Ray Charles was one of American music?s great innovators, blending the gospel of the black church with the sensuality of the blues to create an emotionally raw genre called soul.

He died on Thursday morning at his home in Beverly Hills, California at age 73 after a long battle with liver disease.

«The only genius in the business,» Frank Sinatra once said of Charles.

Charles? response: «(Jazz pianist) Art Tatum, he was a genius, and Einstein. Not me.»

Whether singing the blues or playing jazz, crooning a ballad or yodeling country and western, Charles combined the raw emotions of black gospel with the sophistication of classical training.

Blind since the age of six, Charles battled childhood poverty and later heroin addiction to become one of the world?s most enduring performers.

Drawing on influences as diverse as Chopin and Sibelius, Tatum, Artie Shaw and Nat «King» Cole, Ray Charles helped revolutionize popular music in the 1950s, leading the way for such performers as Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry and Sam Cooke and what was to become rock ?n? roll. His I Got A Woman, is widely considered to be the key that opened the door for a crossover of the black musical heritage into the white American musical mainstream. By taking the traditional gospel My Jesus Is All The World To Me, and adding secular lyrics, Charles came up with a song that, though not a chart hit, was popular on both sides of the racial divide in 1954.

«For blacks it served as unabashed celebration of negritude without religion; to whites it opened doors that had always been shut,» said Peter Guralnick, a music writer and historian.

«I got a lot of flak because some people felt it was like an abomination of the church. But then people began to realize ...?The man is just singing what he feels. He?s got to sing it the way he feel it.? That was when I gave up trying to sound like anyone else,» Charles once told an interviewer. He was calling his style «soul music» then ? a decade before it was recognized as a distinct genre.

<B> BIG BREAK </B>

Born Ray Charles Robinson on September 23, 1930 in Albany, Georgia, he was raised in Greenville, Florida, by his mother and his father?s first wife. His mother took in laundry to make ends meet and at the age of 5 he watched powerless as his older brother drowned in a tub. The next year, he lost his sight to glaucoma.

When he was seven, his mother enrolled him in St. Augustine?s School for the Deaf and Blind, where he learned to read and write music in Braille, score for big bands, and play the piano, alto sax, organ, trumpet and clarinet. Devastated at age 15 by the death of his mother, he quit school, heading for Jacksonville and a career in music. Two years later after playing with a jazz band and a hillbilly group called the Florida Playboys, Ray Charles took his savings of $600 and went to Seattle. There he changed his name to Ray Charles ? to avoid confusion with the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson ? made his first record (Confession Blues ? 1948) and got hooked on heroin.

«I did it to myself. It wasn?t society ... it wasn?t a pusher, it wasn?t being blind or black or being poor. It was all my doing,» he wrote in his autobiography «Brother Ray.» He had several rhythm and blues hits over the next four years and learned the business. «He was like 40 years old,» said a young Quincy Jones, who met Charles in Seattle. «He knew everything. He knew about ladies and music and life, because he was so independent.» His big break came in 1952 when Atlantic Records signed him to a contract and he recorded I Got A Woman. The song wasn?t an immediate hit, but Charles had his fair share of chart success in the years that followed. Another gospel song This Little Light Of Mine, became This Little Girl Of Mine, and Charles introduced a female vocal group, the Raelettes, who backed him up almost like a choir.

Between 1954 and 1959, Charles had a string of hits ? Yes, Indeed, Hallelujah, I Love Her So, Drown In My Own Tears, and Night Time Is The Right Time, before he recorded his first million-seller What?d I Say? ? which was banned on radio stations across America but still became a hit. Changing labels from Atlantic to ABC at age 29 in 1959, Charles then recorded more sentimental songs such as Ruby and Georgia On My Mind, but still had hard-edged R&B hits like Hit the Road, Jack and Let?s Go Get Stoned.

In 1986, Ray Charles was honored by President Ronald Reagan as one of the recipients of the Kennedy Center Awards, given for outstanding contributions to the performing arts in America.

Yet, he considered one of his greatest honors having the Georgia legislature adopt Georgia On My Mind as the official state song.

Charles had at least nine children with five different women. His 20-year marriage to Della, one of his original Raelettes, ended in divorce in 1977.