Ray Charles
Brother Ray” Charles, the genius pianist, singer, composer, and bandleader who left an indelible imprint on music, was born Ray Charles Robinson on September 23, 1930, in Albany, Georgia. His father, Bailey Robinson, pieced together what income he could as a railroad repairman, a mechanic, and a handyman, while his mother, Aretha Williams, worked at a local sawmill. Ray was still an infant when the family moved to Greenville, Florida.
The Robinsons were poor, even compared to other black families in the South during the Great Depression, and they were also given more than their share of tragedy early in Ray’s life. He was only five when he saw his four-year-old brother, George, drown in a washtub. And he was only seven when, possibly due to glaucoma or an untreated infection, his failing eyesight deteriorated to total blindness.
With Aretha’s support, he quickly learned to be capable and independent rather than disabled, and he was promptly enrolled in the Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind in St. Augustine, which he attended from the age of seven until he was fifteen. It was there that his musical gifts were nourished. He was taught composing and reading in Braille. He learned to play the piano, the saxophone, and every other instrument the school had to offer. His young life revolved around studying, practicing, and exploring all the music that moved him, from jazz and the blues to country and gospel.
Ray’s mother died in 1945, when he was fifteen. He left school and moved to Jacksonville, where he played piano at the Ritz Theater for over a year before heading on to Orlando, then Tampa, and finally Seattle in 1947. In Seattle, in addition to meeting his lifelong friend and frequent collaborator Quincy Jones, he started recording for the Down Beat label, forming the Maxin Trio with guitarist G. D. McKee and bassist Milton Garrett, and in 1949 their “Confession Blues” reached number two on the R&B charts. Calling himself Ray Charles for the first time, he then joined Swing Time Records and recorded two more hits, which led to a contract with Atlantic Records. His first major hit singles were recorded for Atlantic, including 1954’s “I Got a Woman,” which he wrote with Renald Richard.
From 1955 until 1959 he had an amazing string of R&B hit singles and albums, with a girl group he recruited and named the Raelettes singing back-up on such classics as “A Fool for You,” “Drown in My Own Tears,” and “The Night Time (Is the Right Time).” In 1959 he achieved his first “crossover” hit when “What’d I Say” reached number one on the R&B charts, but soared into the top ten on the pop music charts as well. He continued his crossover success when he signed with ABC Records in 1960, releasing hit after hit with such legendary recordings as “Georgia on My Mind,” “Hit the Road, Jack,” and “Unchain My Heart.”
In 1962 Ray crossed over again and helped popularize country music among mainstream listeners with a two-album series called Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music. Its first single, a spectacular arrangement of Don Gibson’s “I Can’t Stop Loving You,” not only achieved the number-one spot on both the pop and R&B charts in America, but it also became the number-one record in England.
The “British Invasion,” as the 1964 arrival of the Beatles and a stream of other bands from England has come to be known, seriously disrupted the momentum of a lot of American recording artists for several years, and Ray was among them, with a long string of only moderately successful releases through the late 1960s and well into the 1970s. He recorded a breathtaking signature version of “America the Beautiful” in 1972, popularizing the beloved national standard when it was broadcast internationally at the 1980 Olympics. In 1979, Ray Charles’s recording of “Georgia on My Mind” was officially proclaimed the state song of Georgia. And in 1985 he was a featured part of an all-star chorus who performed the Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie song “We Are the World” for the USA for Africa charity. He performed at the inaugurations of Ronald Reagan in 1985 and Bill Clinton in 1993, kicking off more than a decade of television and worldwide appearances from Venezuela to France to Italy. And between the years of 1981 and 2004 he received, among other honors, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame; induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Rhythm and Blues Foundation, and the Jazz Hall of Fame; the Kennedy Center Honor and a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, all in addition to the seventeen Grammy Awards he won throughout his career, five of them presented posthumously.
