Ray Charles
'I was born with music inside me.' — In his autobiography, Ray Charles said music was a part of his body, like his ribs or his heart.
At a glance 🔭💭
Some coordinates adapted from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) · Pleiades (CC BY 3.0)
The people around him ⏳🌊
- FamilyAretha Robinson
The mother who taught her blind son how to stand on his own, she died when he was fourteen.
- TeacherWiley Pitman
A café owner in Greenville who sat a three-year-old boy at the piano and taught him his first boogie-woogie.
- FriendshipQuincy Jones
A younger musician he met in Seattle, who learned arranging from him and remained a brotherly friend and collaborator for life.
- PatronageAhmet Ertegun
Co-founder of Atlantic Records, who gave him the time to shed his imitations and find his own sound.
- ColleagueMargie Hendrix
Lead vocalist of the Raelettes and his partner onstage, trading lines with him on “Hit the Road Jack” and other songs.
- FriendshipAretha Franklin
The singer who called him onstage to sing with her at the Fillmore West in 1971, and who opened soul’s next generation.
I. The boy from Greenville · 1930–1945
(Birth) In September 1930, Ray Charles Robinson was born in Albany, Georgia. His mother, Aretha Robinson, was still a teenager, and his father, Bailey Robinson, a laborer, was seldom at home. As an infant he followed his mother to Greenville, a small town in northern Florida, and grew up there. His father’s wife, Mary Jane Robinson, also looked after him as if he were her own son. (Piano) Wiley Pitman, owner of the neighborhood café the Red Wing, sat the boy of about three on the piano bench. Pitman played boogie-woogie, and he let the child pound the keys as he pleased while teaching him how to move his hands. The blues pouring from the café jukebox and the hymns of the town church were his first classroom. (Loss) When he was about five, his younger brother George drowned in a washtub. He tried to pull his brother out but was not strong enough. Around that time his sight began to dim, and by seven he had lost it almost completely. The cause is believed to have been glaucoma; for a poor Black family, timely diagnosis and treatment were a distant prospect. (Independence) His mother did not simply shelter her blind son. She made him chop wood and scrub floors on his own, and in 1937 she sent him to the Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind in St. Augustine. In the Black section of that racially segregated school he learned to read music in Braille, played Chopin and Bach, and formed the habit of working out arrangements in his head. (Orphan) His father died when he was about ten, and in 1945, at fourteen, he lost his mother as well. In his autobiography he later named her death the deepest sorrow of his life. That year he left school and resolved to make his own living.
II. The other side of the map · 1945–1952
(Wanderer) He went to Jacksonville, staying in an acquaintance’s home and playing piano in bands at Black theaters and clubs. He then drifted through Orlando and Tampa, and he wrote in his autobiography that when the work dried up he went hungry for days at a time. The small stages of the South were a living for him, not a future. (Seattle) In 1948, at seventeen, he picked the big city farthest from Florida and set out for Seattle. There he formed a trio and played the clubs, singing in a smooth imitation that closely echoed Nat King Cole and Charles Brown. He was adept at giving audiences exactly what they wanted to hear. (Quincy) In Seattle he met Quincy Jones, a trumpet-playing boy three years his junior. He taught Quincy the basics of arranging, and the two remained like brothers all their lives. Decades later, even after becoming a master producer, Quincy still called him his teacher. (Heroin) By his own account in his autobiography, it was around this time that he began using heroin. The habit would follow his life and career for nearly 17 years. (Name) In 1949, “Confession Blues,” recorded for the small Los Angeles label Down Beat, made the R&B chart. To avoid confusion with the boxing champion Sugar Ray Robinson, he dropped his surname and went by Ray Charles. After moving to Los Angeles in 1950, he served as pianist and musical director in blues singer Lowell Fulson’s touring band, learning the work of the road.
