Charles, Ray

(b. 23 September 1930 in Albany, Georgia; d. 10 June 2004 in Beverly Hills, California), popular singer, pianist, and recording artist who blended many styles of American music into his own unique “soul music.”

Charles was born Ray Charles Robinson on 23 September 1930 in Albany, Georgia, where his mother, Aretha Williams, had gone to have her out-of-wedlock baby. Weeks after giving birth, Williams took her infant son back to Greenville, Florida, the logging village forty miles east of Tallahassee where she had been living and where Charles grew up. Charles’s father, Bailey Robinson, an itinerant laborer, soon left town, giving the boy little more than his name. Williams raised Charles with Bailey’s former wife, Mary Jane Robinson; Charles never forgot the nurturing love of his two mothers, stern Aretha and easygoing Mary Jane.

The family lived in Jelly Roll, a small black settlement just outside Greenville. The heart of Jelly Roll was Wiley Pitman’s Red Wing Cafe, where people bought beer and pig’s knuckle sandwiches and danced to big band and blues records on the jukebox on Saturday nights. Pitman played boogie-woogie piano, and Charles, at age four or five, often left his games with his baby brother, George, to listen. “Mr. Pit always let me play,” Charles said many times. “He’d sit me beside him, show me the black and white keys, how to pick out melodies. If I got something going, he’d shout, “That’s it, boy, you got it!”

Poverty and jim crow gripped Jelly Roll in the 1930s, yet Charles was growing up a happy, bright child. Tragedy struck when he was five: George fell into a laundry tub and drowned. Charles was too weak to pull him out. Months later, crusted tears began forming in his eyes; a doctor told Aretha Williams that Charles was going blind and that there was no cure. It has been suggested that the condition was the result of glaucoma. Determined to give her son a chance, Williams went to Greenville’s well-to-do white people for help, and the Reams family had Charles admitted to the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind in Saint Augustine in 1937. Florida D&B was rigidly segregated, but young Charles received a good education from fine teachers, learning to read both books and the music of Bach using braille and becoming popular for singing sexy songs at school assemblies. At twelve, Charles found the ambition that lasted his lifetime: “I wanted to be a great musician. I didn’t care about being rich or famous; I just wanted to be great.” In May 1945 Charles got more bad news: Aretha Williams had died from food poisoning at age thirty-one. As he emerged from his grief, Charles left school and moved to Jacksonville, Florida, on his own at fifteen.

Charles became a professional musician in Jacksonville, surviving cutthroat jam sessions at the colored musicians’ union, playing low-money gigs in after-hours clubs, hearing the colorful sounds of postwar pop music: swing and bebop jazz, old blues and the new rhythm and blues, Frank Sinatra and Louis Jordan. Charles’s meal ticket turned out to be his ability to imitate both the cool pop of Nat King Cole and the florid blues of Charles Brown. After brief stops in Orlando and Tampa, Florida, Charles made the bold decision to cross the country to Seattle: “I wanted to go as far from the South as possible and still be in a big city.” He arrived in the spring of 1948 and, with the guitarist Gossie McKee and the bassist Milt Garret forming the McSon Trio, began playing clubs on Jackson Street, the main street of the black community.

Charles became a star of Seattle’s jazz scene, playing with the saxophonist Jackie McVea, mentoring the teenage Quincy Jones, and attracting the attention of Jack Lauderdale, owner of DownBeat (later Swingtime) Records, an independent record label in Los Angeles, which, like Chess in Chicago, sold black music to black audiences across the country. Lauderdale dropped the “Robinson,” naming his new star Ray Charles, and put out Charles’s first record, “Confession Blues,” which became a little hit, entering Billboard’s Race Records chart in April 1949. Ahmet Ertegun in New York City heard a second hit, “Baby Let Me Hold Your Hand,” in 1951 and signed Charles to his growing independent label, Atlantic Records. That year, Charles married Eileen Williams, but they divorced in 1952.

Through the 1950s, while Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, and Little Richard shot up to become the first rock-and-roll stars, selling millions of records to white teenagers, Charles endlessly toured the “chitlin’ circuit,” a network of black clubs and theaters from Boston to San Diego, weaning himself from imitation and forging his first style, a red-hot combination of lowdown blues and soaring gospel. Hits like “I Got a Woman” (1955) and “Hallelujah, I Love Her So” (1956) and jazz albums like Soul Brothers (1957), with Milt Jackson, brought Charles’s music to the white audience, and he crossed over, full force, in 1959 with his sexy smash “What’d I Say.” Fans called Charles’s blues-gospel “soul music,” and many younger singers, Aretha Franklin and James Brown among them, built their styles on Charles’s expressive blend.

Atlantic Records titled Charles “The Genius” in ads and press releases, but in 1960 a major label, ABC-Paramount Records, won him with an unprecedented deal that gave him a 75 percent royalty, paid him as the producer of his own records, and let him have ownership of his masters. Signing with ABC laid the foundation of Charles’s wealth: three number-one hits in 1960, 1961, and 1963—“Georgia on My Mind,” “Hit the Road, Jack,” and “I Can’t Stop Loving You”—gave him the capital to buy land, build his own studio in Los Angeles, and negotiate with all comers as Ray Charles Enterprises. During the 1960s and 1970s, Charles expanded his music through ever-widening circles of pop, making hits out of ballads backed by strings, so-called country weepers, Beatles songs, and down-home comedy. He controlled every facet of his recordings, and, while making albums of extraordinary beauty, variety, and depth, he mastered the art of getting music onto records. Charles gave some albums clear themes, like Sweet and Sour Tears (1964) and Have a Smile with Me (1964); others, like Ray’s Moods (1966) and Volcanic Action of My Soul (1971), he left more ambiguous.

