie Lee Jones (recognises both Laura Nyro and Van Morrison as the main influences on her career);^[264]^[265] Elton John;^[266] Graham Parker;^[267] Sinéad O'Connor;^[268] Phil Lynott of Thin Lizzy;^[269] Bob Seger ("I know Bruce Springsteen was very much affected by Van Morrison, and so was I." from Creem interview)^[267] ("I've Been Working");^[270] Kevin Rowland of Dexys Midnight Runners ("Jackie Wilson Said");^[271]^[272] Jimi Hendrix ("Gloria");^[273] Jeff Buckley ("The Way Young Lovers Do", "Sweet Thing");^[274] Nick Drake;^[275] and numerous others, including the Counting Crows (their "sha-la-la" sequence in Mr Jones, is a tribute to Morrison).^[276] Morrison's influence reaches into the country music genre, with Hal Ketchum acknowledging, "He (Van Morrison) was a major influence in my life."^[277]

Morrison's influence on the younger generation of singer-songwriters is pervasive: including Irish singer Damien Rice, who has been described as on his way to becoming the "natural heir to Van Morrison";^[278] Ray Lamontagne;^[279] James Morrison;^[280]^[281] Paolo Nutini;^[282] Eric Lindell^[283] David Gray;^[284] and Ed Sheeran^[285] are also several of the younger artists influenced by Morrison. Glen Hansard of the Irish rock band The Frames (who lists Van Morrison as being part of his holy trinity with Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen) commonly covers his songs in concert.^[286] American rock band, The Wallflowers have covered "Into the Mystic".^[287] Canadian blues-rock singer Colin James also covers the song frequently at his concerts.^[288] Actor and musician Robert Pattinson has said that Van Morrison was his "influence for doing music in the first place".^[289] Morrison has shared the stage with Northern Irish singer-songwriter Duke Special, who admits Morrison has been a big influence.^[290]

Overall, Morrison has typically been supportive of other artists, often willingly sharing the stage with them during his concerts. On the live album, A Night in San Francisco, he had as his special guests, among others, his childhood idols: Jimmy Witherspoon, John Lee Hooker and Junior Wells.^[159] Although he often expresses his displeasure (in interviews and songs) with the music industry and the media in general, he has been instrumental in promoting the careers of many other musicians and singers, such as James Hunter,^[291] and fellow Belfast-born brothers, Brian and Bap Kennedy.^[292]^[293]

Van Morrison also had great influence on the other arts: The German painter Johannes Heisig created a series of Lithographs illustrating the book "In the Garden - for Van Morrison", published by Städtische Galerie Sonneberg, Germany, in 1997.^[294]

Personal life [link]

Morrison and daughter Shana Morrison in Berkeley California; 9th December 2006

Morrison lived in Belfast from birth until 1967, when he moved to New York after signing with Bang Records. Facing deportation due to visa problems, he managed to stay in the US when his American girlfriend Janet (Planet) Rigsbee agreed to marry him.^[295] Once married, Morrison and his wife moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he found work performing in local clubs. The couple had one daughter Shana Morrison, who has become a singer-songwriter. Morrison and his family moved around America, living in Boston; Woodstock, New York; and a hilltop home in Fairfax, California. His wife appeared on the cover of the album Tupelo Honey. They divorced in 1973.^[296]^[297]

Morrison moved back to Europe in the late 1970s, first settling in London's Notting Hill Gate area.^[298] Later, he moved to Bath, where he purchased Wool Hall Studios.^[299] He also has a home in the Irish seaside village of Dalkey near Dublin, where legal actions against two different neighbours concerning safety and privacy issues have been taken to court in 2001 and in 2010.^[300]^[301]^[302]^[303] In the former case, Morrison pursued his action all the way to the Irish Supreme Court.^[304]

Morrison met Irish socialite Michelle Rocca in the summer of 1992, and they often featured in the Dublin gossip columns, an unusual event for the reclusive Morrison. Rocca also appeared on one of his album covers, Days Like This.^[305] The couple are married and have two children;^[306] A daughter was born in January 2006 and a son was born in August 2007.^[307]^[308]

In December 2009, Texas native and Morrison employee Gigi Lee gave birth to a son who she asserted was Morrison's and who she named after him. Lee announced the birth of the child on Morrison's official website although Morrison subsequently has denied paternity of the child. It was revealed in December 2011 that Lee died from throat cancer in October 2011 and her son had died previously in January 2011, from complications of diabetes.^[309]

Discography [link]

Main article: Van Morrison discography

Blowin' Your Mind! (1967)
Astral Weeks (1968)
Moondance (1970)
His Band and the Street Choir (1970)
Tupelo Honey (1971)
Saint Dominic's Preview (1972)
Hard Nose the Highway (1973)
It's Too Late to Stop Now (Live) (1974)
Veedon Fleece (1974)
A Period of Transition (1977)
Wavelength (1978)
Into the Music (1979)
Common One (1980)
Beautiful Vision (1982)
Inarticulate Speech of the Heart (1983)
Live at the Grand Opera House Belfast (1984)
A Sense of Wonder (1985)
No Guru, No Method, No Teacher (1986)
Poetic Champions Compose (1987)
Irish Heartbeat (1988)
Avalon Sunset (1989)
Enlightenment (1990)
Hymns to the Silence (1991)
Too Long in Exile (1993)
A Night in San Francisco (Live) (1994)
Days Like This (1995)
How Long Has This Been Going On (1996)
Tell Me Something: The Songs of Mose Allison (1996)
The Healing Game (1997)
The Philosopher's Stone (1998)
Back on Top (1999)
The Skiffle Sessions - Live in Belfast 1998 (2000)
You Win Again (2000)
Down the Road (2002)
What's Wrong with This Picture? (2003)
Magic Time (2005)
Pay the Devil (2006)
Live at Austin City Limits Festival (Limited edition) (2006)
Keep It Simple (2008)
Astral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl (2009)

Legacy [link]

Main article: List of awards and nominations received by Van Morrison

Morrison has received several major music awards in his career, including six Grammy Awards (1996–2007); inductions into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (January 1993), the Songwriters Hall of Fame (June 2003), and the Irish Music Hall of Fame (September 1999); and a Brit Award (February 1994). In addition he has received civil awards of an OBE (June 1996) and an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (1996), and he has honorary doctorates from the University of Ulster (1992) and Queen's University Belfast (July 2001).

The Hall of Fame inductions began in 1993 with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame; Morrison notable for being the first inductee not to attend his own ceremony,^[310]^[311] so that Robbie Robertson from The Band accepted the award on his behalf.^[312] When Morrison became the initial musician inducted into the Irish Music Hall of Fame, Bob Geldof presented Morrison with the award.^[313] Morrison's third induction was into the Songwriters Hall of Fame for "recognition of his unique position as one of the most important songwriters of the past century." Ray Charles presented the award, following a performance during which the pair performed Morrison's "Crazy Love", from the album, Moondance.^[314] Morrison's BRIT Award was for his Outstanding Contribution to British Music.^[315] He was presented with the award by former Beirut hostage, John McCarthy, who while testifying to the importance of Morrison's song, "Wonderful Remark" called it "a song ... which was very important to us."^[316]

Morrison received two civil awards in 1996, first was the Order of the British Empire for his service to music,^[317] the second was an award by the French government when he was made an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.^[318] Along with these state awards he has two honorary degrees in music; an honorary doctorate in literature from the University of Ulster,^[319] and an honorary doctorate in music from Queen's University in his hometown of Belfast.^[320]

Among other awards are an Ivor Novello Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1995,^[321] the BMI ICON award in October 2004 for Morrison's "enduring influence on generations of music makers",^[322] and an Oscar Wilde: Honouring Irish Writing in Film award in 2007 for his contribution to over fifty films, presented by Al Pacino who compared Morrison to Oscar Wilde as they were both "visionaries who push boundaries".^[323] He was voted the Best International Male Singer of 2007 at the inaugural International Awards in Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club, London.^[324]

Morrison has also appeared in a number of Greatest lists, including the TIME magazine list of The All-Time 100 Albums,^[325] which contained Astral Weeks and Moondance, and he appeared at number thirteen on the list of WXPN's 885 All Time Greatest Artists.^[326] In 2000, Morrison ranked twenty-fifth on American cable music channel VH1's list of its "100 Greatest Artists of Rock and Roll".^[327] In 2004, Rolling Stone magazine ranked Van Morrison forty-second on their list of "Greatest Artists of All Time".^[328] Paste ranked him twentieth in their list of "100 Greatest Living Songwriters" in 2006.^[329] Q ranked him twenty-second on their list of "100 Greatest Singers" in April 2007^[330] and he was voted twenty-fourth on the November 2008 list of Rolling Stone magazine's 100 Greatest Singers of All Time.^[331]

Three of Morrison's songs were included in The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll: "Brown Eyed Girl", "Madame George" and "Moondance".^[332]

Morrison has been announced to be one of the 2010 honorees listed in the Hollywood Walk of Fame.^[333]

References [link]

