"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![]() 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." ![]() |