Rock Through the Ages: Ray Charles 1930-2004
"In music you just can't escape when something is beautiful, like a
good song, you can't get away from a good song. You have a good song,
and it will still be beautiful, even when somebody with a bad voice
sings it. I love the old writers, who wrote beautiful love songs. I came
up on those kinds of songs. But I have just as much love for blues and
jazz too". -Ray Charles From
country to blues to jazz to R&B and even funk, Ray Charles has set the
aesthetic standard for more than five decades, earning plaudits across
the globe and setting standards that his legion of fans, in and out of
the entertainment industry, aspire to. He was an American pianist,
singer, and songwriter who shaped the sound of rhythm and blues. Ray
Charles crossed countless perceived musical boundaries throughout his
career and was known since the 1950s as "The Genius." Charles was
credited with the early development of soul music, a style based on a
melding of gospel, rhythm and blues, and jazz music. It is music, Ray
Charles' single driving force, that catapulted a poor, black, blind,
orphaned teenager from there to here."I was born with music inside me.
That's the only explanation I know of..." he remarks in his
autobiography. "Music was one of my parts... Like my blood. It was a
force already with me when I arrived on the scene. It was a necessity
for me - like food or water.""Music is nothing separate from me. It is
me... You'd have to remove the music surgically." Ray Charles Robinson was not born blind, only poor. Ray Charles Robinson was born Sept. 23, 1930, in Albany, Georgia. His father, Bailey Robinson, was a mechanic and a handyman, and his mother, Aretha, stacked boards in a sawmill. His family moved to Greenville, Florida, when Charles was an infant. Charles recalled how poor his family was in his 1978 autobiography, "Brother Ray": "Even compared to other blacks...we were on the bottom of the ladder looking up at everyone else. Nothing below us except the ground.'' At just five years old Charles had to endure the trauma of witnessing the drowning death of his younger brother in his mother's large portable laundry tub. Soon after the death of his brother he gradually began to lose his sight and by 7 years of age Ray Charles was blind. Although it is presumed that untreated glaucoma was the cause, no official diagnosis was ever made. His mother refused to let him wallow in self-pity however and since the sight loss was gradual, she began to work with him on how to find things and do things for himself. Ray Charles was accepted as a charity student at St. Augustine's school for the deaf and blind, where he learned to read Braille and to type. Having started to play the piano at five, Ray was allowed to further develop his great gift of music at the school, learning alto saxophone, clarinet, trumpet, and organ. "When I started to sing like myself - as opposed to imitating Nat Cole, which I had done for a while - when I started singing like Ray Charles, it had this spiritual and churchy, this religious or gospel sound. It had this holiness and preachy tone to it. It was very controversial. I got a lot of criticism for it." Ray Charles, whose father had passed away when he was ten, lost his mother to cancer when he was 15 and left the St. Augustine school to try and make a living as a musician. It was in Seattle's red light district at just 16 where Ray Charles met a young Quincy Jones only 14 himself. He taught the future producer and composer how to write music and arrange. It was a friendship that lasted a lifetime with the two working on many sessions together later in their careers. Ray Charles Robinson dropped his last name to avoid confusion with boxer Sugar Ray Robinson and patterned himself in his early career after Nat "King" Cole. In Seattle, Charles formed the McSon Trio, with Gossady McGee, in 1948, the first black group to have a sponsored TV show in the Pacific Northwest. It was from Seattle that he went to Los Angeles to cut his first professional recording. In 1952, Atlantic Records signed him to a contract although his first recordings with the label were not made until May of the next year. Charles recorded the boogie-woogie classic “Mess Around” and the novelty song “It Should've Been Me” in 1952–53. His arrangement for Guitar Slim's “The Things That I Used to Do” became a blues million-seller in 1953. By 1954 Charles had created a successful combination of blues and gospel influences. Propelled by Charles's distinctive raspy voice, “I've Got a Woman” and “Hallelujah I Love You So” became hit records. “What'd I Say” led the rhythm and blues sales charts in 1959 and was Charles's own first million-seller. Charles reworded the gospel tune "Jesus is all the World to Me", adding deep church inflections to the secular rhythms of the nightclubs, and the world was never the same. That song is widely credited as being the first true "soul" record. "You can't run away from yourself," Charles once said. "What you are inside is what you are inside. I was raised in the church and was around blues and would hear all these musicians on the jukeboxes and then I would go to revival meetings on Sunday morning. So I would get both sides of music. A lot of people at the time thought it was sacrilegious but all I was doing was singing the way I felt."  From
1955 Ray Charles toured extensively in the United States and elsewhere
with his own big band and a gospel-style female backup quartet called
The Raeletts. Charles's rhythmic piano playing and band arranging
revived the “funky” quality of jazz, but he also recorded in many other
musical genres. He entered the pop market with the best-sellers “Georgia
on My Mind” (1960) and “Hit the Road, Jack” (1961). His album
Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music (1962) sold
more than 1,000,000 copies, as did its single, “I Can't Stop Loving
You.” Thereafter his music emphasized jazz standards and renditions of
pop and show tunes. In 1965 Charles was arrested for possession of
heroin and revealed that he had been using it since he was 16. He
cleaned up in a California sanatorium and spent a year away from
performing. In 1966 he made his motion-picture debut in Ballad in
Blue (also known as Blues for Lovers). In it, Ray Charles
(playing himself) befriends a blind boy in London; he also performed two
of his best-known songs, "What'd I Say" and "I Got a Woman." Throughout
his career, Charles was active in a range of political and humanitarian
causes. He provided financial support for the Reverend Martin Luther
King Jr. and the civil rights movement; he was also a staunch supporter
of Israel. In 1984 he performed his version of "America the Beautiful"
at the Republican National Convention. Three years later, Ray Charles
formed the (Ray Charles) Robinson Foundation for Hearing Disorders, with
a $1 million personal endowment. On June 10th, 2004 Ray Charles passed
away from liver disease two months before the release of his final album
Genuis Loves Company. Everyone remembers Charles singing "Georgia"
"Born To Lose", "Hit the Road Jack, "I Can't Stop Loving You." Or, the
Beatles' "Eleanor Rugby" and "Yesterday." Even more remember his epochal
rendition of "America the Beautiful." During a career that has spanned
some 58 years, Charles starred on over 250 albums, many of them top
sellers in a variety of musical genres. Ray Charles appeared in movies,
such as "The Blues Brothers," and on television, and starred in
commercials for Pepsi and California Raisins, among numerous others.
Blessed with one of the 20th century's most advanced musical minds,
Charles became an American cultural icon decades ago. |
