Ray Charles, the story of a true celebrity

Growing Up Ray Charles

Ray Charles Robinson was not born blind, only poor.

The first child of Aretha and Bailey Robinson was born in Albany, GA, on September 23, 1930.

He hit the road early, at about three months, when the Robinsons moved across the border to Greenville, FL. It was the height of the Depression years. And the Robinsons had started out poor.

"You hear folks talking about being poor," Charles recounted, "Even compared to other blacks ... we were on the bottom of the ladder looking up at everyone else. Nothing below us except the ground."

It took three years, starting when Ray Charles was four, for the country boy who loved to look at the blazing sun at its height, the boy who loved to try to catch lightning, the boy who loved to strike matches to see their fierce, brief glare, to travel the path from light to darkness.

But Ray Charles has almost seven years of sight memory -- colors, the things of backwoods country, and the face of the most important person in his early life: his mother, Aretha Robinson.

St. Augustine's was the Florida state school for the deaf and blind. Ray Charles was accepted as a charity student.

He learned Braille and to type. He became a skilled basket weaver. He was allowed to develop his great gift of music. He discovered mathematics and its correlation to music.

He learned to compose and arrange music in his head, telling out the parts, one by one.

He remained at St. Augustine's until his mother's death, when he set out "on the road again" for the first time as a struggling professional musician.

Ray Charles on the road

Photo: Ray Charles, photo by Mark Hanauer. © 1993 Warner Bros. Records.

Thee road to greatness was no picnic, proverbial or literal for Ray Charles.

In fact, while earning his dues around and about Florida, he almost starved at times, hanging out in various Musician's Locals, picking up gigs when he could.

He began to build himself a solo act, imitating Nat "King" Cole.

When he knew it was time to head on, he asked a friend to find him the farthest point from Florida on a map of the continental U.S. Seattle, WA.

For Ray, in Seattle, he became a minor celebrity in local clubs. There he met an even younger musician, Quincy Jones, whom he took under his wing, marking the beginning of an intertwining of two musical lifetimes.

It was from Seattle that he went to Los Angeles to cut his first professional recording.

And it was in Seattle, with Gossady McGee, that he formed the McSon Trio -- Robin(son) and (Mc)Gee --in 1948, the first black group to have a sponsored TV show in the Pacific Northwest.

Along the way he'd shortened his name in deference to the success of "Sugar" Ray Robinson.

As Ray Charles he toured for about a year with Lowell Rulsom's band. He formed a group and played with singer Ruth Brown. He played the Apollo, the landmark showcase for black talent.

He aspired to Carnegie Hall, then, as now, epitomizing the pinnacle of artistic success.

These were also the years that brought Charles the first band of his own, and his first big hit record, "I Got A Woman."

By the early 1960s, Ray Charles had accomplished his dream. He'd come of age musically. He had become a great musician, posting musical milestones along his route.

He did make it to Carnegie Hall. The hit records ("Georgia," "Born To Lose") successively kept climbing to the top of the charts.

Ray Charles made his first triumphant European concert tour in 1960 (a feat which, except for 1965, he's repeated at least once a year ever since).

He'd treated himself to the formation of his first big band in 1961.

In 1962, together with his long-time friend and personal manager, Joe Adams, he oversaw construction of his own office building and recording studios in Los Angeles, RPM International.

He had taken virtually every form of popular music and broken through its boundaries with such awe inspiring achievements as the LPs "Genius Plus Soul Equals Jazz" and "Modern Sounds in country & Western." Rhythm & blues (or "race music" as it had been called) became universally respectable through his efforts.

Jazz found a mainstream audience it had never previously enjoyed.

And country & western music began to chart an unexpected course to general acceptance, then worldwide popularity.

Along the way, Ray Charles was instrumental in the invention of rock & roll.

In 1966, Thomas Thompson wrote in his profile of Ray Charles for Life:

" ... his niche is difficult to define. The best blues singer around? Of course, but don't stop there. He is also an unparalleled singer of jazz, of gospel, even, unlikely enough, of country and western."

"He has drawn from each of these musical streams and made a river which he alone can navigate."

Segregation and Ray's music

Photo: Ray Charles, in "Ray Charles, 50 Years in Music uh, huh," aired on Fox TV October 6, 1991. Photo by Mark Hanauer. © 1991 Fox Broadcasting Co.

Ray Charles music is still marked by the unpredictability that is the genius of consummate artistry. He is master of his soul, musically and personally. He has taken on George Gershwin ("Porgy And Bess"), Rodgers and Hammerstein ("Some Enchanted Evening," "oh What A Beautiful Morning") and "America The Beautiful" -- all with resounding, if unexpected, success.

As a Southern black, segregation was Ray Charles' dubious birthright. But racial tension and friction were not a part of his early rural years. At St. Augustine's, the rules of segregation were strictly adhered to both for the deaf and the blind children, a fact that even young Ray Charles found ironic.

"I knew being blind was suddenly an aid. I never learned to stop at the skin. If I looked at a man or a woman, I wanted to see inside. Being distracted by shading or coloring is stupid. It gets in the way. It's something I just can't see."

It was on the road in the 1950's that the realities of segregation, its evils, its injustices, even its ludicrous moments, became apparent to Charles and his troupe of traveling musicians.

It was a concert date in Augusta, GA, that brought the issue of segregation vs. civil rights to a head for Ray Charles.

"A promoter insisted that a date we were about to play be segregated: the blacks upstairs and the whites downstairs."

"I told the promoter that I didn't mind segregation, except that he had it backwards ... After all, I was black made sense to have the black folk close to me ... Let him sue. I wasn't going to play. And I didn't. And he sued. And I lost."

This was the incident that propelled Ray Charles into an active role in the quest for racial justice, the development of social consciousness that led him to a friendship with and moral and financial support of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the 1960s.

" ... early on, I decided that if I was going to shoot craps on anyone's philosophy, I was putting my money on Martin Luther King, Jr."

"I figured if I was going to pick up my cross and follow someone, it could only be Martin."

Despite his deep commitment to King and the cause of black Americans, Charles came to the logical conclusion that there was no place for him physically on the front lines:

"First, I wouldn't have known when to duck when they started throwing broken bottles at my head. And I told that to Martin personally."

"When he intentionally broke the law, he was hauled off to jail. And when you go to jail, you need money for lawyers, for legal research, for court fees, for food for the marchers. I saw that as my function; I helped raise money."

His awareness of racial injustice was not limited to the horne front. The same years he fought the war against racial injustice in the American South found in Charles a growing awareness of racial injustice abroad, particularly the notorious policy of apartheid in South Africa.

Modest to the point of mum about his humanitarian and charitable activities, Ray Charles makes an exception for the State Of Israel and world Jewry.

Among the many, the world leader Charles has most enjoyed meeting is David Ben-Gurion, with whom he had a conversation of many hours during a concert tour of Israel not long before Ben-Gurion's death.

And the award among the hundreds he claims to have touched him the most is the Beverly Hills Lodge of the B'Nai Brith's tribute to him as its "Man Of The Year" in 1976.

"Even though I'm not Jewish," he explains, "and even though I'm stingy with my bread, Israel is one of the few causes I feel good about supporting."

"Blacks and Jews are hooked up and bound together by a common history of persecution ..."

"If someone besides a black ever sings the real gut bucket blues, it'll be a Jew. We both know what it's like to be someone else's footstool."

But it all comes back to music, so inseparable from Ray Charles. He keeps rolling along, doing what he does uniquely and wonderously well. Ray Charles is a national treasure and a global phenomenon for this obvious reason: He is music; he is himself; he is a master of his soul.

© 1990 Warner Bros. Records.