In the 1960s Charles fought personal demons. He had been a heroin addict since his Seattle days, and a series of arrests that began in Philadelphia in 1955 culminated in a 1964 federal indictment for flying drugs into Boston from Canada. Faced with prison and the end of his career, Charles canceled all his touring for 1965, quit cold turkey in a Los Angeles hospital, and won a suspended sentence; he never touched heroin again. A deft public relations campaign orchestrated by his longtime manager, Joe Adams, smoothed his return to performing and bolstered his continuing success. Charles also supported, and his music helped inspire, the decade’s civil rights movement; he was among the first black entertainers to refuse to perform before segregated audiences, and he played benefits to raise money for Martin Luther King, Jr.

By the 1970s Charles had become known around the world, as popular in France and Japan as he was in America. He traveled constantly, often in planes that he bought to take himself, his twenty-piece band, the three Raelettes, and road managers to his far-flung audience. Although he was famous for complaining onstage about musicians and soundmen, Charles was a magnetic performer. His shows were both rousing and dotted with moments of wrenching poignancy. At the end of the 1970s, however, Charles had slipped to a personal and professional low. Flagrant womanizing cost him his marriage to Della Beatrice Howard Robinson, whom he had married on April 5, 1955. (Charles acknowledged having fathered twelve children, most out of wedlock.) The couple had three sons and was divorced in 1977. Chart-topping pop music had shifted to younger artists singing for younger audiences. Critics savaged Charles’s records for being “bland” and “vapid,” and masterpieces like Through the Eyes of Love (1972) went virtually unheard. “I ain’t no fool,” Charles snapped at one journalist. “If you listen close you’ll know I’m alert to what’s been done to me; you’ll hear the dark note, and if you’re very alert, you’ll pay it some mind.”

In the 1980s, drawing on his native intelligence and iron will, Charles rebuilt his career. He became a regular guest on awards and late-night television shows, played symphony hall concerts backed by string orchestras, and made cameo appearances in popular films like The Blues Brothers (1980). Charles also set himself the goal of breaking into country music. His influential Modern Sounds of Country and Western, released in 1962 and 1963, was a two-part collection of country songs done jazz-style, but his 1980s country music was the real thing, recorded in Nashville, Tennessee, with Nashville musicians. Four years of commercial and artistic growth led to “Seven Spanish Angels,” a number-one duet with Willie Nelson from the Friendship album, released in 1984.

In the 1990s Charles became the wise old grandpa of pop music, beloved by millions for decades of music that could be heard everywhere in the electric media. He continued his worldwide touring to large, well-filled halls. His stirring “America the Beautiful,” unnoticed when it was released on the powerful recording A Message from the People in 1972, grew into an informal national anthem that Charles performed for presidents from Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton. People everywhere jokingly repeated his tagline, “You got the right one, baby,” from his Pepsi television commercial. Charles’s record sales, however, declined. My World in 1993 was a critical success but had slow sales; others, including the sublime Strong Love Affair in 1995, sank without making a ripple.

Turning seventy in the new century, Charles began to slow down, touring only three or four months a year and releasing only one album, Thanks for Bringing Love Around Again (2002), whose sales were also negligible. Feeling unwell during the 2003 summer tour, Charles went to doctors and found that he had incurable liver cancer. Faced with probable death in less than a year, Charles poured all his strength into a final album, Genius Loves Company, a collection of duets with old friends like B. B. King and newcomers like Norah Jones. In early 2004, coming to the end of the album’s recording sessions, Charles had to be carried to the microphone. The final tracks reveal weak moments in his voice, but Genius Loves Company is a fitting and deeply moving conclusion to Charles’s six-decade recording career. In early June, Charles slipped into a coma, and he died at his Beverly Hills home, surrounded by friends and family, on the morning of 10 June 2004. He is buried in the Inglewood Park Cemetery in Inglewood, California. Although it was slightly obscured by media attention to President Reagan’s funeral, Charles’s passing became worldwide news, and he was widely and publicly mourned. Genius Loves Company came out two months later and instantly became a best seller.

Charles reached his goal of greatness, achieving a place beside Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and a dozen giants of twentieth-century popular music. Over the course of his career, he earned twelve Grammy awards, one for Lifetime Achievement. In 1986 he received the Kennedy Center Honors; that same year he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1993. Listening in the dark, he immersed himself in the music of his time, weaving a tapestry of sound from every thread and color of American music. He was a superb singer with a broad spectrum of vocal shades—falsetto, scream, chat, whisper, laugh, howl, giggle, and sob—that he blended to express every flicker of evanescent emotion. Total self-confidence fueled Charles’s greatness. He knew, he declared, “no reason for the music to come out any different from the way I hear it in my head.” Getting that music out to the world was always the job he had at hand; he worked day in, day out, to overcome the obstacles in his path.

Charles became a superb sound painter. Working year after year in his Los Angeles studio, he piled up musical canvases in the form of his records. Blindness posed no handicap for him. “You don’t have to see life,” Charles once said. “You have to observe life.” Charles’s music testifies to his powers of observation; his voice and music ring with truth. Generations to come will listen to Charles’s music, with its passion and profundity, its warmth and wisdom.

For information about Charles’s life, see Ray Charles and David Ritz, Brother Ray (2003), and Michael Lydon, Ray Charles: Man and Music (2004). For information about Charles’s place in the music world, see Michael Lydon, Boogie Lightning (2nd ed., 1980); and Whitney Balliett, American Singers (1988). Two significant periodical articles from the 1960s are “Blues Becomes Big Business,” Ebony (Apr. 1963), and “Music Soaring in a Darkened World... The Comeback of Ray Charles,” Life (29 July 1966). An obituary is in the New York Times (11 June 2004).

Michael Lydon