MSNBC - Music legend Ray Charles dies at 73

Forget Reagan.. Ray Charles was a national hero.

Elvis Costello had better send flowers.. He's still a shmuck in my book after the events reprinted from http://www.elviscostello.info/faq/general.html

Q. What was the Bonnie Bramlett/Ray Charles incident?
A. Elvis back in early 1979 made some not-so-politically-correct comments about Ray Charles (calling him a 'blind, ignorant n***er') while drinking with Bonnie Bramlett and Stephen Stills in the bar of the Holiday Inn -Downtown in Columbus, Ohio. He also called Stills 'steel nose', in reference to Stills' one-time cocaine habit. A fight then ensued between the Attractions and Stills' backing band.
He was later forced to make a public apology at a press conference.

>From an interview with Greil Marcus in Rolling Stone, September 2, 1982:

'What actually happened was this: we were in the bar--Bruce Thomas and I were in the bar after the show in Columbus, Ohio. And we very very drunk.
Well, we weren't drunk to begin with--we were reasonably drunk. And we started into what you'd probably call joshing. Gentle gibes between the two camps of the Stills Band and us. It developed as it got drunker and drunker into a nastier and nastier argument. And I suppose that in the drunkenness, my contempt for them was probably exaggerated beyond my real contempt for them. I don't think I had a real opinion. But they just seemed in some way to typify a lot of things that I thought were wrong with
American music. And that's probably quite unfair. But at the exact moment--they did.'

'...What it was about was that I said the most outrageous thing I could possibly say to them--that I knew, in my drunken logic, would anger them more than anything else.'
(contributed by jweikart@utxvms.cc.utexas.edu)

MSNBC - Music legend Ray Charles dies at 73