III. Between the church and the night stage · 1952–1959
(Atlantic) In 1952, Ahmet Ertegun of Atlantic Records bought out his contract for $2,500. Ertegun and Jerry Wexler gave him time to abandon imitation and find his own sound. “Mess Around,” which Ertegun wrote for him under a pseudonym, was the first step. (New Orleans) In 1953, in New Orleans, he arranged and played piano on Guitar Slim’s recording of “The Things That I Used to Do,” and the song became a major hit. Making someone else’s song a success gave him the confidence to lead a band of his own. (Church) “I Got a Woman,” recorded in November 1954 in an Atlanta radio station studio, set a secular love story to the melody of a gospel hymn. This union, carrying the fervor of the church into the nighttime club, would later come to be called soul. The blues singer Big Bill Broonzy publicly condemned it, saying it was wrong to mix spirituals with the blues. (Family) In 1955 he married Della Bea Howard, a former gospel singer, and they had three sons. He is said to have fathered twelve children in his lifetime. (Raelettes) Margie Hendrix, lead singer of the female vocal group the Raelettes, was his stage partner and his lover. The exchanges they traded on “Night Time Is the Right Time” captured that tension intact. In 1958 his set at the Newport Jazz Festival also won him the recognition of jazz audiences. Late that year, an improvised jam stretched out to fill leftover time at a show became, the following year, “What’d I Say.”
By setting secular love to the melody of gospel praise, this song first broke down the wall between church and club.
- The song’s skeleton comes from the gospel number “It Must Be Jesus.” Listen for the buoyant pulse, like a choir leading a congregation, still fully alive beneath a love song.
- The horn section (a cluster of trumpets and saxophones) of a small band of seven or so players punches out short, heavy stabs that prop up the spaces between the vocal lines. The arrangement is his own.
- Several times the whole band stops dead and only the voice remains (stop time). The cry that bursts into that gap sounds like a preacher reaching his climax.
- The smooth voice that once imitated Nat King Cole is gone, and for the first time a rough, throat-scraping tone comes to the fore.
An improvised jam stretched out to fill leftover time at a show was finished in the studio and became his first pop top 10 hit.
- The riff the electric piano (a Wurlitzer) repeats in its low register at the opening is the engine of the entire song. Listen closely to the shimmering tone of an instrument rarely heard in the R&B of the day.
- The drums mix in staggered rhythms that seem borrowed from Latin music. Atop a simple twelve-bar blues frame, the groove keeps surging forward.
- The song was split across the two sides of a single. At the end of Part 1 the band stops and it seems to be over, but in Part 2 the call-and-response erupts as the Raelettes answer his cries with moaning replies.
- Some radio stations refused to air it, judging this exchange too sensual. The controversy itself became part of the song’s legend.
IV. The genius contract · 1959–1964
(Negotiation) In 1959 he left Atlantic and signed with ABC-Paramount. Besides a high royalty rate, the deal included a clause returning ownership of the original recordings (the masters) to him after a set period. It was a term almost without precedent for a Black musician at the time, and he made it an asset for the rest of his life. (Georgia) In 1960, “Georgia on My Mind,” arranged with strings by Ralph Burns for the album “The Genius Hits the Road,” a collection of songs named for places across America, reached No. 1 on the Billboard chart. Sung thirty years after he had left his native Georgia, the song carved his name across all of popular music. (Refusal) In March 1961, ahead of a concert in Augusta, Georgia, he learned from students’ letters that Black audience members would be seated separately, and he canceled the show. The promoter sued him for breach of contract, and he paid damages. That same year he returned to No. 1 trading lines with Margie Hendrix on Percy Mayfield’s “Hit the Road Jack.” (Country) In 1962 he set out to sing country, a genre regarded as white music. Executives feared he would lose his Black audience, but “Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music” — with songs chosen by producer Sid Feller, strings arranged by Marty Paich, and big band charts by Gerald Wilson — held No. 1 on the album chart for 14 weeks. “I Can’t Stop Loving You” was at its heart. (Ownership) He founded his own label, Tangerine, and in 1964 built his RPM studio headquarters in Los Angeles. Around the same time, Motown’s twelve-year-old Stevie Wonder released an album dedicated to him, “Tribute to Uncle Ray.” His was already a name the next generation looked up to.