Footnotes

^ Lewis, Randy (9 November 2009). "Live review: Van Morrison at the Hollywood Bowl". Los Angeles Times. http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/music_blog/2008/11/live-review-van.html. Retrieved 18 November 2011.
^ Rogogna, Mike (27 January 2009). "HuffPost Reviews:Van Morrison--Astral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl". Huffington Post. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mike-ragogna/huffpost-reviews-van-morr_b_161308.html. Retrieved 18 November 2011.
^ Lewis, Randy (9 January 2009). "Van Morrison takes listeners on his spiritual journey". Los Angeles Times. http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-et-morrison9-2009jan09,0,5414358.story. Retrieved 18 November 2011.
^ Savole, Dan (19 September 2011). "Van Morrison is all business in Vancouver". Rockstar Weekly. http://www.rockstarweekly.com/van-morrison-was-all-business-in-vancouver.html. Retrieved 18 November 2011.
^ Pecorelli, John (26 May 1998). "Live Review: Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and Van Morrison". Rolling Stone. http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/live-review-bob-dylan-joni-mitchell-and-van-morrison-19980526. Retrieved 26 February 2011.
^ Colt, Jonathan. Back to a shadow in the night. Google. ISBN 978-0-634-03596-8. http://books.google.com/books?id=EQR3U2pjwrQC&pg=PA105&dq=inspired+Van+Morrison&lr=. Retrieved 25 May 2010.
^ ^a ^b "Astral Weeks: Van Morrison". acclaimedmusic.net. http://acclaimedmusic.net/Current/A121.htm. Retrieved 30 April 2008.
^ "Acclaimed Music – Moondance". acclaimedmusic.net. http://acclaimedmusic.net/Current/A183.htm. Retrieved 26 January 2010.
^ ^a ^b "Acclaimed Music – It's Too Late to Stop Now". acclaimedmusic.net. http://acclaimedmusic.net/Current/A306.htm. Retrieved 22 November 2009.
^ O'Hare, Kevin (30 October 2009). "Singer Van Morrison continues to fascinate". The Republican. http://www.masslive.com/entertainment/republican/index.ssf?/base/entertainment-0/125688694981090.xml&coll=1. Retrieved 18 May 2010.
^ Turner (1993). pages 86 – 90
^ Eskow, Gary (1 April 2005). "Classic Tracks: Van Morrison's Moondance". mixonline.com. http://mixonline.com/mag/audio_van_morrisons_moondance/. Retrieved 26 May 2009.
^ "SHOF: Van Morrison biography". songwritersshalloffame.org. http://www.songwritershalloffame.org/index.php/exhibits/bio/C333S. Retrieved 7 July 2008.
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^ Hinton (1997), page 19.
^ Hinton (1997), page 20.
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^ Perusse, Bernard (30 June 2007). "Van Morrison: The Irascible Mystic". www2.canada.com. http://www2.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/arts/story.html?id=d25c7b6a-7ddb-4540-84db-9dc6cd09f632. Retrieved 18 May 2010.
^ Hinton (1997), page 22.
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^ Buckley, Peter. The rough guide to rock – Google Book Search. books.google.co.uk. ISBN 978-1-84353-105-0. http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=7ctjc6UWCm4C&pg=PT1077&dq=Baby+Please+Don%27t+Go+/+Gloria&as_brr=3#PPT1077,M1. Retrieved 17 April 2009.
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^ Turner (1993), pages 65 – 66.
^ Lawrence, Paul (2002). "The Doors and Them: twin Morrisons of different mothers". waiting-forthe-sun.net. http://archives.waiting-forthe-sun.net/Pages/Venues/whisky_them.html. Retrieved 7 July 2008.
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^ "Doors 1966 – June 1966". doorshistory.com. http://www.doorshistory.com/doors1966.html. Retrieved 13 October 2008.
^ Turner (1993), pages 72–73.
^ "Grammy Hall of Fame award". grammy.com. http://www.grammy.org/recording-academy/awards/hall-of-fame. Retrieved 18 December 2008.
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^ Heylin (2003), pages 144-147
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^ Heylin (2003), page 152
^ Rogan (2006), p.201
^ "Most played 2007". aperfectdj.com. http://www.aperfectdj.com/Z%20Most%20played%20songs.htm#200%20from%202007//www.aperfectdj.com/Z%20Most%20played%20songs.htm#101. Retrieved 11 September 2008.
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^ Adams, David (28 February 2008). "Let's record gratitude for Van's monumental talent". The Irish Times.
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^ Egan, Barry (3 January 2010). "Why Van and Michelle live their hymns to the silence". The Irish Independent. http://www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/why-van-and-michelle-live-their-hymns-to-silence-1997101.html. Retrieved 4 January 2010.
^ Quinlan, Ronald (3 January 2010). "Duping world's press on reclusive Van's 'baby' is festive child's play". The Irish Independent. http://www.independent.ie/national-news/duping-worlds-press-on-reclusive-vans-baby-is-festive-childs-play-1997068.html. Retrieved 10 January 2011.
^ McKeown, Lesley-Anne (2 January 2012). "Gigi Lee's baby died after slipping into diabetic coma". Irish Independent. http://www.independent.ie/national-news/gigi-lees-baby-died-after-slipping-into-diabetic-coma-2977310.html. Retrieved 3 January 2012.
^ "Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: Van Morrison". rockhall.com. http://www.rockhall.com/inductee/van-morrison. Retrieved 9 November 2008.
^ Rogan (2006), page 411.
^ Turner (1993), page 177.
^ "Van's the man for rock museum". BBC News. 2 September 1999. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/435343.stm. Retrieved 4 July 2008.
^ Gunnaike, Lola O. (14 June 2003). "Songwriting hitmakers donning their laurels". The New York Times. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C02E2DA1638F937A25755C0A9659C8B63. Retrieved 1 July 2008.
^ "Brit Award Shows-1994". brits.co.uk. http://www.brits.co.uk/history/shows/1994. Retrieved 13 December 2009.
^ Rogan (2006), page 419.
^ Rogan (2006), page 443.
^ "Van and Jordan honoured by France". The Irish Independent. 1 July 1998. http://www.independent.ie/national-news/van-and-jordan-honoured-by-france-437577.html. Retrieved 25 January 2009.
^ Rogan (2006), page 409.
^ "Doctorate for Van the Man". BBC News. 3 July 2001. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/northern_ireland/1421036.stm. Retrieved 3 July 2008.
^ "Elvis, Presley are top winners at Ivor award". Billboard: 71. 3 June 1995. http://books.google.com/books?id=1gsEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA71&dq=van+morrison+billboard+1995+billboard+1995=. Retrieved 13 November 2010.
^ "Morrison to be honored as BMI ICON". bmi.com news. 22 September 2004. http://www.bmi.com/news/entry/234191. Retrieved 8 September 2008.
^ "Van Morrison, Terry George and Bill Monahan honored in LA". US-Irish Alliance. http://www.us-irelandalliance.org/wmspage.cfm?parm1=622. Retrieved 30 March 2007.
^ "Van Morrison receives jazz award". 4NI.co.uk. http://www.4ni.co.uk/northern_ireland_news.asp?id=61639. Retrieved 9 May 2007.
^ Tyrangiel, Josh and Light, Alan (13 November 2006). "The All-Time 100 Albums". Time/CNN. http://www.time.com/time/2006/100albums/index.html. Retrieved 31 March 2007.
^ "885 Countdown: Greatest artists (2006)". xpn.org. http://www.xpn.org/images/pdfs/885artists_2006.pdf. Retrieved 31 October 2010.
^ "Vh1: 100 greatest artists of Rock & Roll". rockonthenet. http://www.rockonthenet.com/archive/1998/vh1artists.htm. Retrieved 12 September 2008.
^ "Rolling Stone: The Immortals: 100 Greatest Artists of All-Time". rockonthenet.com. http://www.rockonthenet.com/archive/2004/immortals.htm. Retrieved 29 April 2010.
^ "100 Best Living Songwriters". Paste Magazine. http://www.pastemagazine.com/action/article/3003/feature/music/pastes_100_best_living_songwriters_the_list. Retrieved 6 July 2007.
^ "100 Greatest Singers". rocklistmusic.co.uk. http://www.rocklistmusic.co.uk/qlistspage3.htm#100%20Greatest%20Singers. Retrieved 8 April 2007.
^ "Rolling Stone's 100 Greatest Singers of All Time". stereogum.com. http://stereogum.com/34931/rolling_stones_100_greatest_singers_of_all_time/list/. Retrieved 29 April 2010.
^ "The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll". listsofbests.com. http://www.listsofbests.com/list/37752-500-songs-that-shaped-rock-and-roll. Retrieved 31 October 2010.
^ "The Hollywood Walk of Fame". seeing-stars.com. http://www.seeing-stars.com/immortalized/walkoffame.shtml. Retrieved 31 October 2010.
^ "Beautiful Day: Irish Rock Legends". corkuniversitypress. http://corkuniversitypress.typepad.com/beautiful_day_40_years_of/2005/07/irish_rock_lege.html. Retrieved 30 September 2008.

Bibliography

Collis, John (1996). Inarticulate Speech of the Heart, Little Brown and Company, ISBN 0-306-80811-0
Hage, Erik (2009). The Words and Music of Van Morrison, Praeger Publishers, ISBN 978-0-313-35862-3
Heylin, Clinton (2003). Can You Feel the Silence? Van Morrison: A New Biography, Chicago Review Press, ISBN 1-55652-542-7
Hinton, Brian (1997). Celtic Crossroads: The Art of Van Morrison, Sanctuary, ISBN 1-86074-169-X
Marcus, Greil. 1992. "Van Morrison." In: The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll. Anthony DeCurtis and James Henke, with Holly George-Warren, eds. (original ed. Jim Miller): pp442–447. New York: Random House, ISBN 978-0-679-73728-5
Marcus, Greil (2010). When That Rough God Goes Riding: Listening to Van Morrison, Public Affairs, ISBN 978-1-58648-821-5
Moon, Tom (2008). 1,000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die, Workman Publishing Company, ISBN 978-0-7611-3963-8
Rogan, Johnny (2006). Van Morrison: No Surrender, London: Vintage Books ISBN 978-0-09-943183-1
Rosenthal, Elizabeth. (2001) His Song: The Musical Journey of Elton John, Billboard Books, ISBN 0-8230-8893-6
"The Immortals: The First Fifty". Rolling Stone Issue 946. http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/5939214/the_immortals_the_first_fifty.
Turner, Steve (1993). Van Morrison: Too Late to Stop Now, Viking Penguin, ISBN 0-670-85147-7
"Van Morrison". Peter Wolfe. Rolling Stone Issue 946. http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/5939236/42_van_morrison.
Yorke, Ritchie (1975). Into The Music, London: Charisma Books, ISBN 0-85947-013-X

Further reading

Brooks, Ken (1999). In Search of Van Morrison, Agenda, ISBN 1-899882-95-2
Buzacott, Martin; Ford, Andrew (2005) Speaking in Tongues: The Songs of Van Morrison, ABC, ISBN 0-7333-1297-7
Dawe, Gerald (2007). My Mother-City, Belfast:Lagan Press – (Includes section on Van Morrison from previous edition, The Rest is History, Newry:Abbey Press, 1998)
DeWitt, Howard A. (1983). Van Morrison: The Mystic's Music, Horizon Books, ISBN 0-938840-02-9
Mills, Peter (2010). Hymns To The Silence: Inside the Music and Lyrics of Van Morrison, Continuum, ISBN 978-0-8264-2976-6

External links [link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Van Morrison

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Van Morrison

Official website
Van Morrison at the Internet Movie Database
Collected news at The New York Times
Collected news at The Guardian

v t e Van Morrison

Them	The Angry Young Them Them Again The Story of Them Featuring Van Morrison

Studio albums	Blowin' Your Mind! Astral Weeks Moondance His Band and the Street Choir Tupelo Honey Saint Dominic's Preview Hard Nose the Highway Veedon Fleece A Period of Transition Wavelength Into the Music Common One Beautiful Vision Inarticulate Speech of the Heart A Sense of Wonder No Guru, No Method, No Teacher Poetic Champions Compose Irish Heartbeat Avalon Sunset Enlightenment Hymns to the Silence Too Long in Exile Days Like This How Long Has This Been Going On Tell Me Something: The Songs of Mose Allison The Healing Game Back on Top You Win Again Down the Road What's Wrong with This Picture? Magic Time Pay the Devil Keep It Simple

Live albums	It's Too Late to Stop Now Live at the Grand Opera House Belfast A Night in San Francisco The Skiffle Sessions - Live in Belfast 1998 Live at Austin City Limits Festival Astral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl

Compilations	The Best of Van Morrison The Best of Van Morrison Volume Two The Philosopher's Stone Van Morrison at the Movies - Soundtrack Hits The Best of Van Morrison Volume 3 Still on Top - The Greatest Hits

