Ray Charles

SATURDAY NIGHT AND SUNDAY MORNING
The weather in Atlanta, Georgia, is damp and breezy on the night of May 29,
1959. Despite intermittent rainfall, a crowd of 9,000 people has fi lled the stands
of a minor league ballpark called Herndon Stadium for a long evening of live
rhythm and blues. The Drifters, Ruth Brown, Jimmy Reed, Roy Hamilton,
and B.B. King all have performed to an enthusiastic response; now the crowd is enraptured by the show’s headline attraction, whose set has reached a peak
of controlled frenzy.

Wearing dark sunglasses and rocking from side to side in his seat at an
electric piano, the singer stomps his right foot to count off a mid-tempo blues
called “(Night Time Is) The Right Time.” He hits the fi rst chord and one of
his accompanists, saxophonist David “Fathead” Newman, swoops in with
eight bars of searing tenor. The singer bears down hard on the lyrics—exhorting,
pleading, commanding—as he rides the relentless rocking-chair rhythm
of bass and drums: “You know the night time . . . is the right time . . . to beeee
. . . with the one you love.”
On the opposite side of the stage, a harmonizing trio of female backup singers
echoes his secular sermon with wordless syllables (“bah-doo-day”) until
he calls forth one of them with a gruff shout: “Sing the song, Margie!” The
piercing voice of Margie Hendricks emerges from the group for a fi ery solo
turn until the leader reenters, soaring into top of his vocal range with a hairraising
wail. At the end of his last chorus, the band thunders to a close and the
entire audience leaps to its feet for a standing ovation that lasts nearly ten
minutes.
The organizer and MC of the show, a local disc jockey named Zenas Sears,
races onto the stage and grabs the microphone. “The great Ray Charles!” he
shouts deliriously over the roar of the crowd. “The High Priest! The High
Priest! Ray Charles—What a show !”

EARLY YEARS
Ray Charles Robinson was born in Albany, Georgia, in 1930. Because he
never possessed a birth certifi cate, the exact date of birth can’t be verifi ed.
Most but not all sources state September 23, the date observed by Ray. His
mother Aretha (known as Retha) was a teenage orphan who’d been adopted
by Bailey Robinson and his wife Mary Jane and lived with them in the small
north Florida town of Greenville. When Retha became pregnant, word spread
that Bailey was the father; the girl was sent to stay with relatives in Albany to
have the baby. Shortly after the birth, Ray and Retha returned to Greenville
where they lived in a shack in the impoverished black neighborhood known
as Jellyroll. Bailey Robinson remarried, moved to a nearby small town, and
had little involvement in Ray’s upbringing.
Ray’s brother George was born less than a year later; as toddlers, the two
boys were inseparable. Retha was a strict mother who assigned regular chores
to her sons when they were just fi ve and six years old. Every Sunday, she
brought them with her to the New Shiloh Baptist Church where the reverend
preached fi ery sermons, gospel singers wailed and shook tambourines, and
parishioners “fell out” in spasms of devotional ecstasy.

Outside the church, young Ray’s important musical infl uence came from Wiley
Pitman, the owner of a local general store and café called the Red Wing. Pitman
was a talented stride and boogie-woogie pianist who sat Ray on his knee for his
fi rst lessons at the piano. The boy also listened avidly to the Red Wing jukebox
with its selection of guitar blues, piano boogies, and swing tunes.
One afternoon in 1935, the Robinson boys were splashing around in a
large washtub outside the café. When George suddenly began to panic in the
water, Ray wasn’t big or strong enough to rescue him. George’s accidental
drowning, before his brother’s own eyes, was the fi rst of two tragedies that
scarred Ray’s early childhood. The second followed later that same year when
mucus began to ooze from his eyelids and his sight began to fail. (Years later,
doctors speculated that the cause was congenital juvenile glaucoma.)
Retha was determined that her nearly sightless son be able to make his own
way in the world. She refused to lighten Ray’s load of chores or allow him to
just hang around the house. Again and again, his mother reminded Ray that
she wasn’t going to live forever: He had to do everything he could to prepare
himself for independent life as an adult.
“The woman never let me get away with anything just ’cause I was blind,”
Charles told co-author David Ritz in his autobiography Brother Ray . “I was
treated like I was normal. I acted like I was normal. And I ended up doing
exactly the same things normal people do.” 1
By the fall of 1937, Ray had lost his sight. Over his tearful protestations,
Retha put her son on the train to St. Augustine, Florida, where she had
enrolled him in the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind. For the next eight
years, Ray remained a boarding student at this racially segregated state institution,
where he became known as RC to his friends and fellow students.
Despite facilities and materials inferior to those bestowed upon the school’s
white pupils, the mostly poor black students and underpaid black faculty of
D&B forged a powerful bond. The children learned to read Braille, play
sports, and make handicrafts in addition to their academic subjects. At the
Christmas break and the end of the school year, Ray would return to Retha’s
dilapidated home in Greenville.
RC was an avid radio listener from adolescence. He tuned into the sounds
of country and western music and the big bands of Benny Goodman, Artie
Shaw, and Tommy Dorsey; he was astounded by blind jazz pianist Art Tatum’s
fl awless technique and unending fl ow of musical ideas. The hardcore downhome
blues of the Mississippi Delta and Chicago was almost never heard on
radio in the years before World War II but Ray heard Tampa Red and Lonnie
Johnson on jukeboxes as well as local blues players in cafés or on the street.
By the age of thirteen, Ray had picked up a second instrument, the clarinet.
When not attending D&B, he played piano for a Tallahassee jazz band led by
guitarist Lawyer Smith that worked weddings, proms, dances, juke joints, and
fraternal organization affairs. Ray was still in school in the spring of 1945 when his mother, still in her early thirties, died suddenly of an undiagnosed
illness. Retha’s death was a crushing blow to her only surviving son. But he
was comforted by Rebecca Bea aka Ma Beck, a healer and midwife widely
admired in the Greenville black community who herself had given birth to at
least nineteen children.
In October 1945, Ray was expelled from D&B—a place he felt he’d outgrown
already—and moved in with some family friends in Jacksonville, Florida.
He scuffl ed for gigs on the local music scene while honing his piano chops
and learning the pop standards required for all-occasions entertainment. The
singer and alto saxophonist Louis Jordan was approaching the peak of his
national stardom with bouncy hits like “Caldonia” and “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie.”
Ray enjoyed Jordan’s witty R&B style but was more deeply enamored of Nat
King Cole, a virtuoso jazz pianist and vocalist, and of Johnny Moore’s Three
Blazers, whose massive 1946 hit “Drifting Blues” featured the mellow vocal
and piano of Charles Brown.
“By the time I hit the streets of Jacksonville,” Ray later recalled, “I’d been
schooled on all these different sounds way ’fore I ever heard the word school; it
was part of my natural upbringing. And at school, of course, I’d been exposed
to Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Sibelius, Chopin, and all the other big names.” 2
Ray traveled to Orlando with a band led by saxophonist Tiny York; when
work ran out and the group broke up, he stayed on. Blind, broke, and alone
in a city where he knew almost no one, RC literally went hungry on many
occasions while trying to hustle gigs on the competitive local music scene. Yet
he never gave up and seems never to have asked for charity—only for the
chance to play and be paid for his music.
Gradually, RC found work on the bandstands of the black community in
west Orlando. In early 1947 he was hired to play piano with Joe Anderson’s
fi fteen-piece big band and later to write original arrangements for the group.
Ray’s confi dence rose as he began teaching himself to play alto saxophone.
Soon he’d earned enough to buy his fi rst record player and a treasured handful
of 78 rpm jazz discs by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and other jazz
innovators.
Later that year, Ray relocated to Tampa and was quickly recruited by two
different groups. The Honeydrippers, led by Charlie Brantley, were an allblack
“jump blues” band in the mode of Louis Jordan’s Tympani Five; the
Florida Playboys were an all-white country band playing the songs of Hank
Williams, Eddie Arnold, and other Grand Ole Opry favorites. In a segregated
city like Tampa, it was surprising that the Playboys would enlist a blind black
pianist. But RC could play country music with as much ability and feeling as
any white musician—he even sang lead on a couple of tunes. Heeding the suggestions
of friends, he also began to wear the heavy-rimmed dark sunglasses
that became his trademark.
Life in Tampa was improving for RC. It got better still when he became the
featured vocalist and pianist with a new group called the Manzy Harris Quartet that specialized in the sophisticated blues and ballad style of Nat King Cole.
Ray also purchased a wire recorder and made some informal home recordings
on this primitive device. These lo-fi delity tracks (such as “Walking and Talking”
and “I Found My Baby There”) would surface years later on various
cheaply packaged compilation albums. Despite the poor sound quality and
uncertain backing of his accompanists, RC’s piano playing cuts through the
fog with sophisticated chords and explosive single-note runs.
RC’s musician friend Gossie McKee had done some touring around the
United States and returned to Tampa with exciting tales from the road—and
of cities in the North and West that were free of Florida’s segregationist codes.
In the spring of 1948, Ray rode a Trailways bus from Tampa to Seattle, Washington,
where Gossie already had settled into the black entertainment district
centered on Jackson Street. There was plenty of work for a musician as talented
as Ray Charles on a circuit of gigs that extended north to Vancouver
and south to Portland, Oregon. RC formed the McSon Trio with Gossie on
guitar and Milt Garred on bass. For professional purposes, he dropped his
last name in deference to the established fame of welterweight boxing champion
Sugar Ray Robinson.