A song bearing the name of the home state he left as a child, it became his first Billboard No. 1 and later Georgia’s state song.
- Once the piano introduction ends, Ralph Burns’s arrangement of strings and chorus spreads out broadly beneath. At the time, an R&B singer clothed in such lush string accompaniment was a novelty in itself.
- The first phrase is low and restrained, almost a whisper. Follow how the voice cracks and climbs as the song goes on.
- Toward the end of the song, melisma — stretching a single syllable over many winding notes — grows more frequent. It sounds like longing held back and then seeping out.
- His 1979 performance of this song at the Georgia State Capitol is remembered as a reconciliation between the state and the man who had refused segregated seating.
The whole song is a quarrel-like exchange with Margie Hendricks, his partner on stage and his lover off it.
- A four-note bass line, stepping down one stair at a time, repeats from beginning to end. It is a simple frame, but once heard it is never forgotten.
- The song is built as a dialogue between a woman telling a man to leave and a man who refuses to go. Margie Hendricks's sharp, unyielding voice collides head-on with his sly protests.
- The Raelettes' short chorus keeps pressing with the same words again and again, so the tension never lets up even across a little over two minutes.
- The songwriter, Percy Mayfield, was a blues singer. Listen for how a story that was probably once a lonely blues became, in his hands, a humorous farce.
Wrapping a song by country singer Don Gibson in strings and choir, he answered the doubts about a Black singer taking on country with a No. 1 hit.
- The song opens with the choir. The choir sings a line and he answers it — a church-style call and response transplanted onto a country ballad.
- Marty Paich's string arrangement flows wide and soft. The plain country original has been dressed in finery worthy of a Hollywood film score.
- His voice never hurries, right to the end. Each time he repeats the same confession, his tone roughens a little more and the feeling grows deeper.
- At the close, the choir and he fade together as if vanishing, in a long, drawn-out ending.
V. Breaking the chains · 1964–1979
(Arrest) In October 1964 he was arrested at Boston's airport for possession of heroin. It was the third time, after Philadelphia in 1958 and Indianapolis in 1961, and this time a prison sentence would be hard to avoid. Looking back in his autobiography, he said he had wanted to be able to stand tall before his children. (Treatment) In 1965 he stopped touring for a year and entered St. Francis Hospital in Lynwood, near Los Angeles, where he was treated by the psychiatrist Frederick Hacker. He endured withdrawal without drugs and never used heroin again. The court sentenced him to probation. (Return) In the same period, “Crying Time,” his take on a song by country singer Buck Owens, came out at the end of 1965 and won two Grammys. The song of parting sounded all the heavier joined to his weary voice. With manager Joe Adams keeping a strict hand on the finances, his organization grew solid. (Conviction) He supported Martin Luther King Jr.'s civil rights movement. Unable to see, he said, he found it hard to march, so he lent his strength through money and concerts. On his 1972 album “A Message from the People,” he placed the hymn known as the Black national anthem side by side with “America the Beautiful,” singing of a country he held with both criticism and affection. (Peers) In 1971, at the Fillmore West in San Francisco, Aretha Franklin called him up from the audience to the stage, and they sang “Spirit in the Dark” together. In 1973 he left ABC and founded Crossover Records. In 1977 he divorced Della Bea, and the following year he published his autobiography, “Brother Ray,” written with David Ritz. In 1979 the Georgia legislature named “Georgia on My Mind” the state song, and he sang it at the Capitol.
A song of parting released while he was quitting heroin and undergoing treatment, it brought him two Grammys and announced his return.
- To Buck Owens's country original he added strings and the Raelettes' chorus. Listen to how the plain country melody became a soul ballad in his hands.
