The 55th New York Festivals® International Television & Film Awards™, announced this year’s winning entries at the 2012 awards ceremony Tuesday, April 17th at the annual NAB Show in Las Vegas. Tremolo Productions for BIO, The Biography Channel, USA was honored with the World Gold Medal Award for Ray Charles’ America in the Biography/Profiles category [...]
Writer and Ray Charles fan Aaron Cohen will be honored at the 43rd Annual ASCAP Deems Taylor Awards for outstanding print, broadcast and new media coverage of music. The writer, based in Chicago, won the important award for the article “Ray’s Kind Of Jazz”, published in the October 2010 edition of Downbeat Magazine. Cohen, along [...]
Over 100 minutes of rare Ray Charles Concert footage from the legendary 1961 Antibes Jazz Festival in France will be released on DVD on October 25th, 2011. The newly discovered footage, featuring an hour and 45 minutes of performances, show Ray Charles in his prime period with the original Raeletts and his most legendary band [...]
Music fans were in for a surprise Wednesday night when the debut of Pepsi’s new “Music Icons” commercial, featuring Ray Charles, aired during the premiere of Simon Cowell’s “The X Factor” reality competition. The ad celebrates Pepsi’s rich history of incorporating worldwide superstars into its numerous music-focused television spots and along with Charles, featured talents [...]
Universal Studios Home Entertainment has recently released acclaimed film “Ray” on Blu-ray format, giving fans an entirely new way to view the film. Taking place in the segregated south of the 1960’s, the Ray Charles biopic follows the music legend from his loss of sight at age seven to his tours across the Southern musical [...]
Pepsi, a consistent frontrunner in creating instant commercial classics and iconic pop culture campaigns, brings back the memorable Diet Pepsi and Ray Charles’ ads for “You Got the Right One Baby, Uh-Huh!” with a line of retro t-shirts. The recent collaboration was brokered through The Joester Loria Group, Pepsi’s exclusive licensing agency for North America [...]
The Ray Charles Marketing Group along with Alfred Music Publishing are pleased to announce the release of the Ray Charles 80th Anniversary Sheet Music Collection. This collectible songbook contains sheet music for 28 songs recorded by legendary musician Ray Charles over a 50 year span, from 1953 through 2003. Each sheet music transcription accurately renders [...]
The Ray Charles Marketing Group has announced a limited edition run of fifty premium photo prints by acclaimed German photographer Jürgen Lechner has been made available to the public. The print, featuring a smiling Ray Charles in motion after finishing a show-closing performance of “What’d I Say”, is beautifully made in gicléeprint-technique on canvas and [...]
“Listen, I’m going to fool around, so y’all just follow me” is the direction Ray Charles gave the three Raeletts in December of 1958, just before 1:00 AM, after realizing the need to fill 12 minutes of show time. What followed was the first performance of “What’d I Say”, one of the most popular and [...]
Born impoverished and black in the racially segregated south and losing his sight as a child, Ray Charles was able to overcome adversity on many levels before reaching the masses through music. However, music alone could not unite the heavily segregated South during the Civil Rights era. Though Ray’s extraordinary talent allowed him social liberties [...]