West Coast Rhythm and Blues
When Ray Charles moved from Florida to Seattle in 1948, he joined a longterm
mass migration that brought large numbers of African American musicians
to the West Coast from the Deep South and Southwest. This movement
gained momentum with the outbreak of World War II and the need for workers
in factories and shipyards revitalized by the war effort. In Los Angeles, Central
Avenue was the city’s African American business district and home to such
fl ourishing nightspots as Club Alabam, Little Harlem, and the Downbeat.
Many early pioneers of West Coast rhythm and blues had personal roots in
the South and professional ones in the swing era of the 1930s including Rock
and Roll Hall of Fame inductees Aaron “T-Bone” Walker, Nat King Cole, and
Charles Brown.
Born 1910 in rural Texas, T-Bone Walker was the fi rst to popularize the electric
guitar in blues and swing music with the big bands of Les Hite and Freddie
Slack. Walker’s 1948 recording of “Call It Stormy Monday” “drove me crazy,”
B.B. King recalled years later. “I never believed a sound could be that pretty on
an instrument.”
Nat King Cole and Charles Brown (born in Alabama and Texas in 1917 and
1922, respectively) rose to prominence in the 1940s, singing and playing
piano in a smooth small-group format sometimes known as “club blues.” Nat
Cole overcame barriers of institutional racism to become a beloved mainstream
entertainer. He briefl y hosted his own television show, headlined in Las
Vegas, and placed twenty-seven songs in the Top Forty from 1954 until
his death from cancer in 1965. Charles Brown recorded such West Coast standards as “Trouble Blues” (1949), “Black Night” (1951), and the holiday
perennial “Please Come Home for Christmas” (1960). After many years in
obscurity, this openly gay bluesman made a late 1980s comeback with the
help of Bonnie Raitt (who took him on tour as her opening act) and several
Grammy-nominated albums recorded in his classic style.
Johnny Otis was a key player on the Los Angeles R&B scene for decades, less
important as a vocalist than as a bandleader, multi-instrumentalist, and talent
scout. He was born John Veliotes in 1921—a white man of Greek heritage who
lived his life entirely within the African American community. (Indeed, many
of his fellow musicians believed that Otis was black.) His discoveries included
future soul stars Esther Phillips and Etta James, and the great vocal group Hank
Ballard and the Midnighters. Otis was the bandleader and de facto producer
for two landmark number one R&B hits of the 1950s: “Pledging My Love” by
Johnny Ace and Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton’s original version of “Hound
Dog,” later a number one hit for Elvis Presley. Fifty years later, Johnny Otis was
still active as a record producer, author, lecturer, painter, and radio personality.
Andy Schwartz

As a musician, RC had both growing technical command and deep Southern
feeling; as a man, he was already supporting himself and his girlfriend,
Louise Mitchell. Ray seemed older than his eighteen years and younger Seattle
musicians like saxophonist Buddy Catlett and trumpeter Quincy Jones held
him in high esteem for his abilities as an arranger. “He showed me how to
voice the fi rst brass section writing I ever did,” Quincy told writer Nat Hentoff.
“He really showed me the function of an arranger, what he was capable
of doing.” 3
But in this same eventful year of 1948, Ray Charles discovered drugs. He
became a heroin addict and remained one for the next seventeen years despite
the personal and fi nancial toll extracted by his habit.
“It was more curiosity than anything,” Ray explained to David Ritz in his
characteristically blunt manner. “The way I was around mechanical devices,
the way I was around musical instruments, electronic playthings—well, that’s
how I was around drugs. Once I started, I saw no reason to stop. In those
days, [heroin] didn’t even cost that much.” 4
One night during an extended engagement at the Rocking Chair in Seattle,
the members of the McSon Trio were introduced to Jack Lauderdale, the proprietor
of a small independent label called Down Beat Records. The next day,
Lauderdale brought the group into a local studio to cut two sides, “I Love
You, I Love You” and “Confession Blues.” In early 1949, Down Beat released
the songs on the debut single by the Maxin Trio; authorship of both tunes was
credited to Ray Charles.
To the surprise of all concerned, this disc made it into the Top Ten of Billboard
’s Best Selling Retail Race Records chart (the industry term “race records” had not yet been supplanted to “rhythm and blues”) and in June Jack
Lauderdale returned to Seattle to record more songs with the trio. He brought
along a recording contract that Gossie McKee quickly signed on behalf of the
group even though its extravagant guarantees were pure fi ction—for example,
the promise that Down Beat would record at least 200 songs by the group
during the six-year term of the agreement.
More sessions followed but internal tensions soon broke up the McSon
Trio. RC’s relationship with Louise Mitchell was also crumbling; when at last
she returned to her family in Florida, neither of them even knew that Louise
was pregnant with Ray’s fi rst child, a daughter who they named Evelyn. Jack
Lauderdale was undeterred by these developments. Ray was clearly the star of
the group, was still under contract to Lauderdale’s label (now renamed Swingtime
Records), and was now free to relocate to Los Angeles, where he arrived
alone by train in the spring of 1950.