- By this time his voice is lower, almost hoarse. The weary tone meshes with the song's resigned mood.
- The Raelettes' long-held harmonies lie beneath like a sigh, supporting his monologue-like singing.
- The song never builds to a big climax and ends with quiet composure. It is a design in which restraint only deepens the sorrow.
A supporter of the civil rights movement, he placed it on an album carrying a social message and sang the patriotic hymn anew as a song of the Black church.
- He begins the song not with the familiar first verse but with a different one. That is why the well-known hymn sounds different from the very start.
- Between the lines there are passages he adds as if speaking, like a preacher. The way a minister rouses the congregation in a gospel service has been carried over intact.
- Piano and choir build layer by layer until the song swells mightily in its second half. The march-like original has been turned into the climactic structure of church praise.
- In the decades that followed, his performances of this song at sporting events and national occasions were talked about again and again.
VI. The tour that never ended · 1980–2004
(Rediscovery) In 1980 he appeared in the film “The Blues Brothers” as the owner of a music store, reintroducing himself to young audiences. The next year he performed in apartheid-era South Africa and was criticized for breaking the international cultural boycott. (Country) In the 1980s at Columbia he released one country album after another. In 1984 “Seven Spanish Angels,” sung with Willie Nelson on the duet album “Friendship,” reached No. 1 on the country chart. In 1985 he added his voice to “We Are the World” alongside Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross and others. (Honors) In 1986 he was among the first inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and received the Kennedy Center Honors. That same year Billy Joel recorded “Baby Grand,” which he had written for him, as a duet with him. In 1990 he won a Grammy for Quincy Jones's “I'll Be Good to You,” and in 1991 a soft-drink commercial made his a familiar face to a new generation. (Farewell) Even past seventy he toured every year. In 2003 hip surgery forced him to cancel dates for the first time, and his liver disease worsened. In April 2004 he attended the ceremony designating RPM Studios a Los Angeles historic landmark — his last public appearance. On June 10 of that year he died at his home in Beverly Hills, at seventy-three. (Legacy) “Genius Loves Company,” a duet album released that August with Norah Jones, Elton John and others, won eight Grammys the following year, including Album of the Year. The film “Ray,” with Jamie Foxx playing him, was released the same year. He left most of his estate to the Ray Charles Foundation, which supports research and education for the hearing-impaired.
His long love of country bore fruit in a duet with Willie Nelson that reached No. 1 on the country chart.
- It is a Western ballad telling the tragedy of lovers on the run. The two singers divide the story between them, and it unfolds like a short film.
- Willie Nelson's thin, dry voice alternates with his thick, hoarse one. Their tones are complete opposites, so each one's lines stand clearly apart.
- The blend is most beautiful when the two voices overlap in the chorus — the moment two singers from different traditions are bound in a single harmony.
- Unlike the lavish string-laden country of the 1960s, here his voice sounds rawer over the accompaniment of a plain country band.
Lesser-known stories
One widely circulated story holds that after he canceled a 1961 concert in Augusta, the state of Georgia banished him, and that the state later apologized officially. The film “Ray” dramatized this plot as well. What the record confirms, however, is that the concert promoter sued him for breach of contract and he paid damages; no state-level ban on his entry has been verified. The legislature's 1979 resolution designated the song as the state song. It is a case of a dramatic narrative being remembered longer than the facts. He learned Braille notation, but he usually completed his arrangements for large ensembles in his head, without a piano, calling out the notes for each part while a copyist wrote them down. In the 1950s he also played alto saxophone himself on some recordings and in some performances. These are details seldom mentioned, overshadowed by the fame of his piano and his voice. During his treatment in 1965 he learned chess, and he enjoyed it all his life on a special board that let him tell the pieces apart by touch. He is said to have carried the board with him even on tour. Regarded as a trivial offstage hobby, it has stayed in the footnotes of his biographies, but as a habit acquired in the period when he broke his addiction, it is also a small piece that shows his recovery.