Videos	Van Morrison in Ireland Van Morrison The Concert

DVDs	Live at Montreux 1980/1974 Astral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl: The Concert Film

Films	To Be Born Again

Unofficial Bang albums	T.B. Sheets Bang Masters

Tribute albums	No Prima Donna: The Songs of Van Morrison The Van Morrison Songbook Vanthology: A Tribute to Van Morrison Into the Mystic: An Instrumental Tribute to Van Morrison The String Quartet Tribute to Van Morrison Smooth Sax Tribute to Van Morrison Mystic Piano: Piano Tribute to Van Morrison

Discography Albums Songs List of artists who have covered Van Morrison songs Related topics List of awards and nominations received by Van Morrison List of people on stamps of Ireland

v t e Van Morrison singles discography

1960s	1967 "Brown Eyed Girl" "Ro Ro Rosey" "Spanish Rose"

1970s	1970 "Come Running" "Crazy Love" "Domino" 1971 "Blue Money" "Call Me Up in Dreamland" "Wild Night" 1972 "Tupelo Honey" "(Straight to Your Heart) Like a Cannonball" "Jackie Wilson Said (I'm in Heaven When You Smile)" "Redwood Tree" 1973 "Gypsy" "Warm Love" "Bein' Green" 1974 "Ain't Nothing You Can Do" "Bulbs" "Caldonia" "Gloria" 1977 "The Eternal Kansas City" "Joyous Sound" "Moondance" 1978 "Wavelength" "Natalia" "Kingdom Hall" 1979 "Bright Side of the Road" "Full Force Gale"

1980s	1980 "You Make Me Feel So Free" 1982 "Cleaning Windows" "Scandinavia" 1983 "Cry For Home" "Celtic Swing" 1984 "Dweller on the Threshold" "A Sense of Wonder" 1985 "Tore Down a la Rimbaud" 1986 "Ivory Tower" "Got to Go Back" 1987 "Did Ye Get Healed?" "Someone Like You" 1988 "Queen of the Slipstream "I'll Tell Me Ma 1989 "Have I Told You Lately" "Whenever God Shines His Light" "Orangefield"

1990s	1990 "Coney Island" "Gloria" "Real Real Gone" "In The Days Before Rock 'N' Roll" 1991 "Enlightenment" "I Can't Stop Loving You" "Why Must I Always Explain?" 1993 "Gloria" 1995 "Have I Told You Lately" "Days Like This" "Perfect Fit" "No Religion" 1996 "That's Life" 1997 "The Healing Game" "Rough God Goes Riding" 1999 "Precious Time" "Back on Top" "Philosopher's Stone"

2000s	2000 "I Wanna Go Home" "Let's Talk About Us" 2002 "Hey Mr. DJ" "Meet Me in the Indian Summer" 2003 "Once in a Blue Moon" 2005 "Celtic New Year" 2006 "Playhouse" "Cry For Home" 2007 "Blue and Green"

v t e Them

Van Morrison Billy Harrison Eric Wrixon Alan Henderson Raymond Sweetman Ronnie Millings Pat McAuley Jackie McAuley Peter Bardens

Regular UK albums	The Angry Young Them (1964) Them Again (1965)

Singles (Decca, Parrott)	"Don't Start Crying Now" (1964) "Baby, Please Don't Go" / "Gloria" (1964) "Here Comes the Night" (1965) "One More Time" (1965) "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" "Call My Name" "I Can Only Give You Everything" "Richard Cory" (1966)

v t e The Caledonia Soul Orchestra

Van Morrison Terry Adams Bill Atwood Nancy Ellis David Hayes Tim Kovatch Jef Labes John Platania Nathan Rubin Jack Schroer Dahaud Shaar Tom Halpin James Trumbo

Albums	It's Too Late to Stop Now (1974)

Singles	"Ain't Nothin' You Can Do"/"Wild Children" (1974) "Gloria"/"Warm Love" (1974)

Persondata
Name	Morrison, Van
Alternative names	Morrison, George Ivan (full name)
Short description	Musician, singer and songwriter
Date of birth	31 August 1945
Place of birth	Belfast, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom
Date of death
Place of death

http://wn.com/Van_Morrison

http://it.wn.com/Van Morrison

http://cs.wn.com/Van Morrison

http://es.wn.com/Van Morrison

http://ru.wn.com/Моррисон, Ван

http://nl.wn.com/Van Morrison

http://pt.wn.com/Van Morrison

http://pl.wn.com/Van Morrison

http://fr.wn.com/Van Morrison

http://de.wn.com/Van Morrison

This page contains text from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Morrison

This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, which means that you can copy and modify it as long as the entire work (including additions) remains under this license.

For the Major League Baseball player, see Alfred Ellis (baseball).

Pee Wee Ellis
Ellis in Milan, 2007.
Background information
Birth name	Alfred Ellis
Also known as	Pee Wee Ellis
Born	(1941-04-21) April 21, 1941 (age 71) Bradenton, Florida, U.S.
Genres	Funk, soul, jazz
Occupations	Saxophonist, composer, arranger
Instruments	tenor, soprano, alto and baritone saxophones, keyboards and flute^[1]
Years active	1954–present
Labels	Skip Records, Minor Music, Gramavision
Associated acts	James Brown, Van Morrison

Pee Wee Ellis, 1996 in Paris (Jazz Club: New Morning) with his band Assembley

Alfred "Pee Wee" Ellis (born April 21, 1941) is an American saxophonist, composer and arranger. He was an important member of James Brown's band in the 1960s and appeared on many of Brown's most notable recordings. He also worked closely with Van Morrison.

In later years, he became a resident of England, living in the town of Frome in the county of Somerset.^[2]

1 Biography
2 Selected discography
3 See also
4 References
5 External links

Biography [link]

Born in Bradenton, Florida, Ellis's family moved to Lubbock, Texas in 1949, where he was given his nickname "Pee Wee". He gave his first public performance in 1954 at Dunbar Junior High School. In 1955 he moved with his family to Rochester, New York. While attending Madison High School he played professionally with jazz musicians like Ron Carter and Chuck Mangione. In 1957 he moved to New York City, where he attended Manhattan School of Music and had regular lessons with Sonny Rollins. In 1960 he moved back to Florida working as a bandleader, musical director and writer.

Ellis played with the James Brown Revue from 1965 to 1969. While with Brown he arranged and co-wrote hits like "Cold Sweat" and "Say It Loud - I'm Black and I'm Proud". In 1969 he returned to New York City. He worked as an arranger and musical director for CTI Records' Kudu label, collaborating with artists like George Benson, Hank Crawford and Esther Phillips. In the late 1970s he moved to San Francisco and formed a band with former Miles Davis sideman David Liebman.^[3] Between 1979 and 1986 he worked with Van Morrison's band as an arranger and musical director and then again from 1995 through 1999. He also gave occasional performances in 1988, 1989, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 2000, 2002, 2005 and 2006 as guest appearances.^[4]

In the late 1980s Pee Wee regrouped with some musicians he worked with during his time with James Brown to form the JB Horns. With Fred Wesley and Maceo Parker he recorded a number of albums that defined a distinctive brand of jazz-funk. The group also toured in Europe.

In 1992 Pee Wee resumed his solo recording career.

Ellis's composition "The Chicken" was made famous by the electric bass player Jaco Pastorius, who recorded it on his album The Birthday Concert, as well as Invitation.

In 1995, showing the diversity of his musical interests and talents, Ellis played tenor sax and arranged the horns for the album Worotan, by Mali's Oumou Sangare, the so-called "Songbird of Wassoulou".

In 2009 Pee Wee toured a tribute to James Brown called "Still Black Still Proud". He performed this with special guests Mahotella Queens and Ghanaian born rapper Ty at the Frome Festival on July 12, 2009, and again in a series of concerts in Europe during April and May 2010.

In July 2010 Pee Wee participated in Brass: Durham International Festival 2010. This involved Ellis working with a selection of local youth ensembles and culminated in a concert at Bishop Auckland Town Hall on Monday 5 July. Later that week, on Thursday 8 July, Pee Wee took to the stage as a special guest of Maceo Parker and his band. The concert was held at the Gala Theatre Durham and Ellis linked up with his old band friend Maceo to perform 2 songs, playing his signature baritone sax next to Maceo's tenor sax. In August 2010 he played at the 27th Brecon Jazz Festival. Pee Wee is scheduled to join Maceo and Fred Wesley on Jam Cruise in January 2011.

Selected discography [link]

With James Brown [link]

Star Time - a 4 CD retrospective of James Brown's career

With Van Morrison [link]

1979 Into the Music (Polydor)
1980 Common One (Polydor)
1982 Beautiful Vision (Polydor)
1983 Inarticulate Speech of the Heart (Polydor)
1984 Live at the Grand Opera House Belfast (Polydor)
1985 A Sense of Wonder (Polydor)
1995 Days Like This (Polydor)
1996 How Long Has This Been Going On (Mercury) - Top Jazz Album - #1
1996 Tell Me Something: The Songs of Mose Allison (Verve) - Top Jazz Album - #1
1997 The Healing Game (Mercury)
1998 The Philosopher's Stone (Polydor)
1999 Back on Top (Polydor)
2006 Live at Montreux 1980/1974 DVD (Exile) - (Pee Wee Ellis is featured prominently in the 1980 performance with solos, especially standing out as the "twin brother" to Morrison's vocals on "Troubadours".)

With The JB Horns [link]

1990 Finally Getting Paid (Minor Music)
1991 Pee Wee, Fred and Maceo (Gramavision)
1993 Funky Good Time - Live (Gramavision)
1994 I Like It Like That

With Maceo Parker [link]

1990 Roots Revisited (Minor Music)
1991 Mo Roots (Minor Music)
1992 Life On Planet Groove (Minor Music)
1993 Southern Exposure (Minor Music)
1994 Maceo (Minor Music)

Other [link]

With Brass Fever

Time Is Running Out (Impulse!, 1976)

With Various Artists

2007 Goin' Home: A Tribute to Fats Domino (Vanguard)^[5]

References [link]

^ "Pee Wee Ellis credits". allmusic.com. http://www.allmusic.com/artist/p10501. Retrieved 2009-07-22.
^ "Frome Festival's community spirit". news.bbc.co.uk. 2009-07-03. http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/somerset/hi/people_and_places/arts_and_culture/newsid_8131000/8131461.stm. Retrieved 2009-09-25.
^ "Pee Wee Ellis biography". peewee-ellis.com. http://www.peewee-ellis.com/biography.htm. Retrieved 2009-07-22. ^{[dead link]}
^ "Van Morrison song database". ivan.vanomatic.de. http://ivan.vanomatic.de/. Retrieved 2009-07-22.
^ On "Whole Lotta Lovin'", playing with the Rebirth Brass Band, Troy "Trombone Shorty" Andrews, Fred Wesley, Maceo Parker and Lenny Kravitz

External links [link]

Persondata
Name	Ellis, Alfred Pee Wee
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	1941-04-21
Place of birth	Bradenton, Florida, U.S.
Date of death
Place of death

http://wn.com/Alfred_"Pee_Wee"_Ellis

http://fr.wn.com/Pee Wee Ellis

http://de.wn.com/Pee Wee Ellis

http://es.wn.com/Pee Wee Ellis

This page contains text from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_"Pee_Wee"_Ellis

This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, which means that you can copy and modify it as long as the entire work (including additions) remains under this license.

