Ray Charles Performs At Award Event For Bland & Ertegun (1998)

This pic may be of a later date.

Reuters Television has archived a show biz item from 9 November 1998, covering how Bobby Blue Bland and Ahmet Ertegun received their Lifetime Achievement Awards from The Blues Foundation, in the House Of Blues in LA.

(Coll. Joël Dufour).

Ruth Brown, Quincy Jones And Ray Charles were among those to pay to tribute to Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun. Bobby Bland, Ruth Brown, Boz Skaggs, Stephen Stills and Ray Charles performed live. There was also a B/W montage of Ahmet Ertegun and Ray Charles:

A.E.: We started Atlantic Records with 10,000. And it cost three thousand dollars to buy Ray Charles' contract and I tried to make Ray Charles make records like we were making hits with The Clovers, but that didn't work with Ray Charles. What we told him was not as good as what would happen if we didn't fuck around with him and let him do what he wanted to do, because he got his shit together when he got his own band... 

R.C.: We'd be sitting in the studio playing around and he said to me, Hey listen, what if I put down some words and see what you can do with them. So I said, Alright Ahmet, I'll do that. And this is what he put down and this is what I did with it. [Starts to play Mess Around].

Source here. Another interesting story on the event by the LA Times is here.

Who knows more?