SOLO ARTIST
Black L.A. was jumping. Its central business district, along a six-mile-long
stretch of Central Avenue, was fi lled with restaurants, bars, hotels, nightclubs,
and movie theaters. Ray’s new Swingtime release, “Late in the Evening”
backed with “Th’ Ego Song,” gave him the brassy backing of an eight-piece
band and extra pay as the session leader. But just weeks after his arrival in
town, RC was on the road with blues singer and guitarist Lowell Fulson, then
riding high on his career-making Swingtime hit “Every Day I Have the Blues.”
While playing piano for Fulson, Ray also received a featured spot of his own
which earned him his fi rst notices in the black press.
Jack Lauderdale reverted to the drum-less trio format for the next Swingtime
session and came up with a winner in “Baby Let Me Hold Your Hand.”
Ray’s closely miked vocal and delicate keyboard intro—played on a celeste
rather than piano—imbued the track with a distinctive sound that was part
Nat King Cole, part Charles Brown, and part pure RC. The song hit the
stores and airwaves in January 1951 when the Lowell Fulson tour was still
out on the road. Saxophonist Stanley Turrentine was not quite seventeen
when he signed on with the Fulson show. It was the future jazz superstar’s
fi rst national tour: “I got on that raggedy bus . . . we turned south and we
stayed south.” 5
During an extended engagement in Cleveland in July, Ray met Eileen Williams,
a beautician from Columbus, Ohio. The two had known each other for
about three weeks when they were wed in Atlanta on July 31; Ray went back
on the road while Eileen returned to Columbus. Within a year, the marriage
was effectively over and the couple later divorced.
Peaking at number fi ve on the Billboard R&B Jukebox chart, “Baby Let
Me Hold Your Hand” was Ray’s fi rst hit under his own name. It became a national best-seller and led to his signing by the powerful Shaw Artists booking
agency (he remained with the fi rm for the next fi fteen years). But the sound
was still too derivative to establish RC as a viable artist in his own right.
Out on the road, Ray’s superior musicianship made him invaluable to Lowell
Fulson and earned him multiple salary increases. Between those performance
earnings and occasional record royalties, RC could afford to buy his
fi rst car and pay someone to drive it while making regular deposits to the savings
account he maintained back in Greenville. But he chafed under the limitations
of a supporting role, and the Shaw Agency began to book Ray under
his own name on selected dates.
“Kissa Me Baby,” the next Swingtime release by Ray Charles, fell short of
the R&B Top Five and quickly faded from the chart. Jack Lauderdale found
his cash fl ow squeezed by tight-fi sted distributors who postponed payment as
long as they possibly could. In January 1952, Lauderdale sold RC’s recording
contract for $2,500 to Ahmet Ertegun and Herb Abramson, the founding
partners of New York–based Atlantic Records.
“I heard ‘Baby, Let Me Hold Your Hand’ once and I said this is the most
fabulous singer alive today,” Ertegun recalled in a 2005 interview. “A booking
agent named Billy Shaw said to me, ‘We have Ray Charles but we can’t
book him as a headliner. Do you think you can make hit records with him?’
and I said, ‘I know I can make hit records with him.’ . . . I was the only one
who thought so.” 6

THE ATLANTIC YEARS
In September 1952, Ray Charles arrived in New York City for his fi rst Atlantic
recording session. Jesse Stone, the company’s main man in the studio, had
booked some of his regular musicians for the date, which produced four fi nished
masters in three hours. “Roll with My Baby” evoked Nat King Cole,
just as “Midnight Hour” did Charles Brown. But “The Sun’s Gonna Shine
Again” pointed toward a more distinctively original sound with its somber
mood, plaintive vocal, and Ray’s repeated exclamations of “Lord.”
The fi rst single, “Roll with My Baby” backed with “Midnight Hour,” received
good notices in the trade publications though not much in the way of sales or airplay.
It was the same story with “Jumping in the Morning” backed with “The
Sun’s Gonna Shine Again,” released in early 1953. But Atlantic had scored
several of the biggest Top Ten R&B hits of 1952 with other artists such as
Ruth Brown (“Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean”), and these sales
allowed the company to continue recording Ray until he came up with a hit.
When the army suddenly recalled Herb Abramson to active duty in Germany,
Ahmet found a new partner in Jerry Wexler. A former song promoter,
Billboard staff writer, and fellow black music buff, Wexler had coined the
phrase “rhythm and blues” in an essay for The Saturday Review of Literature .
In his 1995 autobiography, Jerry recounted his fi rst meeting with RC at the
old Atlantic offi ces on West 56th Street in Manhattan.
“I was struck by his physical presence,” he wrote, “strong, broad-shouldered,
barrel-chested, his rhythms simultaneously quick and cautious. . . . His
speaking voice, like his singing voice, was deep but ever-changing, sometimes
sounding old beyond his years, sometimes fi lled with youthful ebullience,
sometimes sullen and withdrawn. His dark glasses were a symbol of his mystery,
an emblem of some secret pain.” 7
Years later, Ray refl ected upon his solitary mode of existence: “Loud parties,
large crowds, being out with the gang—none of these things interested
me. . . . Of all the people I’ve met in my life, I’d have to struggle hard to fi nd
fi ve I’d call my friends, people I can really count on. And that’s my doing. I’m
just not the type to have scores of long-lasting, intimate friendships.” 8
Wexler was present for Ray’s second Atlantic session, in May 1953. This
time, everyone played it by ear, without a pre-set repertoire. Ahmet called out
song titles and stray lyrics from the history of jazz and blues; at the piano, Ray
blithely ran off boogie-woogie motifs and swing era quotations. Ertegun sang
a twelve-bar blues stomp he’d written called “Mess Around” and Ray cut it
fast, loose, and hard-driving. “Losing Hand” was a ghostly minor-key blues
with atmospheric guitar work by Mickey Baker. “It Should’ve Been Me” was
a sly mid-tempo tale of ghetto street life as told by an envious also-ran watching
“a real sharp cat, with a $300 suit and a $100 hat” and his “real fi ne
chick, driving that Dynafl ow!”
Released as a single, “It Should’ve Been Me” climbed to number fi ve R&B
and hung on the chart for nine weeks—a respectable showing if not a career
breakthrough. But more important, on at least half the tracks from this session,
Ray had moved away from his skillful emulations of Nat King Cole and
Charles Brown toward his own style of phrasing and delivery. Ahmet Ertegun
sensed the beginning of this transformation and knew it was only a matter of
time and circumstance until he had the Ray Charles hit he craved.
In his travels with Lowell Fulson, RC had been particularly well received in
New Orleans; he settled there temporarily in the summer of 1953. In August,
Ahmet and Jerry fl ew down for sessions at J&M Recording, working with
J&M owner/producer/engineer Cosimo (Cosmo) Matassa. With time left over
from a date with local singer Tommy Ridgley, they let Ray cut a pair of slow
blues numbers. Atlantic rush-released “Feelin’ Sad” in late September but it
too failed to catch on.

