Forget solemnity. Forget silence. If it were up to me, I’d honor Ray Charles with a good old New Orleans Jazz Funeral.

I never met Ray Charles. But I got the chance to step into his Los Angeles recording studio a year ago, thanks to a collaboration between Taylor Hackford and The Man himself.

We wrapped up production on Taylor’s feature film about Ray’s life on a glorious June morning. As the camera panned across walls… covered with every imaginable award I was struck by the ordinary appearance of the studio. If I hadn’t known better, I might have assumed this room had housed an insurance office, with clerks making minimum wage, dreaming of weekends off and backyard football parties. How could such ordinary walls have anything to do with the musical miracle we knew as Ray Charles? It’s a tribute to Ray that I forgot, for a time, that for him sound and feel were more important than sight.

Ray was older and wiser than his years,” Quincy Jones has said. “He was one of my gurus. He taught me how to arrange, how to voice horns and reeds. He was this amazing spirit — strong, brilliant, and completely open-minded. At a time when you were either in this camp or that camp, either a bebopper or a bluesman or whatever, Ray was in every camp. ‘It’s all music, man,’ he’d say. ‘We can play it all.’ And we did.”

Given the opportunity to talk about Ray, people first mention his genius and his open-mindedness. His impact on the face of music is so strong that it’s impossible to imagine what music today would be like without his voice and work. Though he began as a Nat King Cole stylist, he decided early on in his career to let his natural style lead the direction of his music:

“ …I started sounding like myself [with the song ‘I got a woman’]. All I was doing was just being natural. Before that I was trying my best to sound like Nat King Cole. I slept Nat King Cole. I ate Nat King Cole. I drank Nat King Cole. I was pretty good at it, too. Everybody was like, ‘Hey, kid, you sound just like Nat King Cole!’ That’s what stopped me. That word, ‘kid.’ Nobody knew my name. I woke up one morning and said, ‘This has got to stop. Remember what your mom told you. You got to be yourself. You got to stop this. Because you’re not doing nothing for yourself.’ So I said, ‘OK, I’m going to sing naturally.’ You dare to be different. It wasn’t like, ‘Now I am going to take country and western and put it with this or I am going to take jazz and put it with that.’ All I said was I’m going to be myself and sing the way I feel. That’s it.”

No matter how many genres he crossed, the results are unmistakably Ray.

As well known for his willingness to risk his career for his beliefs, he was famous for protesting segregation laws at his performances:

“The main problem I had once white people started coming to my concerts is that they would make the black people go upstairs. Then I wouldn’t do the concert and I’d get sued. Naturally, I lost. I’d say, ‘Look, I don’t mind playing my music for anybody, but I’m not going to play and have my people who made what I am sit upstairs.’ So I got sued a lot.”

Neither did he allow music executives’ preconceptions to limit his vision:

“I got a lot of criticism. But my mom always had this thing about being yourself. I was successful being myself so why should I worry about somebody who don’t like it? When I did the first country album, ABC said ‘You’re going to lose a lot of fans, Ray. You’re really a blues artist.’ I said, ‘I think you’re probably right, but my feeling is if I do this right, I’ll gain more fans than I lose.’ As it turned out, I was lucky. I was right again. You got to always focus on what you’re doing. You can’t let yourself slip into what other people want.”

For Ray, music came first. No obstacle could come between him and the music. True to character, in an interview with VH1, he didn’t lament the days of segregation, he praised music instead: “The only thing I can say about that time in my life is thank God for music. If music hadn’t been there to help me through all of this, I wouldn’t have made it.”

In conversations about him, the obstacles Ray overcame are rarely mentioned. He had three points against him, as far as identity and culture are concerned: extreme poverty, blindness, and blackness in the segregated South where he grew up. Ray Charles transcended them all. Maybe his legacy, in addition to his music, shows us that it’s not which identity or which culture we begin with that determines our future. Rather, these elements are only tools we are given to forge something brilliant in the world that will elevate our own life and the lives of others.

In his piece, “A Meeting with the Man,” Dave Alvin provides a little consolation for those of us who never met him, as he recalls his own brush with Brother Ray:

“I rode in a freight elevator once with Ray Charles. …Awestruck, I stood staring at Ray, who was smiling and softly humming a melody to himself. I tried to think of something original to say, but what could I possibly tell him that he’d never heard before? ‘Gee, Mister Charles, I’m your biggest fan!’ or ‘Hey, Brother Ray, what’s shakin’ baby?’ I don’t think so…

“Did Ray Charles really need some stranger in an elevator telling him how much of a revolutionary he’s been in a country so musically, culturally, and racially segregated? Or how his music represents everything many of us believe America is ideally supposed to be: open-minded, compassionate, independent, adventurous — willing to explore the new without discarding what was good in the old. I just kept my mouth shut and listened to Ray’s humming.”

A genius has left us. And, as Samirah Evans put it so well on her Bluesy Blues Show this afternoon on WWOZ, how fortunate we are that he left us so much of his music and his inimitable voice. That extraordinary gift of music he gave the world is powerful enough to turn our remembrances of Ray into a celebration of life.