NO PLAN
Origin	Tokyo
Genres	J-pop
Years active	2003–2006
Labels	Ki/oon Records
Website	Uchimura Produce(Japanese)
Members
Teruyoshi Uchimura Masakazu Mimura Kazuki Ōtake Golgo Matsumoto Red Yoshida Ryō Fukawa

NO PLAN is a Japanese konto style comedy group, and is also occasionally known for their music. The group is best known for appearing regularly on the late night owarai show, Uchimura Produce (内村プロデュース) until late 2005, when the show was cancelled. The group consists of 6 male members; Kazuki Ōtake and Masakazu Mimura of Summers, Red Yoshida and Golgo Matsumoto of TIM, Ryō Fukawa, and the leader of the group, the eminent Japanese comedian Teruyoshi Uchimura.

1 History
2 Discography
- 2.1 Album
- 2.2 Single
3 External links

History [link]

The origin of the group's name traces back to one of their first television appearances on the popular music show, Music Station in 2003. Having arrived to sing a song, but not having prepared any lyrics, a fellow guest—Morning Musume's Mari Yaguchi—commented on-air, "No plan, huh?", and the name stuck. Their first album was then named We are NO PLAN.

In 2004, NO PLAN was selected to perform the title song to the new Crayon Shin-chan movie, and they also managed to land their first live appearance. Although they released another single, Oh! Summer, and a new album, SUMMER PLAN, in 2005, their main TV outlet Uchimura Produce was cancelled on September 26, 2005.

Not long after the show was cancelled, NO PLAN released a third album, LAST PLAN, and though the members continue to appear as NO PLAN on many variety shows, and on the occasional Uchimura Produce special, the comedians generally appear alone or in their own kombi.

Discography [link]

Album [link]

LAST PLAN (January 1, 2006) Ki/oon Records KSCL 938

"Konya ha NO PLAN!" ~Konshu no FAX tēma Happyō (「今夜はNO PLAN!｣～今週のFAXテーマ発表, "Tonight is NO PLAN!" ~FAX theme announcement of to this week)
Kimi no Naka no Shōnen (君の中の少年, A heart like a boy in you) _{offered from Toshihide Baba}
~Senshū no Kuizu no Kotae (～先週のクイズの答え ,~An answer of a quiz of to last week)
Red Yoshida no 5 moji de Kaiketsu Onayami Sōdan Sono 1 (～レッド吉田の5文字で解決お悩み相談その1, ～Red Yoshida solves your trouble in 5 characters part 1)
~CM 1 NO PLAN fainansu (～CM 1「NO PLANファイナンス」,~First commercial "NO PLAN finance")
Uchimura-san ni Sasageru Barādo (内村さんに捧げるバラード, A ballad to give to Mr.Uchimura)
~Yarasii Uchimura-san (～やらしい内村さん, ~Disgusting Mr.Uchimura)
Daijōbu (大丈夫, It's all right) _{offered from Masatoshi Mashima, formerly known as a member of The High-Lows and The Blue Hearts}
~FAX "Kimi no naka no Shōnen" Shokai (～FAX「君の中の少年」紹介, ~FAX "A heart like a boy in you" Introduction)
NO PLAN NONSTOP DJ Mix
Red Yoshida no 5 moji de Kaiketsu Onayami Sōdan Sono 2 (～レッド吉田の5文字で解決お悩み相談その2 ,~Red Yoshida solves your trouble in 5 characters part 2)
~CM 2 Last Album "LAST PLAN" (～CM 2 ラストアルバム「LAST PLAN」, ~Second commercial the last album "LAST PLAN")
~Menbā ni Sitsumon (～メンバーに質問, ~Questions from you to a member)
Arigatou! (ARIGATOU!, Thank you!)
~Happun Tanaka to Poruno Itō (～八分田中とポルノ伊東, ~Eight minutes Tanaka and Pornography Ito)
Sayonara NO PLAN (さよならNO PLAN, Good-bye NO PLAN)

SUMMER PLAN (August 8, 2005) Ki/oon Records KSCL 832

Harikiru Otoko (はりきる男, Vigorous Man)
Oh! Samaa (Oh! サマー, Oh! Summer) _{offered from Nobuteru Maeda (Tube)}
We are NO PLAN 2 ~Sasayaka na Shiawase~ (We are NO PLAN 2 ～ささやかな幸せ～, Modest Happiness)
Tama Shoku-nin (玉職人, Ball-Craftsman)
Yome ni Konai ka Sumida-ku e (嫁に来ないか墨田区へ, Won't You Be My Wife? To Sumida Ward)
NO PLAN no Jinsei toiu Na no Ressha (NO PLANの人生という名の列車, The train called life by NO PLAN) _{offered from Toshihide Baba}
Sono Go no Harikiru Otoko (その後のはりきる男, The Vigorous Man After)

NO PLAN (December 17, 2003) Ki/oon Records KSCL 637

We are NO PLAN _{Produced by Ken Yokoyama from Crazy Ken Band}
Gaku-ya Ō (楽屋王, King of the Dressing Room)
Uchi-P "Coco Japan" Remix (内P "COCO JAPAN" Remix)
Sono toki, hontō wa... ichi (その時、本当は・・・。 1, Back then, the truth is... part1)
Wake no Wakaranai Spōtsu Jikkyō (訳の分からないスポーツ実況, Uncomprehensibe Athletic Condition)
Uchi-P Gun-dan no Teema (内P軍団のテーマ, Uchi-P's Troupe Theme)
Shutsugen! Sonzaikan no Nai Kaijū (出現! 存在感のない怪獣, It's here! The Unobtrusive Monster)
Ima, omou koto ichi (今、思うコト。 1, What I'm Thinking Now part1)
Zenryaku, Rotenburo no Ue Yori ~Geinin-damashii no Uta~ (前略、露天風呂の上より～芸人魂の詩～, Greetings from the Outdoor Bath: Song of the Entertainer's Spirit)
Ima, omou koto ni (今、思うコト。 2, What I'm Thinking Now part2)
Uchimura Jitaku Jikkyō Chūkei ~Chiisai Terebi wa Sonzai suru ka?!~ (内村自宅実況中継～小さいテレビは存在するか?!～, Check out the state of Uchimura's house: Does he have small TVs?!)
Comedians' Life ~one week~
Sono toki, hontō wa... ni (その時、本当は・・・。 2, Back then, the truth is... part2)
F1 Midorimachi Guranpuri (F1緑町グランプリ, F1 Midorimachi Grand Prix)
Hitori Botchi no Jinguru Beru (ひとりぼっちのジングルベル, A Loner's Jingle Bell)
Ima, omou koto san (今、思うコト。3, What I'm Thinking Now part3)
Sono toki, hontō wa... san (その時、本当は・・・。 3, Back then, the truth is... part3)
Nippon Zenkoku Uchi-age Ondo (日本全国打ち上げ音頭, A Working Song to Blast-Off All of Japan)
Uchimura Akiyoshi (内村秋好, Akiyoshi Uchimura)
Kokorozashi Nakaba (志なかば, Halfway Wish) _{offered from Ryudo Uzaki}
Suketto Yarō no Teema (助っ人野郎のテーマ, Helper Guy's Theme) (Bonus Track)

Single [link]

Oh! Summer　(June 15, 2005) Ki/oon Records KSCL 831

Oh! Samā (Oh! サマー, Oh! Summer)
Uchi-P No Catto Quiz II(内PノーカットクイズII, An Uchimura Produce Non-Cutted Quiz for CD PartII)
Oh! Samā (original karaoke) (Oh!サマー(オリジナル・カラオケ), Oh! Summer (original karaoke))

Honmō de Gozaimasu ~Geinin-damashii no Uta PartII~ (April 14, 2004) Ki/oon Records KSCL 966

Honmō de Gozaimasu ~Geinin-damashii no Uta PartII~ (本望でございます～芸人魂の詩 PartII～, We'll be Satisfied: Song of the Entertainer's Spirit PartII)
CD-ban Uchi-P No Catto Quiz(CD版内Pノーカットクイズ, An Uchimura Produce no cut quiz for CD)
◯(Maru) Ageyō (◯(マル)あげよう, I will give a standard mark) _{Ending theme of Crayon Shin-chan 2004 film "The Kasukabe Boys of the Evening Sun" (クレヨンしんちゃん嵐を呼ぶ! 夕陽のカスカベボーイズ)}
Honmō de Gozaimasu ~Geinin-damashii no Uta Part II~ (karaoke) (本望でございます～芸人魂の詩 PartII ～(カラオケ), We'll be Satisfied: Song of the Entertainer's Spirit PartII (A karaoke))
◯(Maru) Ageyō (karaoke) (◯(マル)あげよう(カラオケ), I will give a standard mark (A karaoke))

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For the composer and conductor of the Ray Charles Singers, see Ray Charles (composer).

For the song by Chiddy Bang, see Ray Charles (song).

Ray Charles
Ray Charles in 1990
Background information
Birth name	Ray Charles
Born	(1930-09-23)September 23, 1930 Albany, Georgia, United States
Origin	Greenville, Florida, United States
Died	June 10, 2004(2004-06-10) (aged 73) Beverly Hills, California, United States
Genres	Rhythm and blues, soul, blues, soul blues, rock and roll, jazz, vocal jazz, country, pop, gospel
Occupations	Composer, musician, arranger, bandleader
Instruments	Vocals, piano, keyboards, alto saxophone, trombone
Years active	1947–2004
Labels	Atlantic, ABC, Warner Bros., Swing Time, Concord, Columbia, Flashback
Associated acts	The Raelettes, Quincy Jones, Betty Carter, Marvin Gaye, Billy Joel, James Brown, Little Richard
Website	Official website

Ray Charles Robinson (September 23, 1930 – June 10, 2004), known by his shortened stage name Ray Charles, was an American musician. He was a pioneer in the genre of soul music during the 1950s by fusing rhythm and blues, gospel, and blues styles into his early recordings with Atlantic Records.^[1]^[2]^[3] He also helped racially integrate country and pop music during the 1960s with his crossover success on ABC Records, most notably with his Modern Sounds albums.^[4]^[5]^[6] While with ABC, Charles became one of the first African-American musicians to be given artistic control by a mainstream record company.^[2] Frank Sinatra called Charles “the only true genius in show business.”

The influences upon his music were mainly jazz, blues, rhythm and blues and country artists of the day such as Art Tatum, Nat King Cole, Louis Jordan, Charles Brown, Louis Armstrong. His playing reflected influences from country blues and barrelhouse, and stride piano styles.

