It barely cracked the R&B chart in 1972. Now it plays at every Super Bowl.

As the tributes of the past two weeks have reminded us, Ray Charles could make any song, in any genre, his own -- even the white-bread 19th-Century hymn ''America the Beautiful," one of Charles's most ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. The melody was older. Church organist Samuel A. Ward had written it in 1882 on a ferry ride home from Coney Island, originally to ...

Katharine Lee Bates, an English professor at Wellesley College, wrote the lyrics as a poem in 1893 after a train trip to Colorado Springs. The view from atop Pikes Peak gave her the line "purple ...