New Orleans Rhythm and Blues
It’s not surprising that New Orleans should have been the place where Ray
Charles found his true voice as a recording artist. From the end of World War
II into the early 1960s, the Crescent City was a leading producer of rhythm
and blues just as it had been the cradle of jazz in earlier decades. The history of New Orleans is marked by deep poverty, political corruption, and racial
segregation. But its citizens take great pride in the city’s centuries-old cultural
traditions, showing a special affection for local musicians whether or not they
ever fi nd success beyond the city limits. A New Orleans artist who barely brushed
the national charts with a single song could still be “a star in the ghetto”
decades later in one or another of the city’s close-knit neighborhoods.
Singer/pianist Antoine “Fats” Domino remains the most famous name in
the history of New Orleans rhythm and blues, more than fi fty years after making
his Billboard R&B chart debut in 1950 with the rocking, self-mocking blues
“The Fat Man.” Between 1950 and 1963, Fats placed thirty-seven songs in the
Pop Top Forty including “I’m Walkin’,” “Whole Lotta Loving,” and “I’m in
Love Again.” The tunes were infectiously simple but arranged for maximum
danceability by Domino’s co-writer and bandleader, Dave Bartholomew, and
played by a stellar studio group that included saxophonist Lee Allen and drummer
Earl Palmer. When recording activity in New Orleans declined in the mid-
1960s, these and other musicians moved to Los Angeles. But until the fl oods
of Hurricane Katrina destroyed his home in 2005, Fats Domino continued to
live in the Lower Ninth Ward—the same New Orleans neighborhood where
he was born in 1928. In 1986, Domino was among the fi rst group of artists
inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Roy Brown (1925–81) sang the blues with gospel fervor and put New Orleans
on the post-war musical map with his 1947 hit “Good Rockin” Tonight.”
Larry Williams (1935–80) was a favorite of the Beatles, who covered his late
1950s hits “Slow Down” and “Bad Boy.” Eddie Jones aka Guitar Slim (1926–59)
created an all-time blues standard with his only R&B chart hit, “The Things
That I Used to Do.” With his hundred-foot guitar cord and brightly colored
suits, Slim was a fl amboyant performer so much in demand that other Crescent
City singer/guitarists like Earl King were sometimes booked to perform in
his stead, using his name.
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame honoree Allen Toussaint began his career in 1958
and rose to become the city’s best-known songwriter and producer. Artists
ranging from Lee Dorsey (“Workin” in a Coal Mine”) to the Pointer Sisters
(“Yes We Can-Can”) have reaped major hits from Toussaint’s catalog of compositions.
In August 2005, Allen Toussaint lost his home in the fl ooding after
Hurricane Katrina. But in collaboration with English singer-songwriter Elvis
Costello, he released a new album, The River in Reverse , that brought the New
Orleans rock and roll tradition into the twenty-fi rst century.