Everyone he worked with would agree that perfectionism drove every note of every Ray Charles recording session, to the point where he literally let nothing stand in his way. Singer, songwriter, and producer Billy Vera tells the story of delivering the twenty-four-track tape of a $10,000 instrumental session to Ray’s Los Angeles studio for Ray to add his vocals. Ray listened and liked what he heard for the most part, but he was sure the saxophone solo should happen eight bars later than it was recorded. While Billy watched in amazement, Ray threaded the tape and cued up the solo. And then, in Billy’s words, “I see this blind man take a razor blade to a $10,000 recording, splice in the solo where he thinks it belongs, and sure enough, he was right, it was perfect. And believe me, we all knew Ray too well to try to stop him.”
Behind the scenes, Ray Charles’s life was as dramatic as his genius. There were two marriages, first to Eileen Williams from 1951 to 1952 and then to Della Howard from 1955 to 1977. From 1950 through 1987 he fathered twelve children by nine different women, including three by his wife Della. It’s said that at a family lunch in 2002, Ray presented each of his children with a tax-free check for $1 million.
In 1965 Ray was arrested for a third time for heroin possession. He’d reportedly been addicted to heroin since the mid to late
1950s, and in lieu of serving jail time after the arrest, he checked himself into a rehab clinic in Los Angeles and, by all accounts, emerged free of his addiction. It was during his year on parole in 1966 that his hit single “Cryin’ Time” was released.
On April 30, 2004, Ray made his final public appearance, when he was honored by having his Los Angeles music studio dedicated as a historic landmark. Less than two months later, on June 10, 2004, at 11:35 a.m., Ray Charles died of liver cancer at his Beverly Hills, California, home, surrounded by family and friends, including his longtime partner Norma Pinella. His body was interred in the Inglewood Park Cemetery in Inglewood, California. At the time of his death he was survived by his twelve children, twenty-one grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren.
From Francine
Ray regained his eyesight the instant he entered the tunnel, and a huge crowd gathered to greet him when he arrived Home, led by his brother, George, and his mother. It was an especially ecstatic reunion—imagine your first sights after decades of blindness being faces you’ve longed to see, with the exquisite beauty of Home all around you. And everyone who witnessed it commented on the fact that Ray’s tears when he arrived were tears of pure joy, devoid of surprise or relief. While he never made an issue of his faith throughout his lifetime, he always knew with unwavering certainty where he was going when his body died and how much he had to look forward to when he resumed his life on the Other Side. He says it was that certainty that allowed him to make the most of his time on earth. Never fearing what came next, he was able to focus on every moment he lived, often to the point of indulgence, willfulness, and potential self-destruction, he admits, but he’s unique in having returned Home with no feeling of having left unfinished business behind.
It was during his time at the Scanning Machine that he recalled all his past lives, both here and on earth, with complete clarity and recognized the extent to which music has always been essential to his spirit; he spent three incarnations as a classical composer and musician and one as an accomplished opera singer in Prague. His lifetime as Ray Charles was his way of influencing other musicians, present and future, as so many historically influenced him along the path of his soul, filling him so completely with creativity, freedom, innovation, passion, and discipline that not even the onset of blindness would discourage him.
He performs here at Home in thrilling concerts with other singers and musicians who are old friends from here and from past incarnations. He continues to “pay it forward,” as you put it, by being one of our most prolific composers. He’s begun infusing his compositions to a young boy, a musical prodigy. The boy is currently eleven years old, his first or last name is Martin, and he lives in the Macon, Georgia, area. He’s already being recognized for his talent as a singer and guitarist. By the time he’s in his mid-teens he’ll be writing “Ray Charles songs” without knowing where they came from, and four of those songs will be successfully recorded by the time he’s twenty-five.
Ray is involved in developing something to do with advancements in computer software that involve composing and transcribing music in Braille, and he is also part of a team of researchers who are exploring the use of stem cells in reversing blindness and diseases of the eye. His primary residence is on the cliffs above what corresponds to the place on earth you call Big Sur. He is always surrounded by a large group of friends with whom he loves playing music, chess, and soccer.
His greatest regret is that he didn’t say “no” more often, particularly when it came to heroin. He remembers that when he got involved with drugs, he thought he was simply indulging in the freedom of being able to do anything he pleased, but now he looks back at his addiction as “just another form of slavery.”
And he wants Willie Nelson to know that he never heard “Georgia on My Mind” “sung prettier” than when Willie sang it at his memorial service. His incarnation as Ray Charles will be his last.
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