Rolling Stone ranked Charles number ten on their list of "100 Greatest Artists of All Time" in 2004,^[7] and number two on their November 2008 list of "100 Greatest Singers of All Time".^[8] In honoring Charles, Billy Joel noted: "This may sound like sacrilege, but I think Ray Charles was more important than Elvis Presley. I don't know if Ray was the architect of rock & roll, but he was certainly the first guy to do a lot of things . . . Who the hell ever put so many styles together and made it work?"^[9]

1 Early life: 1930–1945
2 Career
3 Personal life
4 Death
5 Legacy
6 Discography
7 Filmography
8 References
9 Bibliography
10 External links

Early life: 1930–1945 [link]

Ray Charles Robinson was the son of Aretha Robinson, a sharecropper, and Bailey Robinson, a railroad repair man, mechanic and handyman.^[10] Aretha Robinson was a devout Christian and the family attended the New Shiloh Baptist Church.^[11] When Ray was an infant, his family moved from Albany, Georgia, where he was born, to the poor black community on the western side of Greenville, Florida. In his early years, Charles showed a curiosity for mechanical things and he often watched the neighborhood men working on their cars and farm machinery. His musical curiosity was sparked at Mr. Wiley Pit's Red Wing Cafe when Pit played boogie woogie on an old upright piano. Pit would care for George, Ray's brother, so as to take the burden off Williams. However, George drowned in the Williams' bath tub when he was four years old.^{[citation needed]} After witnessing the death of his brother, Ray would feel an overwhelming sense of guilt later on in life.

Charles started to lose his sight at the age of five. He went completely blind by the age of seven, apparently due to glaucoma.^[12]^[13] He attended school at the Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind in St. Augustine from 1937 to 1945,^[14] where he developed his musical talent.^[12] During this time he performed on WFOY radio in St. Augustine. His father died when he was 10 and his mother died five years after.

In school, Charles was taught only classical music, but he wanted to play the jazz and blues he heard on the family radio.^[14] While at school, he became the school's premier musician. On Fridays, the South Campus Literary Society held assemblies where Charles would play piano and sing popular songs. On Halloween and Washington's birthday, the Colored Department of the school had socials where Charles would play. It was here he established "RC Robinson and the Shop Boys" and sang his own arrangement of "Jingle Bell Boogie."^[15] He spent his first Christmas at the school, but later the staff pitched in so that Charles could return to Greenville, as he did each summer.

Henry and Alice Johnson, who owned a store not unlike Mr. Pit's store in Greenville, moved to the French town section of Tallahassee, just west of Greenville; and they, as well as Freddy and Margaret Bryant, took Charles in. He worked the register in the Bryants' store under the direction of Lucille Bryant, their daughter. It's said he loved Tallahassee and often used the drug store delivery boy's motorbike to run up and down hills using the exhaust sound of a friend's bike to guide him. Charles found Tallahassee musically exciting too and sat in with the Florida A&M University student band. He played with the Adderley brothers, Nat and Cannonball, and began playing gigs with Lawyer Smith and his Band in 1943 at the Red Bird Club and Deluxe Clubs in Frenchtown and roadhouse theaters around Tallahassee, as well as the Governor's Ball.^[16]

Career [link]

Early career: 1946–1952 [link]

After his mother died in 1946, Charles was 15 years old and didn't return to school. He lived in Jacksonville with a couple who were friends of his mother. For over a year, he played the piano for bands at the Ritz Theatre in LaVilla, earning $4 a night. Then he moved to Orlando, and later Tampa, where he played with a southern band called The Florida Playboys. This is where he began his habit of always wearing sunglasses, made by designer Billy Stickles.^[17]

Charles had always played for other people, but he wanted his own band. He decided to leave Florida for a large city, but Chicago and New York City were too big. After asking a friend to look in a map and note the city in the United States that was farthest from Florida, he moved to Seattle in 1947^[12] (where he first met and befriended, under the tutelage of Robert Blackwell, a 14-year-old Quincy Jones)^[18]^[19] and soon started recording, first for the Down Beat label as the Maxin Trio with guitarist G.D. McKee and bassist Milton Garrett, achieving his first hit with "Confession Blues" in 1949. The song soared to No. 2 on the R&B charts. He joined Swing Time Records and under his own name ("Ray Charles" to avoid being confused with boxer Sugar Ray Robinson)^[10] recorded two more R&B hits, "Baby, Let Me Hold Your Hand" (No. 5) in 1951 and "Kissa Me Baby" (No. 8) in 1952. The following year, Swing Time folded and Ahmet Ertegün signed him to Atlantic Records.^[12]

Atlantic Records: 1953–1958 [link]

Charles laid low from recording until early 1953 as Atlantic executives cleared out Charles' contract with Swingtime. Charles began recording jump blues and boogie-woogie style recordings as well as slower blues ballads where he continued to show the vocal influences of Nat "King" Cole and Charles Brown. "Mess Around" became Charles' first Atlantic hit in 1953 and he later had hits the following year with "It Should Have Been Me" and "Don't You Know". He also recorded the songs, "Midnight Hour" and "Sinner's Prayer". Some elements of his own vocal style showed up in "Sinner's Prayer", "Mess Around" and "Don't You Know".

Late in 1954, Charles recorded his own composition, "I Got a Woman" and the song became Charles' first number-one R&B hit in 1955 and brought him to national prominence.^[20] The elements of "I Got a Woman" included a mixture of gospel, jazz and blues elements that would later prove to be seminal in the development of rock 'n' roll and soul music. He repeated this pattern throughout 1955 continuing through 1958 with records such as "This Little Girl of Mine", "Drown in My Own Tears", "Lonely Avenue", "A Fool For You" and "The Night Time (Is the Right Time)".

However, Charles didn't stop his ambitions of jazz recording a couple of instrumental jazz albums with vibraphonist Milt Jackson while also promoting his R&B career. By 1958, Charles was not only headlining black venues such as The Apollo Theater and The Uptown Theater but also bigger venues such as The Newport Jazz Festival. It was at the Newport festival where he cut his first live album. In 1956, Charles recruited a young all-female singing group named the Cookies, and reshaped them as The Raelettes. Before then, Charles had used his wife and other musicians to back him up on recordings such as "This Little Girl of Mine" and "Drown In My Own Tears". The Raelettes' first recording session with Charles was on the bluesy-gospel inflected "Leave My Woman Alone".

Crossover success: 1959–1967 [link]

Charles in 1971. Photo: Heinrich Klaffs.

Charles reached the pinnacle of his success at Atlantic with the release of "What'd I Say", a complex song that combined gospel, jazz, blues and Latin music and a song that Charles would later say he composed spontaneously as he was performing in clubs and dances with his small band. Despite some radio stations banning the song because of its sexually suggestive lyrics, the song became a crossover top ten pop record, Charles' first record to do so.^[21] Later in 1959, Charles recorded and released his first country song, a cover of Hank Snow's "Movin' On", and had recorded three more albums for the label including a jazz record (later released in 1961 as The Genius After Hours), a blues record (released in 1961 as The Genius Sings the Blues) and a traditional pop/big band record (The Genius of Ray Charles). The Genius of Ray Charles provided his first top 40 album entry where it peaked at #17 and was later held as a landmark record in Charles' career but Charles saw a bigger opportunity following his Atlantic contract expiring in the fall of 1959 when several big labels offered him record deals.

Choosing not to renegotiate his contract with Atlantic, Ray Charles signed with ABC-Paramount Records in November 1959, obtaining a much more liberal contract than other artists had at the time.^[22] Following the success of "What'd I Say" and The Genius of Ray Charles, ABC offered Charles a $ 50,000 annual advance, higher royalties than previously offered and eventual ownership of his masters — a very valuable and lucrative deal at the time.^[23] During his Atlantic years, Charles was heralded for his own inventive compositions, however, by the time of the release of the instrumental jazz LP Genius + Soul = Jazz (1960) for ABC's subsidiary label Impulse!, Charles had virtually given up on writing original material and had begun to follow his eclectic impulses as an interpreter.^[21]

With his first hit single for ABC-Paramount, Charles received national acclaim and a Grammy Award for the Sid Feller-produced "Georgia on My Mind", originally written by composers Stuart Gorrell and Hoagy Carmichael, released as a single by Charles in 1960.^[21]^[24] The song served as Charles's first work with Feller, who arranged and conducted the recording. Charles also earned another Grammy for the follow-up "Hit the Road Jack", written by R&B singer Percy Mayfield.^[25] By late 1961, Charles had expanded his small road ensemble to a full-scale big band, partly as a response to increasing royalties and touring fees, becoming one of the few black artists to crossover into mainstream pop with such a level of creative control.^[21]^[26] This success, however, came to a momentary halt in November 1961, as a police search of Charles's hotel room in Indianapolis, Indiana during a concert tour led to the discovery of heroin in his medicine cabinet. The case was eventually dropped, as the search lacked a proper warrant by the police, and Charles soon returned his focus on music and recording.^[26]

The 1962 album, Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music and its sequel Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, Vol. 2, helped to bring country into the mainstream of music. His version of the Don Gibson song, I Can't Stop Loving You topped the Pop chart for five weeks and stayed at No. 1 R&B for ten weeks in 1962. It also gave him his only number one record in the UK. In 1962, he founded his own record label, Tangerine Records, which ABC-Paramount promoted and distributed.^[27]^[28] He also had major pop hits in 1963 with "Busted" (US No. 4) and Take These Chains From My Heart (US No. 8). With the rise of younger soul performers such as James Brown, Otis Redding and Motown singers such as Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye and its own blind artist, Stevie Wonder, Charles' successes on the pop and R&B charts peaked after 1964 though he remained a huge concert draw.

Later years: 1967-2004 [link]

1972 meeting of President Nixon and Ray Charles taken by Oliver F. Atkins

By 1967, Charles' commercial success had begun peaking on both pop and R&B charts though he would remain a concert draw both in the states and overseas. In 1965, Charles' career after being arrested for a third time for heroin halted after he agreed to go to rehab to avoid jail time. Charles kicked his habit at a clinic in Los Angeles. After spending a year on parole, Charles reemerged on the charts in 1966 with a series of hits composed with the fledgling team of Ashford & Simpson including the dance number, "I Don't Need No Doctor" (later covered in a hard rock style by British supergroup Humble Pie), "Let's Go Get Stoned", which became his first #1 R&B hit in several years, and "Crying Time", which reached #6 on the pop chart and later helped Charles win a Grammy Award the following March.

In 1967, he had a top twenty hit with another ballad, "Here We Go Again".^[29] Charles' renewed chart success, however, proved to be short lived and by the late 1960s his music was rarely played on radio stations partly due to the rise of psychedelic rock and harder forms of rock and R&B music and also due to Charles choosing to record pop standards and covers of then-modern day rock and soul hits as he had no desire to write due to him earning masters. Most of his recordings between 1966 and 1973 were either received well or poorly.^[12] Nonetheless, Charles continued to have an active recording career. Charles' 1972 album, Message from the People, included his unique gospel-influenced version of "America the Beautiful". In 1974, he left ABC Records and recorded several albums on his own Crossover Records label. His 1975 recording of Stevie Wonder's hit, "Living for the City" later helped Charles win another Grammy.