On October 16, 1953, Ray participated in another session at J&M, this one
starring Guitar Slim (Eddie Jones Jr.). The fl amboyant blues singer/guitarist
had passion and energy to burn but none of Ray’s technical skill or organizational
ability. RC quickly took command of the session: playing piano, humming improvised horn riffs to the band, and reining in the excitable Slim, who
tended to rush the tempo and wander off the microphone. It was nearly dawn
when they cut the master take of the last song of the date, “The Things That
I Used to Do.”
Released on Specialty Records in December, “The Things That I Used To
Do” became the biggest-selling R&B disc of 1954 and topped the Billboard
R&B chart for six straight weeks. The Guitar Slim date showed Ray that he
had what it took to create a smash hit, albeit for another artist.
Jerry and Ahmet returned to New Orleans in December for an all-night session
at a local radio studio. This time RC brought along several original bluesbased
tunes including the infectious “Don’t You Know.” “Now you can hear
the real Ray emerging,” Wexler noted. “It’s Ray’s tune, Ray’s chart, Ray’s
irresistible spirit that sets the sexy agenda. From his opening falsetto scream
. . . to the horn voicings to the super-hip medium-mellow groove, the production
is brilliant.” 9 In its very brief R&B chart appearance, “Don’t You Know”
struggled to number ten.
Ray would not return to the studio for nearly a year. But in the interim, he
took a major step forward in his career when he formed his own seven-piece
band. Any horn player auditioning for RC had to be able to read music, to
improvise jazz solos, and to play the blues. One of RC’s key early recruits was
saxophonist David “Fathead” Newman, a Dallas native who would remain
with Ray for the next ten years. As band director or “straw boss,” New Orleans
trumpeter Renald Richard was responsible for overseeing rehearsals and making
sure the musicians took the stage on time, properly attired, and more or
less sober. In addition to playing piano and singing his featured numbers, Ray
also soloed on alto sax during a portion of the show.
The group was assembled initially to back Ruth Brown for two weeks of
shows, the fi rst of which necessitated a breakneck 750-mile drive from Houston
to El Paso. The second date, the next night in Alexandria, Louisiana,
required driving all the way back to Houston and then 200 miles further east.
Such grueling trips were fairly typical of RC’s early life on the “chitlin’ circuit”
along with shortchanged or non-existent performance fees, segregated
accommodations, and frequent police harassment.
By November 1954, when he was due to appear at the Royal Peacock in
Atlanta, RC had worked up several new originals in anticipation of his next
studio session. One of them was “I Got a Woman,” a fast-paced tune co-written
with Renald Richard and based on the melody of a gospel song Ray had heard
one night on the car radio. The response from live audiences had RC so excited
that he called Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler to ask if they could fl y to Atlanta
for a recording date. A few days later, they sat in the empty club and listened
intently as singer and band ran through “I Got a Woman,” Renald’s humorous
“Greenbacks,” the aching soul-blues ballad “Come Back Baby,” and more.
The two Atlantic executives were overwhelmed by the range, power, and
precision of the music; they hastened to book recording time at a local radio station. “I Got a Woman” was the obvious choice of a fi rst single from the
session, and test pressings were sent out to key disc jockeys and distributors
in mid-December. A few days into the New Year of 1955, it was clear that Ray
Charles and Atlantic Records had a smash hit on their hands.
By March, “I Got a Woman” was Billboard ’s number one R&B song—and
it hung on the chart for twenty weeks. More than a hit record, “I Got a Woman”
was a defi ning musical statement that bridged the long-standing divide within
the African American community between blues and gospel.
“The record blended elements like a hybrid fl ower,” wrote Michael Lydon.
“It had a dancing beat like a jump blues, but it was built on gospel’s ‘rise to
glory’ chords, and the cheerful lyric, infectiously delivered by Ray, gave that
mix a pop music gloss.” 10 Although he would never refer to or think of himself
as a rock and roller, in the public’s eyes Ray Charles now counted as one
of the black rock and roll artists—including Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Little
Richard, and Fats Domino—who were revolutionizing Western popular music.
RC was now based in Dallas, where on April 5, 1955, he married Della Bea
Howard. A former gospel singer, modest and soft-spoken, Della seemed content
to make a comfortable home for her husband to enjoy during his irregular
interludes in residence even as Ray’s inveterate womanizing and continued
heroin use became open secrets between them.
The next recording session, convened in April in Miami, produced more
gems written, arranged, conducted, and sung by Ray Charles. “This Little
Girl of Mine” was Ray’s rewrite of the gospel standard “This Little Light of
Mine” with the addition of a jazzy horn chart and Latin-tinged syncopation.
As for the confessional slow blues “A Fool for You,” Ahmet Ertegun and
Jerry Wexler thought it was simply the best record Atlantic had made to
date—even if they’d done little more than book the studio time and make sure
the engineer didn’t erase the completed takes. By July, “A Fool for You” was
RC’s second Billboard number one record; his next two songs, “Greenbacks”
and “Blackjack,” also made the R&B Top Ten.
Ray’s band now included fellow heroin addicts Fathead Newman, baritone
saxophonist Jay Dennis, and bassist Roosevelt “Whiskey” Sheffi eld. On
November 17, backstage at a gig in Philadelphia, all four musicians were
arrested and charged with possession of drugs and drug paraphernalia. Road
manager Jeff Brown bailed out RC but the others remained in jail for a week.
Finally Jeff retained a New York attorney who succeeded in having all charges
dropped, reportedly in exchange for payoffs totaling around $6,000.
The arrest didn’t curb Ray’s drug use simply because, as Jerry Wexler
observed, “there wasn’t an instance where his addiction interfered with his
work . . . . As a bandleader and producer, he was more than conscientious;
he was meticulous and demanding, ready to reject the least instance of faulty
intonation or rhythm. His own singing and playing were beyond reproach,
his writing a paragon of art and commerce combined. When it came to
Ray’s professionalism, there could be no grounds for complaint. He worked
his ass off.” 11

Two weeks later, Ray was in Atlantic’s New York studio for another session.
This date produced “Mary Ann,” a lightly lascivious tune dedicated to
singer Mary Ann Fisher, a recent addition to the Ray Charles show. Two other
highlights were the strutting, jubilant “Hallelujah I Love Her So,” with its
Count Basie–style horn chart, and “Drown in My Own Tears,” a stately slow
blues in the mode of “A Fool for You” that became Ray’s third R&B number
one in early 1956.
The latter song featured the fi rst appearance on any of RC’s records by a
young female trio called the Cookies, who were Atlantic recording artists in
their own right. Ray loved the blend of his rougher voice with their dulcet
harmonies, and he found lead singer Margie Hendricks’s churchy, growling
solos irresistible. But it wasn’t until 1958 that RC felt fi nancially able to add
the women (Hendricks, Ethel McRae, and Pat Lyles) to his touring organization.
When he did, he gave them a new name: the Raeletts. Although the
personnel would change frequently with the passing years, from this time on
the group would always be a key element of the Ray Charles road show. The
star carried on countless short- and long-term affairs with various female
members of his troupe, in which it was often said that in order to become a
Raelett, you had to “let Ray.”

RISING STAR
In 1956, Elvis Presley’s RCA debut album included a cover of “I Got a
Woman” that earned Ray his fi rst substantial royalty check as songwriter. The
level of RC’s income from live performances was such that he was able to loan
money to the Shaw Agency when the company fell on hard times after founder
Billy Shaw died suddenly from a heart attack. Ahmet Ertegun’s older brother
Nesuhi Ertegun had recently joined Atlantic to oversee its production of jazz
and long-playing albums. In April, Nesuhi cut a few piano trio tracks with
Ray; subsequently, he brought in the full road band to complete a pure jazz
album titled The Great Ray Charles , released the following year. With arrangements
by RC or Quincy Jones, the tunes included Tin Pan Alley standards
(“I Surrender Dear,” “My Melancholy Baby”) and Horace Silver’s
hard-bop classic “Doodlin’.”
In terms of record sales, 1957 was a comedown after the stunning success
of the previous two years. Atlantic released several new Ray Charles singles
that were moderate sellers at best. The rigors of the road inevitably precipitated
further personnel changes in Ray’s band. Edgar Willis replaced Whiskey
Sheffi eld and remained RC’s bassist for the next two decades. Baritone saxophonist
Leroy “Hog” Cooper initially signed on for just a few months’ roadwork
but wound up staying with Ray into the 1970s. Hank Crawford
possessed a singing, soulful tone on alto saxophone that eventually made him
a jazz star in his own right while Don Wilkerson and Fathead Newman played
tenor sax in contrasting but equally compelling styles.