Glossary 📚🔎
Rhythm and blues (R&B)
(Meaning) A term joining rhythm and blues. It came into wide use in 1949, when the American music magazine Billboard renamed its chart for Black music with this term in place of the old name, which had branded it by race. Jerry Wexler, then a reporter at Billboard, is said to have proposed the name. (In pop) Popular music made by Black American musicians in the 1940s and ’50s by adding a strong sense of beat and danceable rhythms to the blues. Ray Charles opened a new path by mixing in the fervor of church music. Just as your feet jump on their own without thinking once the beat settles into your body while skipping rope, R&B is music that makes the body respond before the mind.
Gospel
(Meaning) The English word gospel comes from the Old English godspel, meaning good (god) news (spel). It is the same word as bogeum (福音, 'good news'), which in Christianity refers to the teachings of Jesus. (In pop) The music of praise sung in Black American churches. The singer raises the emotion to its peak, and the congregation claps and answers back aloud, building the fervor together. It is much like a school sports day, when the head cheerleader leads a chant and the whole class shouts it back, the mood growing hotter and hotter. Ray Charles carried the melodies and vocal style of gospel straight into love songs.
Soul
(Meaning) The English word soul means the spirit, the deepest part of the heart. The name carries the idea of music that pours out the feelings inside without any outward polish. (In pop) A music born from the late 1950s onward, when the fervent vocal style of gospel merged with the rhythms of R&B. Singers such as Ray Charles, Sam Cooke and Aretha Franklin opened the way. Think of it as singing about love and parting in the voice once used for praise in church. Just as your voice trembles on its own when you sincerely apologize to a friend, soul uses even the tremor and roughness of the voice as part of the emotion. (Elsewhere) As in 'soul food,' the word is also used for the food and everyday culture of the African American community as a whole.
Call and response
(Meaning) A combination of calling (call) and answering (response). It takes its name directly from the practice of one person calling out and others taking it up in reply. (In pop) A song structure in which the lead singer sings a phrase and the chorus or instruments pick it up as if answering. It is a tradition carried down from African music and Black church worship. Picture a classroom where the teacher asks, 'Got it?' and the whole class answers, 'Yes!' The passage in "What'd I Say" where the Raelettes answer Ray Charles's cries is a classic example.
Master (original recording rights)
(Meaning) The English word master means an owner, but also the original from which all copies are made. The record industry uses it in the second sense. (In pop) The first original recording made in the studio is called the master, and whoever holds it grants permission, for a fee, to press records or to use it in broadcasting and advertising. Because record companies usually held it, Ray Charles's 1959 contract, under which his masters would revert to him after a set period, was highly unusual. It is like a drawing of yours: classmates may copy it, but only the person who holds the original can decide whether it goes into an exhibition. (Elsewhere) Master is also commonly used for a graduate master's degree, or for someone who has fully mastered a field.
Crossover
(Meaning) The English cross over means to go across, to pass over. (In pop) It refers to a musician or song that has won popularity in one genre or with one audience extending that success to another genre and another audience. Moving from the Black music charts to the pop charts heard by white listeners, or from R&B to country, are examples. Like a friend famous on the soccer team who also wins the basketball tournament, it means going beyond one's original stage and earning recognition on another. Ray Charles went so far as to name his own label Crossover. (Elsewhere) In basketball, it refers to a dribbling move in which the ball is switched quickly from one hand to the other to shake off a defender.
Boogie-woogie
(In pop) A blues piano style favored by African American pianists in the 1920s through the 40s. The left hand plays a fast, rolling repeated figure in the low register without pause, while the right hand freely lays short melodies over it. Since the left hand must roll on steadily like the wheels of a train, the two hands have to do different things at once, as if bouncing a ball steadily with one hand while making some other motion with the other. This was the piano Ray Charles first learned, at around age three, in a café in Greenville.