In 1977, he reunited with Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler and re-signed to Atlantic Records where he recorded the album, True to Life. However, the label had now begun focusing on rock acts and some of the label's prominent soul artists such as Aretha Franklin were starting to be neglected. Charles stayed with his old label until 1980. In November 1977 he appeared as the host of NBC's Saturday Night Live.^[30] In April of 1979, Charles' version of "Georgia On My Mind" was proclaimed the state song of Georgia. An emotional Charles performed the song on the floor of the state legislature.^[12] Though he notably supported the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1960s, Charles would be criticized for performing at South Africa's Sun City resort in 1981 during an international boycott of its apartheid policy.^[12] In 1983, Charles signed a contract with Columbia Records and recorded a string of country albums. Charles also began having a string of country hits often with duet singers such as George Jones, Chet Atkins, B.J. Thomas, Mickey Gilley, Hank Williams, Jr. and lifelong friend Willie Nelson, for which he recorded the #1 country duet, "Seven Spanish Angels". After 1987, his Columbia contract ended and Charles returned to recording pop music after signing with Warner Bros. Records. Prior to the release of his first Warner release, Would You Believe, Charles made a return on the R&B charts with a cover of The Brothers Johnson's "I'll Be Good to You", a duet with his lifelong buddy Quincy Jones and singer Chaka Khan. The song hit number-one on the R&B charts in 1990 and won Charles and Khan a Grammy for their dual work. Prior to this, Charles returned on the pop charts in another duet, with singer Billy Joel on the song, "Baby Grand" and in 1989, recorded a cover of the Southern All Stars' "Itoshi no Ellie", releasing it as "Ellie My Love" for a Japanese TV ad for Suntory releasing it in Japan where it reached #3 on its Oricon chart.^[31] Charles' 1993 album, My World became his first album in some time to reach the Billboard 200 and his cover of Leon Russell's "A Song for You" gave him a charted hit on the adult contemporary chart as well as his twelfth and final Grammy he would receive in his lifetime.

By the beginning of the 1980s, Charles would reach younger audiences by appearances in various films and TV shows. In 1980, he made a cameo on the film, The Blues Brothers. While he never appeared on the show, Charles' version of "Night Time is the Right Time" was played during the popular "Cosby Show" episode, "Happy Anniversary". In 1985, he appeared among a slew of other popular musicians in the USA for Africa charity recording, "We Are the World". Charles' popularity increased among younger audiences in 1991 after he appeared where he popularized the catchphrase "You Got the Right One, Baby" The catchphrase came from a song that was composed by Kenny Ascher, Joseph C. Caro and Helary Jay Lipsitz.^[32]

Charles with President Ronald Reagan and First Lady Nancy Reagan in 1984.

Charles also appeared at two Presidential inaugurations in his lifetime. In 1985, he performed for Ronald Reagan's second inauguration, and in 1993 for Bill Clinton's first.^[33] In the late 1980s/early 1990s, Charles made appearances on the Super Dave Osbourne TV show, where he performed and appeared in a few vignettes where he was somehow driving a car, often as Super Dave's chauffeur. During the sixth season of Designing Women, Charles sang "Georgia on My Mind", instead of the song being rendered instrumentally by other musicians as in the previous five seasons. He also appeared in 4 episodes of the popular TV comedy The Nanny in Seasons 4 & 5 (1997 & 1998) as 'Sammy', in one episode singing "My Yiddish Mamma" to December romance and later fiancee of character Gramma Yetta, played by veteran actress Ann Guilbert. From 2001-2002, Charles appeared in commercials for the New Jersey Lottery to promote its "For every dream, there's a jackpot" campaign.

In 2003, Ray Charles headlined the White House Correspondents Dinner in Washington, D.C. where the President, First Lady, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice attended. He also presented one of his greatest admirers, Van Morrison, with his award upon being inducted in the Songwriters Hall of Fame and the two sang Morrison's song "Crazy Love". This performance appears on Morrison's 2007 album, The Best of Van Morrison Volume 3. In 2003 Charles performed "Georgia On My Mind" and "America the Beautiful" at a televised annual electronic media journalist banquet held in Washington, D.C. His final public appearance came on April 30, 2004, at the dedication of his music studio as a historic landmark in the city of Los Angeles.^[12]

Personal life [link]

Family [link]

Charles was married twice and had 12 children with nine different women.^[34]^[35] His first marriage to Eileen Williams was brief: July 31, 1951 to 1952. He had three children from his second marriage, to Della Beatrice Howard Robinson from April 5, 1955 to April 26, 1977. His long term girlfriend and partner at the time of his death was Norma Pinella. His first child, Evelyn, was born in 1950 to girlfriend Louise Mitchell. His three children with Della, Ray Charles, Jr., David and Robert, were born in 1955, 1958 and 1960 respectively. Another son, Charles Wayne, was born in 1959 during his six-year long affair with original Raelettes vocalist Margie Hendricks. In 1961, a daughter, Raenee, was born during an affair with Mae Mosely Lyles. Two years later, in 1963, Charles and Sandra Jean Betts welcomed daughter Sheila Raye Charles Robinson.^[36] In 1966, a daughter named Alicia was born by a woman who remains unidentified to this day, followed by another daughter, Alexandra, born to a woman named Chantal Bertrand. Charles' next child, Vincent, came from a relationship with Arlette Kotchounian following his divorce from Della Howard in 1977. A year later, daughter Robyn was born to a woman named Gloria Moffett. Charles' youngest child, son Ryan Corey, was born in 1987 to Mary Anne den Bok.

Charles gave 10 of his 12 children checks for one million USD in December 2002 at a family luncheon, while the other two could not make it.^[37]

Substance abuse and legal issues [link]

On November 14, 1961, Charles was arrested on a narcotics charge in an Indiana hotel room, where he waited to perform. The detectives seized heroin, marijuana, and other items. Charles, then 31, stated that he had been a drug addict since the age of 16. While the case was dismissed because of the manner in which the evidence was obtained,^[38] Charles's situation did not improve until a few years later. Individuals such as Quincy Jones and Reverend Henry Griffin felt that those around Charles were responsible for his drug use.

By 1964 Charles' drug addiction caught up with him and he was arrested for possession of marijuana and heroin. Following a self-imposed stay^[38] at St. Francis Hospital in Lynwood, California, Charles received five years' probation. Charles responded to the saga of his drug use and reform with the songs "I Don't Need No Doctor", "Let's Go Get Stoned", and the release of his first album since having kicked his heroin addiction in 1966, Crying Time.^[39]^[40]

Other interests [link]

Charles played chess using a special board with holes for the pieces and raised squares.^[41] Charles referred to Willie Nelson as "my chess partner" in a 1991 concert.^[42] In 2002, he played and lost to American Grandmaster and former U.S. Champion Larry Evans.^[43]

Death [link]

Charles died on June 10, 2004 at 11:35 a.m. of liver disease at his home in Beverly Hills, California, surrounded by family and friends.^[44]^[45] He was 73 years old. His body was interred in the Inglewood Park Cemetery.

Star on Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6777 Hollywood Blvd.

His final album, Genius Loves Company, released two months after his death, consists of duets with various admirers and contemporaries: B.B. King, Van Morrison, Willie Nelson, James Taylor, Gladys Knight, Michael McDonald, Natalie Cole, Elton John, Bonnie Raitt, Diana Krall, Norah Jones, and Johnny Mathis. The album won eight Grammy Awards, including five for Ray Charles for Best Pop Vocal Album, Album of the Year, Record of the Year and Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals for "Here We Go Again" with Norah Jones, and Best Gospel Performance for "Heaven Help Us All" with Gladys Knight; he also received nods for his duets with Elton John and B.B. King. The album included a version of Harold Arlen's "Over the Rainbow", sung as a duet by Charles and Johnny Mathis; this record was played at his memorial service.^[46]

Two more posthumous albums, Genius & Friends (2005) and Ray Sings, Basie Swings (2006), were released. Genius & Friends consisted of duets recorded from 1997 to 2005 with his choice of artists. Ray Sings, Basie Swings consists of archived vocals of Ray Charles from live mid-1970s performances added to new instrumental tracks specially recorded by the contemporary Count Basie Orchestra and other musicians. Charles's vocals recorded from the concert mixing board were added to new accompaniments to create a "fantasy concert" recording.

Legacy [link]

File:RayCharlesStatue.jpg

Statue by Andy Davis in Ray Charles Plaza in Albany, Georgia

Charles possessed one of the most recognizable voices in American music. In the words of musicologist Henry Pleasants:

Sinatra, and Bing Crosby before him, had been masters of words. Ray Charles is a master of sounds. His records disclose an extraordinary assortment of slurs, glides, turns, shrieks, wails, breaks, shouts, screams and hollers, all wonderfully controlled, disciplined by inspired musicianship, and harnessed to ingenious subtleties of harmony, dynamics and rhythm... It is either the singing of a man whose vocabulary is inadequate to express what is in his heart and mind or of one whose feelings are too intense for satisfactory verbal or conventionally melodic articulation. He can’t tell it to you. He can’t even sing it to you. He has to cry out to you, or shout to you, in tones eloquent of despair — or exaltation. The voice alone, with little assistance from the text or the notated music, conveys the message.

Ray Charles is usually described as a baritone, and his speaking voice would suggest as much, as would the difficulty he experiences in reaching and sustaining the baritone's high E and F in a popular ballad. But the voice undergoes some sort of transfiguration under stress, and in music of gospel or blues character he can and does sing for measures on end in the high tenor range of A, B flat, B, C and ev in full voice, sometimes in an ecstatic head voice, sometimes in falsetto. In falsetto he continues up to E and F above high C. On one extraordinary record, "I’m Going Down to the River’ . . . he hits an incredible B flat . . . giving him an overall range, including the falsetto extension, of at least three octaves.^[47]

In 1979, Charles was one of the first of the Georgia State Music Hall of Fame to be recognized as a musician born in the state.^[48] Ray's version of "Georgia On My Mind" was made the official state song for Georgia.^[49] In 1981, he was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and was one of the first inductees to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame at its inaugural ceremony in 1986.^[50] He received the Kennedy Center Honors in 1986.^[51]

In 1987, he was awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. In 1991, he was inducted to the Rhythm & Blues Foundation. In 1993, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts.^[52] In 1998 he was awarded the Polar Music Prize together with Ravi Shankar in Stockholm, Sweden. In 2004 he was inducted to the Jazz Hall of Fame, and inducted to the National Black Sports & Entertainment Hall of Fame.^[53] The Grammy Awards of 2005 were dedicated to Charles.