In June 1957, Atlantic compiled various singles and B-sides to create the
eponymous debut album, Ray Charles . That it failed to chart was not surprising:
The seven-inch single still dominated R&B and Ray’s album (later retitled
Hallelujah I Love Her So ) was one of Atlantic’s early entries in the burgeoning
LP fi eld. Had Ertegun and Wexler waited a few more months, they would
have had a brand-new Ray Charles hit to include on the album.
In November 1957, RC made an unexpected breakthrough with his recording
of “Swanee River Rock”—a gospelized, up-tempo transformation of Stephen
Foster’s sentimental nineteenth-century ballad “Old Folks at Home,”
with Mongo Santamaria on conga drum and a hot tenor solo by Fathead
Newman. For Michael Lydon, this track revealed “Ray’s emerging grand ambition:
to absorb all American music . . . . For pop singers, Stephen Foster
belonged to the square and distant past; jazzmen looking for songs to jam on
seldom reached further back than Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern. In recording
rock ‘n’ roll Foster, Ray declared American music of any era fair game for his
devices.” 12 The Atlantic single not only made it to number fourteen R&B but
to number thirty-four on the Billboard Hot 100—Ray Charles’s fi rst entry on
the pop chart.
R&B, pop, jazz—Ray was determined to do it all and do it as well or better
than anybody. For another 1957 session, Nesuhi Ertegun put him together
with vibraphonist Milt Jackson of the Modern Jazz Quartet, Atlantic’s bestselling
jazz act, for a languid session of extended jazz instrumentals (some
reaching the nine-minute mark) that featured RC on both piano and alto
sax. The resulting tracks were issued on the albums Soul Brothers and Soul
Meeting —titles that incorporated the word “soul” several years before the
term was applied to the music of Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, and Aretha
Franklin.
When Ray bought his fi rst home in Los Angeles in March 1958, it was a
clear sign of his increasing wealth. His rising stature within the music industry
was certifi ed on July 5 by his fi rst appearance at the prestigious Newport Jazz
Festival. On a festival bill that included Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, and
John Coltrane, RC and his fi ery band held their own with a set that ranged
from jazz instrumentals to R&B hits, closing with a long, ecstatic version of
“I Got a Woman.” Nesuhi Ertegun edited the tapes to make a live LP, Ray
Charles at Newport , that Atlantic issued in the fall of the year. For many jazz
listeners and others of the American intelligentsia, this album was their fi rst
introduction to RC—one that set him apart from the black rock and rollers
and urban blues singers.

WHAT’D I SAY
One night in December 1958, headlining at a dancehall outside of Pittsburgh,
Ray and the band found they’d played through their entire “book” of sheet
music arrangements but still had fi fteen minutes left to fi ll. Ray told the musicians
to follow his lead and the Raeletts to simply repeat whatever he sang. As
he bore down on an up-tempo Latin-tinged piano riff, “I could feel the whole
room bouncing and shaking and carrying on something fi erce. . . . When I got
through, folk came up and asked where they could buy the record. ‘Ain’t no
record,’ I said, ‘just something I made up to kill a little time.’ ” 13
The February 1959 session that brought forth the recording of this new
song—now titled “What’d I Say”—was dispatched in Ray’s usual all-forbusiness
manner. It didn’t feel especially momentous at the time yet the master
take was over six minutes long, the stop-time verses divided by RC’s fl uid
solos on electric piano (an instrument rarely heard in late 1950s R&B). The
whole performance built through wave upon wave of barely disguised sexual
tension and release as Ray’s voice rose to a wail and the Raeletts moaned in
unison behind him.
Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler held back the release of “What’d I Say”
until April, when Atlantic issued the track as a two-part single. This fi rst,
frankly adult version met stiff resistance from radio programmers—which
translated into scant orders from the label’s distributors—so Atlantic’s chief
engineer Tom Dowd re-edited the track to give it a slightly more playful teenage
atmosphere. In July, “What’d I Say” entered the Billboard Hot 100 at
number eighty-two and then jumped to number forty-three the next week. By
August, Ray Charles had his fi rst Top Ten pop hit (peaking at number six) and
his fourth R&B number one; the disc became the best-selling single in Atlantic’s
history and gave the company its fi rst monthly sales gross of more than
$1 million.
“What’d I Say” was the song that “brought Ray Charles to everybody. In
faraway Liverpool, Paul McCartney heard ‘What’d I Say’ and chills went up
and down his spine: ‘I knew right then and there I wanted to be involved in
that kind of music.’ ” 14
Not content with having one of the biggest rock and roll/R&B hits of the
year, in 1959 Ray went into the studio to record an album of standards from
the Great American Songbook. On half the tracks, he was backed by a brassy
big band, arranged by Quincy Jones; on the rest, by a full orchestra with
arrangements by Ralph Burns. The rough edge of RC’s voice and the “blue”
quality of his phrasing turned oft-recorded songs like “Just for a Thrill” and
“When Your Lover Has Gone” into modern masterpieces. After the tracks
were issued on a 1960 LP titled The Genius of Ray Charles , the appellation
“genius” stuck to the singer for the rest of his life.
The other side of Ray Charles—the raw rhythm and blues shouter who
could drive his audiences into a frenzy—was captured on a tape made by disc
jockey Zenas Sears during a May 1959 performance at Herndon Stadium in
Atlanta. The sound of this single-microphone recording is startlingly clear
and RC’s performance raises the roof, especially his call-and-response with
Margie Hendrix on “(Night Time Is) The Right Time” and an epic six-minute version of “Drown in My Own Tears.” A joyful Jerry Wexler worked with Tom
Dowd to edit the tape into Ray’s second live album, Ray Charles in Person .
Both The Genius of Ray Charles and Ray Charles in Person made the Billboard
Top Twenty—a rare feat for a black artist in 1959. Along with Bobby
Darin, Ray Charles was one of the two best-selling artists on Atlantic Records.
But his contract was about to expire and Ray would soon be moving on.

THE ABC YEARS
When Ray Charles left Atlantic for ABC-Paramount at the end of 1959,
Ahmet and Jerry were hurt and angry but not really surprised. The backing of
two major entertainment corporations, the American Broadcasting Company
and Paramount Theaters, allowed the label—founded in 1955 and headed by
Sam Clark—to make RC an offer that Atlantic simply couldn’t match.
The new three-year contract gave Ray an advance of $50,000 per year and
75 percent of net sales after the label recouped its manufacturing and promotion
costs. Most important, Ray was granted both creative control and 100
percent ownership of his master recordings, which ABC-Paramount would
license for a period of just fi ve years after delivery. This was an unprecedented
achievement for a black artist—one never to be repeated even by future superstars
like James Brown, Stevie Wonder, or Michael Jackson.
Ray’s fi rst ABC-Paramount album, Genius Hits the Road , released in the
fall of 1960, became his fi rst Top Ten LP. It was also the fi rst in a series of RC
concept albums—this one based on songs about places (“Moonlight in Vermont,”
“California, Here I Come,” etc.)—and the singer’s fi rst full-length
collaboration with Sid Feller, his new producer/A&R man. The album’s indisputable
high point was “Georgia on My Mind.” Ray’s beautifully orchestrated
rendition made this song (written in 1930) into something much more
than just a nostalgic paean to the state of his birth. Coming from one who’d
traveled so far for so long, “Georgia” captured a profound sense of yearning
for home; it also invoked the collective spirit of all the black women who’d
nurtured and cared for the singer. “Georgia on My Mind” became Ray
Charles’s fi rst number one pop single as well as a number three R&B hit and
won two Grammy Awards. He would sing the song almost nightly for the rest
of his life.
By the end of the year, Ray’s performance fee was up to $1,500 per night
thanks to the effort of promoter Hal Zeiger, who was determined to present
RC as a “class act” who could play Carnegie Hall and the Hollywood Palladium
as successfully as any ghetto dancehall. Previously, Ray’s original songs
were published by Atlantic’s Progressive Music. But the creation of his own
Tangerine Music allowed RC to keep every dime earned from airplay royalties,
cover versions, and licensing fees. His touring band nearly doubled in
size, with every man on a regular weekly salary. RC was earning as much as $300,000 per year at a time when the annual per capita income for an African
American male was just $2,260.
Dedicated to You , comprising songs named for women (“Nancy,” “Margie,”
“Ruby,” and the like), reached number eleven on the Billboard chart.
Genius + Soul = Jazz (1961) was a snappy instrumental set with Ray on organ
backed by the Count Basie band; it was followed that same year by Ray
Charles & Betty Carter , a set of intimate duets. In July 1961, Ray and his
road band cut Percy Mayfi eld’s “Hit the Road Jack,” a minor-key song set to
an up-tempo groove. Mayfi eld’s clever, down-home lyrics cast Ray as a noaccount
lover begging not to be cast out by his girl, a role sung with convincing
fervor by Margie Hendrix. Tough and bluesy as any Atlantic track, “Hit
the Road Jack” epitomized the vocal interplay between RC and the Raeletts.
It shot to number one on the Hot 100 and topped the R&B Singles chart for
fi ve weeks.
In the spring of 1962, Ray released Modern Sounds in Country & Western
Music . This unprecedented collection comprised songs originally made famous
by (among others) Hank Williams, Eddie Arnold, and the Everly Brothers,
arranged either as lush ballads with orchestra and chorus or as bluesy bigband
numbers. Despite the initial misgivings of ABC executives, Modern
Sounds became the label’s fi rst million-selling album—a massive acrossthe-
board hit that held the number one position for fourteen weeks and
stayed on the chart for two years. RC’s version of Don Gibson’s “I Can’t Stop
Loving You” topped the Hot 100 for fi ve weeks; it became a number
one R&B hit and won the Grammy Award for Best Rhythm & Blues Recording.
Country radio programmers, however, simply ignored Ray’s landmark
achievement.
A true pop music event, “I Can’t Stop Loving You” inaugurated a year in
which Ray Charles scored four Top Ten pop singles and four Top Five albums
including the inevitable Modern Sounds in Country & Western Music (Volume
II) and the number two album Ingredients in a Recipe for Soul . Although
a consistent presence on both the Pop and R&B charts into the early 1970s,
Ray reached the pinnacle of his commercial success as a recording artist in the
period 1960–64. He founded the ABC-distributed Tangerine label to release
the recordings he produced for the Raeletts, the blues singer/songwriter Percy
Mayfi eld, and the brilliant jazz balladeer Jimmy Scott. To ensure a steady supply
of new material and publishing royalties, he signed talented writers such
as Jimmy Lewis to his own Tangerine Music.
Ray was still a heroin addict—albeit one protected by wealth, prestige, and
a personal retinue headed by his hawk-eyed new manager Joe Adams. He
endured police harassment and several minor busts but always managed to
avoid a jail term. On October 31, 1964, in Boston, Ray Charles was arrested
at Logan Airport. This time, there would be no easy way out.
RC’s private jet had landed before dawn and he’d been driven to his hotel,
where he realized that he’d left his drugs behind. The singer, who never entrusted anyone else with his stash, had his chauffeur return him to the airfi
eld to retrieve some of the marijuana and heroin he’d left on board. When
suspicious U.S. Customs agents stopped the two men on the tarmac, they
found pot and a small amount of white powder in Ray’s overcoat. A subsequent
search of the aircraft uncovered three ounces of heroin.
RC was released on his own recognizance, but the impact of the bust was
severe and immediate. The story made the front page of the Boston papers and
quickly spread throughout the international media. When Customs impounded
his plane, Ray’s agent was forced to cancel a string of cross-country dates and
the band members were laid off.
Between November 1964 and March 1966, Ray Charles took his longestever
hiatus from live performance. In the interim, Ray returned to Los Angeles
where he focused on moving Della Bea and their three sons (Robert, David,
and Ray Jr.) into a new home and his businesses into a new headquarters. One
of his only public appearances during this period came in December 1964,
when soul singer Sam Cooke was shot and killed by a motel manager in Los
Angeles. When Ray arrived at the funeral and heard the huge crowd call out
to him, he sat down at the piano and sang a heartbreaking impromptu version
of the gospel hymn “The Angels Keep Watching Over Me.”
Facing four narcotics charges handed down by a federal grand jury, RC
made the decision to quit heroin. On July 26, 1965, he entered St. Francis
Hospital in L.A. and endured four days of “cold turkey” withdrawal with its
attendant waves of nausea, chills, and diarrhea. As part of his therapy Ray
met three times per week with a psychiatrist, Dr. Friedrich Hacker, who
taught his patient the basics of chess—a game that RC loved and quickly
mastered. When the singer returned to the recording studio in October, the
result was Crying Time —“one of Ray’s true masterpieces, the self-portrait of
an artist in a season of despair. . . . Every track, every note, bears the scars of
experience.” 15 The title song, previously a country hit for Buck Owens,
reached number six Pop and won the Grammy Awards for Best Rhythm &
Blues Solo Vocal Performance and for Best Rhythm & Blues Recording.
Another track, the wry, witty soul-blues “Let’s Go Get Stoned,” became RC’s
tenth R&B number one.
On November 22 in federal court in Boston, Ray Charles pleaded guilty to
all charges. Prosecutors called for two years in prison and a hefty fi ne, but
Judge George Sweeney listened carefully to Dr. Hacker’s account of RC’s
determination to get off drugs and his thus-far-successful program of treatment
and rehabilitation. The judge offered to postpone the verdict for a year
if the defendant would agree to undergo regular examinations by governmentappointed
physicians. For Ray, the offer was a no-brainer. He knew he was
done with heroin for good. When the singer returned to court in November
1967, he received a fi ve-year suspended sentence, four years’ probation, and
a fi ne of $10,000. Ray never spent a day in prison and never touched heroin
again, although he continued to smoke marijuana on occasion. Later he favored a mixture of heavily sugared black coffee and Bols gin, which he
would sip throughout the day from a ceramic mug.
Throughout the latter half of the 1960s, Ray Charles maintained a rigorous
international touring schedule booked by the prestigious William Morris
Agency. He appeared on national television and recorded the title theme song
for the Academy Award–winning fi lm In the Heat of the Night . He amassed
a large personal fortune.
But the big hits tapered off after 1967. The interracial and cross-generational
audience Ray had brought together from the time of “I Got a Woman”
and “Swanee River Rock” through “I Can’t Stop Loving You” and “Crying
Time” had begun to fragment. Young black listeners had turned steadily
toward the sounds of Motown, James Brown, and Sly Stone; young whites,
toward the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and a host of new pop and rock performers
from both sides of the Atlantic. At the end of 1969, ABC declined to renew
Ray Charles’s recording contract although the company continued to distribute
his albums on the Tangerine label. ( Volcanic Action of My Soul and A
Message from the People , from 1971 and 1972 respectively, were two of RC’s
most successful post-ABC efforts both artistically and commercially.)
Unlike Sam Cooke, James Brown, or Nina Simone, Ray was not perceived
as an ardent supporter or a musical voice of the 1960s civil rights movement.
Although he bitterly condemned American racism in interviews, Ray’s
involvement in the freedom struggle didn’t go much beyond writing the occasional
check. As a self-made man, RC believed in the power of his music to
gradually break down society’s walls and to overcome fear and hatred among
people.