On December 7, 2007, Ray Charles Plaza was opened in Albany, Georgia, with a revolving, lighted bronze sculpture of Charles seated at a piano. Later that month, on December 26, 2007, Ray Charles was inducted into the Hit Parade Hall of Fame. He was also presented with the George and Ira Gershwin Award for Lifetime Musical Achievement, during the 1991 UCLA Spring Sing.^[54]

In 2003, Charles was awarded an honorary degree by Dillard University. Upon his death, he endowed a professorship of African-American culinary history at the school, which is the first such chair in the nation.^[55] A $20 million performing arts center at Morehouse College was named after Charles and was dedicated in September 2010.^[56]

The biopic Ray, released in October 2004, portrays his life and career between 1930 and 1979 and stars Jamie Foxx as Charles. Foxx won the 2005 Academy Award for Best Actor for the role.

Discography [link]

Main article: Ray Charles discography

References [link]

^ Unterberger, Richie. Biography: Ray Charles. Allmusic. Retrieved on 2009-11-26.
^ ^a ^b VH1 (2003), p. 210.
^ "Show 15 - The Soul Reformation: More on the evolution of rhythm and blues. [Part 1] : UNT Digital Library". Digital.library.unt.edu. 1969-05-11. http://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc19764/m1/. Retrieved 2010-09-10.
^ Guide Profile: Ray Charles. About.com. Retrieved on 2008-12-12.
^ Soul Survivor Ray Charles. Rolling Stone. Retrieved on 2008-11-09.
^ Tyrangiel, Josh. Review: Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music. Time. Retrieved on 2009-07-21.
^ "100 Greatest Artists of All Time. #10: Ray Charles". Van Morrison. Rolling Stone Issue 946. Rolling Stone. http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/100-greatest-artists-of-all-time-19691231/ray-charles-19691231. Retrieved 2010-06-13.
^ "100 Greatest Singers of All Time. #2: Ray Charles". Billy Joel. rollingstone.com. http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/6027/32782/32797. Retrieved 2010-06-13.
^ "A Tribute to Ray Charles", Rolling Stoners issue 952/953, July 8–22, 2004.
^ ^a ^b "Ray Charles Biography". SwingMusic.Net. http://www.swingmusic.net/Ray_Charles_Biography.html. Retrieved 2008-02-14.
^ Lydon, Michael, Ray Charles: Man and Music, Routledge, ISBN 0-415-97043-1, Routledge Publishing, January 22, 2004.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f ^g ^h Bohème Magazine Obituary: Ray Charles (1930 – 2004).
^ "The Genius of Ray Charles", an article about an 1986 segment on Charles from 60 Minutes.
^ ^a ^b Lydon, Michael: Ray Charles, pp. 29–38.
^ Lydon, Michael, p. 19
^ Lydon, Michael, p. 20
^ "Blacknetwork.com". Blacknetwork.com. http://www.black-network.com/charlesbio.htm. Retrieved 2010-09-10.
^ Quincy Jones at www.pbs.org/... Accessed 2010 May 9.
^ Quincy Jones at www.achievement.org/... Accessed 2010 May 9.
^ Dahl, Bill (1954-11-18). "profile". Allmusic.com. http://www.allmusic.com/song/t2562634. Retrieved 2010-09-10.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d Ray Charles, Bluesy Essence of Soul. The New York Times Company. Retrieved on 2008-12-12.
^ breath of life » RAY CHARLES / “I Can’t Stop Loving You”. Kalamu. Retrieved on 2008-08-13.
^ RS Biography - Ray Charles 1930-2004. Rolling Stone. Retrieved on 2008-08-14.
^ The RS 500 Greatest Songs of All Time: 44) Georgia on My Mind. Rolling Stone. Retrieved on 2008-08-14.
^ Hit The Road Jack by Ray Charles Songfacts. Songfacts. Retrieved on 2008-08-14.
^ ^a ^b Cooper (1998), pp. 20&n dash;22.
^ Charles & Ritz 2004, p. 248.
^ Lydon 1998, pp. 213–16.
^ "Ray Charles Biography". PianoFiles. http://www.pianofiles.com/browse/artist/ray+charles.
^ "SNL Transcripts: Ray Charles: 11/12/77". Snltranscripts.jt.org. 1977-11-12. http://snltranscripts.jt.org/77/77e.phtml. Retrieved 2010-09-10.
^ List of best-selling international singles in Japan of 1989, Extract from the Year-End chart posted by oricon.
^ ASCAP Work ID: 570066694
^ "Internet Movie Database Bio on Ray Charles". Imdb.com. http://imdb.com/name/nm0153124/bio. Retrieved 2010-09-10.
^ "Marriages of Ray Charles". About.com. http://marriage.about.com/od/entertainmen1/p/charlesray.htm. Retrieved 2008-02-14.
^ "The Genius Of Ray Charles". CBS News. October 14, 2004. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/10/14/60minutes/main649346.shtml.
^ "Ray Charles' daughter, Sheila Raye Charles, on The Overnighter with Ewing Stevens". RadioLIVE.co.nz. http://www.radiolive.co.nz/Ray-Charles-daughter-Sheila-Raye-Charles-on-The-Overnighter-with-Ewing-Stevens/tabid/506/articleID/13773/Default.aspx. Retrieved 2010-07-01.
^ Ray Charles' Children Discuss Father's Unknown Generosity. Retrieved 2010-02-03.
^ ^a ^b "Show 16 - The Soul Reformation: More on the evolution of rhythm and blues. [Part 2] : UNT Digital Library". Digital.library.unt.edu. http://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc19765/m1/. Retrieved 2010-09-18.
^ "Answers.com". Answers.com. http://www.answers.com/Ray%20Charles. Retrieved 2010-09-10.
^ "PBS.org". PBS.org. 2006-05-17. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/episodes/ray-charles/about-ray-charles/554/. Retrieved 2010-09-10.
^ The chess games of Ray Charles. Retrieved 2010-02-03.
^ Charles, Ray (2005) (in English). Genius & Friends (CD). Burbank, CA: Atlantic Records. Event occurs at Track 13 2:22.
^ "Chess News - GM Larry Melvyn Evans (1932 – 2010)". ChessBase.com. http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=6814. Retrieved 2011-12-30.
^ D'angelo, Joe "Ray Charles Dead at 73" "MTV", Retrieved on 01 January 2012.
^ Evans, Mike "Ray Charles: The Birth of Soul", Retrieved 01 January 2012.
^ "Many Pay Respects to Ray Charles". CBS News. June 10, 2004. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/06/10/entertainment/main622401.shtml. Retrieved 2006-11-25.
^ Pleasants, H. (1974). The Great American Popular Singers. Simon and Schuster
^ "List of Inductees". Georgia Music Hall of Fame. 1979–2007. Archived from the original on 2006-10-15. http://web.archive.org/web/20061015013823/http://www.gamusichall.com/inducteelist.html. Retrieved 2006-11-25.
^ "State Song". Georgia Secretary of State. 1979. http://sos.georgia.gov/archives/state_symbols/state_song.html.
^ "Inductees". Rock and Roll Hall of Fame & Museum. Archived from the original on November 23, 2006. http://web.archive.org/web/20061123064050/http://www.rockhall.com/hof/inductee.asp?id=76. Retrieved 2006-11-25.
^ "List of Kennedy Center Honorees". Kennedy Center. 1986. http://www.kennedy-center.org/programs/specialevents/honors/history/home.html. Retrieved 2006-11-25.
^ "Lifetime Honors - National Medal of Arts". Nea.gov. http://www.nea.gov/honors/medals/medalists_year.html#93. Retrieved 2010-09-10.
^ "Hall of Fame". National Black Sports & Entertainment. 2004. http://www.harlemdiscover.com/halloffame. Retrieved 2006-11-25.
^ "Calendar & Events: Spring Sing: Gershwin Award". UCLA. http://www.uclalumni.net/CalendarEvents/springsing/Gershwin/winners.cfm.
^ Read, Mimi (February 23, 2005). "A Gift to Black Cuisine, From Ray Charles". New York Times. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F00E0D91F3AF930A15751C0A9639C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all. Retrieved 2010-10-11.
^ "Morehouse Cuts the Ribbon on the Ray Charles Performing Arts Center and Music Academic Building". Morehouse College. http://www.morehouse.edu/news/archives/002313.html. Retrieved 2010-10-11.

Bibliography [link]

Charles, Ray and Ritz, David (2004). Brother Ray: Ray Charles' Own Story (Third Da Capo Press ed.). Da Capo Press. ISBN 0-306-81431-5.
VH1 (see list of contributors) (2003). 100 Greatest Albums. edited by Jacob Hoye. Simon & Schuster, USA. p. 210. ISBN 0-7434-4876-6.
Lydon, Michael (1998). Ray Charles: Man and Music. Riverhead Books. ISBN 1-57322-132-5.

External links [link]

	Book: Ray Charles
Wikipedia books are collections of articles that can be downloaded or ordered in print.

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Ray Charles

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Ray Charles

Official website
Article from the St. Augustine Record noting Charles' being on WFOY.
Ray Charles - Daily Telegraph obituary
Ray Charles discography at MusicBrainz
Ray Charles at RollingStone
Ray Charles at Songwriters Hall of Fame
Ray Charles at The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
Ray Charles at the Internet Movie Database
Ray Charles at Allmusic
Ray Charles discography at Discogs
Ray Charles autobiography: The Early Years 1930–1960
I Can't Stop Loving You: Ray Charles and Country Music - Past Exhibit at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum
Ray Charles's oral history video excerpts at the National Visionary Leadership Project
Ray Charles interviewed on the Pop Chronicles (1969).

v t e Ray Charles

Studio albums	Ray Charles (Hallelujah, I Love Her So) The Great Ray Charles Yes Indeed! Soul Brothers What'd I Say The Genius of Ray Charles Genius+Soul = Jazz The Genius Hits the Road Dedicated to You Ray Charles and Betty Carter The Genius Sings the Blues Soul Meeting The Genius After Hours Ray Charles Greatest Hits Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, Vol. 2 Ingredients in a Recipe for Soul Sweet & Sour Tears Have a Smile with Me Together Again / Country and Western Meets Rhythm and Blues Crying Time Ray's Moods Ray Charles Invites You to Listen A Portrait of Ray I'm All Yours Baby! Doing His Thing My Kind of Jazz Love Country Style Volcanic Action of My Soul A Message From the People Through the Eyes of Love Jazz Number II Come Live With Me Renaissance My Kind of Jazz Part 3 Porgy and Bess with Cleo Laine True to Life Love & Peace Ain't It So Brother Ray Is at It Again Wish You Were Here Tonight Do I Ever Cross Your Mind? Friendship The Spirit of Christmas From the Pages of My Mind Just Between Us Would You Believe? My World Strong Love Affair Thanks for Bringing Love Around Again Genius Loves Company

Posthumous studio creations	Genius & Friends Ray Sings, Basie Swings Rare Genius

Live albums	Ray Charles at Newport Ray Charles in Person Live in Concert Live in Japan (Ray Charles Live) Berlin, '62 Ray Charles Celebrates a Gospel Christmas with the Voices of Jubilation Live at the Olympia, 2000

Notable compilations	Do the Twist! with Ray Charles The Ray Charles Story, Vol 1~4 A Man and His Soul The Best of Ray Charles Anthology Seven Spanish Angels and Other Hits The Birth of Soul Genius and Soul The Complete Swing Time & Down Beat Recordings Ultimate Hits Collection Ray Charles in Concert Pure Genius: The Complete Atlantic Recordings (1952-1959)

Billboard Hot 100 Top 10 Singles	"What'd I Say " "Georgia on My Mind " "Hit the Road Jack" "One Mint Julep" "Unchain My Heart" "I Can't Stop Loving You " "You Don't Know Me" "You Are My Sunshine" "Busted" "Take These Chains from My Heart" "Crying Time"

Other Billboard Charts #1 singles	"I Got a Woman" "A Fool for You" "Mary Ann" "Drown in My Own Tears" "Together Again" "Let's Go Get Stoned" "Seven Spanish Angels" "I'll Be Good to You"

Grammy Awarded Works (not included above)	"Let The Good Times Roll" "Living for the City" "A Song for You" "Heaven Help Us All " "Here We Go Again"

See also	David "Fathead" Newman Fathead / Ray Charles Sextet Hank Crawford The Raelettes Ray Quincy Jones The Blues Brothers Here We Go Again: Celebrating the Genius of Ray Charles

Discography Albums Songs Audio samples

v t e Laureates of the Polar Music Prize

1992–1999	Paul McCartney / the Baltic states (1992) Dizzy Gillespie / Witold Lutosławski (1993) Quincy Jones / Nikolaus Harnoncourt (1994) Elton John / Mstislav Rostropovich (1995) Joni Mitchell / Pierre Boulez (1996) Bruce Springsteen / Eric Ericson (1997) Ray Charles / Ravi Shankar (1998) Stevie Wonder / Iannis Xenakis (1999)

2000–2009	Bob Dylan / Isaac Stern (2000) Burt Bacharach / Robert Moog / Karlheinz Stockhausen (2001) Miriam Makeba / Sofia Gubaidulina (2002) Keith Jarrett (2003) B.B. King / György Ligeti (2004) Gilberto Gil / Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (2005) Led Zeppelin / Valery Gergiev (2006) Sonny Rollins / Steve Reich (2007) Pink Floyd / Renée Fleming (2008) Peter Gabriel / José Antonio Abreu / El Sistema (2009)

2010–present	Björk / Ennio Morricone (2010) Kronos Quartet / Patti Smith (2011)

v t e Kennedy Center Honorees (1980s)

1980	Leonard Bernstein James Cagney Agnes de Mille Lynn Fontanne Leontyne Price

1981	Count Basie Cary Grant Helen Hayes Jerome Robbins Rudolf Serkin

1982	George Abbott Lillian Gish Benny Goodman Gene Kelly Eugene Ormandy

1983	Katherine Dunham Elia Kazan Frank Sinatra James Stewart Virgil Thomson

1984	Lena Horne Danny Kaye Gian Carlo Menotti Arthur Miller Isaac Stern

1985	Merce Cunningham Irene Dunne Bob Hope Alan Jay Lerner & Frederick Loewe Beverly Sills

1986	Lucille Ball Hume Cronyn & Jessica Tandy Yehudi Menuhin Antony Tudor Ray Charles

1987	Perry Como Bette Davis Sammy Davis, Jr. Nathan Milstein Alwin Nikolais

1988	Alvin Ailey George Burns Myrna Loy Alexander Schneider Roger L. Stevens

1989	Harry Belafonte Claudette Colbert Alexandra Danilova Mary Martin William Schuman

complete list 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s

Grammy Award for Record of the Year (2000s)

"Smooth"* by Santana (Rodney Holmes, Tony Lindsay, Karl Perazzo, Raul Rekow, Benny Rietveld, Carlos Santana, Chester Thompson) featuring Rob Thomas engineered/mixed by David Thoener, produced by Matt Serletic (2000)	"Beautiful Day"* by U2 (Bono, Adam Clayton, The Edge, Larry Mullen, Jr.) engineered/mixed by Richard Rainey & Steve Lillywhite; produced by Brian Eno & Daniel Lanois (2001)
"Walk On" by U2 (Bono, Adam Clayton, The Edge, Larry Mullen, Jr.) engineered/mixed by Richard Rainey & Steve Lillywhite; produced by Brian Eno & Daniel Lanois (2002)	"Don't Know Why"* by Norah Jones; engineered/mixed by Jay Newland; produced by Arif Mardin, Jay Newland & Norah Jones (2003)
"Clocks" by Coldplay (Guy Berryman, Jon Buckland, Will Champion, Phil Harvey, Chris Martin) engineered/mixed by Coldplay, Ken Nelson & Mark Phythian; produced by Coldplay & Ken Nelson (2004)	"Here We Go Again" by Ray Charles and Norah Jones engineered/mixed by Al Schmitt, Mark Fleming, & Terry Howard; produced by John R. Burk (2005)
"Boulevard of Broken Dreams" by Green Day (Billie Joe Armstrong, Mike Dirnt, Frank Edwin Wright III) engineered/mixed by Chris Lord-Alge & Doug McKean, produced by Green Day & Rob Cavallo (2006)	"Not Ready to Make Nice"* by Dixie Chicks (Martie Maguire, Natalie Maines, Emily Robison) engineered/mixed by Chris Testa, Jim Scott & Richard Dodd; produced by Rick Rubin (2007)
"Rehab"* by Amy Winehouse engineered/mixed by Tom Elmhirst, Vaughan Merrick, Dom Morley, Mark Ronson & Gabriel Roth; produced by Mark Ronson (2008)	"Please Read the Letter" by Alison Krauss and Robert Plant engineered/mixed by Mike Piersante; produced by T-Bone Burnett (2009)

Grammy Award for Album of the Year (2000s)

Supernatural performed by Santana (Rodney Holmes, Tony Lindsay, Karl Perazzo, Raul Rekow, Benny Rietveld, Carlos Santana, Chester Thompson); engineered/mixed by Alvaro Villagra, Andy Grassi, Anton Pukshansky, Benny Faccone, Chris Theis, Commissioner Gordon, David Frazer, David Thoener, Glenn Kolotkin, Jeff Poe, Jim Gaines, Jim Scott, John Gamble, John Karpowich, John Seymour, Matty Spindel, Mike Couzzi, Steve Farrone, Steve Fontano, T-Ray, Tom Lord-Alge, Tony Prendatt & Warren Riker; produced by Alex Gonzales, Art Hodge, Charles Goodan, Clive Davis, Dante Ross, Dust Brothers, Fher Olvera, Jerry 'Wonder' Duplessis, K. C. Porter, Lauryn Hill, Matt Serletic, Stephen M. Harris & Wyclef Jean (2000)	Two Against Nature performed by Steely Dan (Walter Becker, Donald Fagen); engineered/mixed by Dave Russell, Elliot Scheiner, Phil Burnett & Roger Nichols; produced by Donald Fagen & Walter Becker (2001)
O Brother, Where Art Thou? Soundtrack performed by Alison Krauss & Union Station (Barry Bales, Ron Block, Jerry Douglas, Alison Krauss, Dan Tyminski), Chris Sharp, Chris Thomas King, Emmylou Harris, Gillian Welch, Harley Allen, John Hartford, Mike Compton, Norman Blake, Pat Enright, Peasall Sisters (Hannah Peasall, Leah Peasall, Sarah Peasall), Ralph Stanley, Sam Bush, Stuart Duncan, The Cox Family (Evelyn Cox, Sidney Cox, Suzanne Cox, Willard Cox), The Fairfield Four (Nathan Best, Isaac Freeman, Robert Hamlett, James Hill, Joseph Rice, Wilson Waters, Jr.), The Whites (Buck White, Cheryl White, Sharon White) & Tim Blake Nelson; engineered/mixed by Mike Piersante & Peter Kurland; master engineered by Gavin Lurssen; produced by T-Bone Burnett (2002)	Come Away with Me performed by Norah Jones; engineered/mixed by Jay Newland & S. Husky Höskulds; master engineered by Ted Jensen; produced by Arif Mardin, Craig Street, Jay Newland & Norah Jones (2003)
Speakerboxxx/The Love Below performed by OutKast (André 3000, Big Boi); engineered/mixed by Brian Paturalski, Chris Carmouche, Darrell Thorp, Dexter Simmons, John Frye, Kevin Davis, Matt Still, Moka Nagatani, Neal H. Pogue, Padraic Kernin, Pete Novak, Reggie Dozier, Robert Hannon, Terrence Cash & Vincent Alexander; master engineered by Bernie Grundman & Brian Gardner; produced by André 3000, Big Boi & Carl Mo (2004)	Genius Loves Company performed by Ray Charles and Various Artists; engineered/mixed by Al Schmitt, Ed Thacker, Joel W. Moss, John Harris, Mark Fleming, Pete Karam, Robert Fernandez, Seth Presant & Terry Howard; master engineered by Doug Sax & Robert Hadley; produced by Don Mizell, Herbert Waltl, John R. Burk, Phil Ramone & Terry Howard (2005)
How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb performed by U2 (Bono, Adam Clayton, The Edge, Larry Mullen, Jr.); engineered/mixed by Carl Glanville, Flood, Greg Collins, Jacknife Lee, Nellee Hooper, Simon Gogerly & Steve Lillywhite; master engineered by Arnie Acosta; produced by Brian Eno, Chris Thomas, Daniel Lanois, Flood, Jacknife Lee & Steve Lillywhite (2006)	Taking the Long Way performed by Dixie Chicks (Martie Maguire, Natalie Maines, Emily Robison); engineered/mixed by Chris Testa, Jim Scott & Richard Dodd; master engineered by Richard Dodd; produced by Rick Rubin (2007)
River: The Joni Letters performed by Herbie Hancock; featuring Norah Jones, Joni Mitchell, Corinne Bailey Rae , Tina Turner ; produced by Herbie Hancock & Larry Klein; engineered/mixed by Helik Hadar; master engeineered by Bernie Grundman (2008)	Raising Sand performed by Robert Plant & Alison Krauss; produced by T-Bone Burnett; engineered/mixed by Mike Piersante; master engeineered by Gavin Lurssen (2009)

Persondata
Name	Charles, Ray
Alternative names	Robinson, Ray Charles
Short description	Vocalist, musician, songwriter, arranger, bandleader
Date of birth	September 23, 1930
Place of birth	Albany, Georgia, U.S.
Date of death	June 10, 2004
Place of death	Beverly Hills, California, U.S.

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[edit] Astral Weeks – 1968

[edit] From Moondance to Into the Music: 1970–79

[edit] Common One to Avalon Sunset: 1980–89

[edit] The Best of Van Morrison to Back on Top: 1990–99

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