LATER YEARS
Over the course of the next decade, this singularly gifted artist came to be
taken largely for granted by American audiences. Ray Charles was like a president’s
face carved on Mount Rushmore: a revered but remote fi gure whose
legacy lay in the past. Ray himself was partly to blame. Too often, his live
show was a rote run-through of an over-familiar repertoire. His albums were
of uneven quality; he refused either to accept outside musical direction or to
curry favor with the press and the music industry.
Occasionally a special event or guest appearance would create a small stir
in the media and reintroduce RC to a new subset of listeners. One such
moment was his high-spirited stage jam with Aretha Franklin on “Spirit in the
Dark,” from her 1971 album Live at Fillmore West ; another was his brief but
lively screen performance in the 1980 box offi ce hit The Blues Brothers .
Off stage, Ray’s marriage was crumbling under the strain of his mood swings,
career pressures, and numerous affairs; he and Della Bea fi nally divorced
in 1978. In total, the singer fathered nine children outside his marriage.
They included Charles Wayne Robinson, Ray’s son by Margie Hendricks (she
died in 1973); and his youngest son, Corey Robinson den Bok, born in 1988.
A new deal with Ahmet Ertegun resulted in four albums on Atlantic Records.
But only the fi rst, True to Life , made the chart, peaking at number seventyeight
in 1977. The following year, Dial Press published Brother Ray: Ray
Charles’ Own Story , a frank if sketchy autobiography co-written with David
Ritz, and in 1979 Ray’s version of “Georgia on My Mind” was declared the
state’s offi cial song. Another positive note was struck in the spring of 1980
when PBS broadcast Ray Charles in concert with the Boston Pops Orchestra
conducted by John Williams. This well-received program led to many more
orchestral bookings, in which RC’s soul-stirring interpretation of “America
the Beautiful” was always an emotional high point.
Ray Charles was about to enjoy his last sustained run of radio hits—this
time, on the country airwaves. In 1982, he was signed to the Nashville division
of Columbia Records and released Wish You Were Here Tonight , selfproduced
mostly at the singer’s own RPM Studio in L.A. Although musically
bland and formulaic, the set received decent sales and engendered a Top 20
Country single in “Born to Love Me.” In 1984, Ray handed the reins to top
Nashville producer Billy Sherrill for Friendship , a collection of duets with
country stars like George Jones, Merle Haggard, and Ricky Skaggs. The result
was the most fully realized Ray Charles album in years and the number one
Country single “Seven Spanish Angels,” a mythic cowboy ballad sung with
Willie Nelson.
Ray’s country crossover reaffi rmed the transcendent appeal of his voice—an
instrument now readily available for hire in exchange for a substantial payday
or some valuable exposure. His fervent delivery stood out among the all-star
cast (including Michael Jackson, Bob Dylan, and Bruce Springsteen) that
recorded the chart-topping charity anthem “We Are the World” in 1985. Ray
performed “America the Beautiful” at Ronald Reagan’s second inauguration
and sang with Billy Joel on “Baby Grand,” an homage to RC included on
Joel’s 1986 Top Ten album The Bridge .
The awards and honors came in a steady stream. In 1986, Ray Charles was
named a Kennedy Center honoree and one of the inaugural inductees into
the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In 1987, he was given a Grammy Lifetime
Achievement Award by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences
(NARAS). In 1989, an RC duet with jazz singer Dee Dee Bridgewater
titled “ ’Til The Next Somewhere” became a number one hit all across
Europe.
These events seemed to set the stage for Ray to take one more shot at
American pop radio, and in late 1989 he got his chance with “I’ll Be Good to
You.” A high-tech, hip-hop fl avored duet with Chaka Khan, it was the fi rst
single released from Quincy Jones’s glossy all-star album Back on the Block .
The song topped the Billboard R&B/Hip-Hop Singles chart and reached number
eighteen on the Hot 100. “I’ll Be Good to You” propelled Back on the Block to platinum status and later won the Grammy Award for Best R&B
Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal.
Vast numbers of television viewers came to recognize Ray Charles from his
appearances in an ad campaign for Diet Pepsi that kicked off with the Super
Bowl XXIV telecast on January 28, 1990. The ad proved so popular that Pepsi
extended the campaign for almost two years, with RC starring in every installment.
Ray’s key line was “You got the right one, baby—uh-huh!” and in this
case he most certainly did: Pepsi paid the singer in seven fi gures and the catch
phrase briefl y entered the pop culture lexicon. Small children now recognized
Ray in airports, and he had to explain to reporters that a Diet Pepsi commercial
was not, in fact, the biggest or most signifi cant event of his long career.
Ray’s renewed visibility attracted the interest of Mo Ostin, the chairman of
Warner Bros. Records, who signed him to the label in 1990. Ostin was soon
disappointed by the two discs that resulted, Would You Believe? and My
World . Despite a costly and concerted media push by Warners and a Grammy
Award for “A Song for You” from My World , the albums received little exposure
on radio and only a half-hearted response from record buyers. Old friend
Quincy Jones released Ray’s Strong Love Affair on his own Warner-distributed
Qwest label in 1995, but the album was virtually ignored by audiences and
critics alike.
In 1997, a lavish fi ve-CD box set on Rhino Records titled Ray Charles:
Genius and Soul brought together the best and most popular recordings from
every phase of his career. Ray demanded and received an advance in excess
of $1 million for granting Rhino the right to reissue his post-1959 master
recordings. Two tracks culled from a Japan-only live album, “Till There Was
You” and “Am I Blue,” served to remind listeners that on any given night, RC
was still capable of a masterful and profoundly moving performance. Genius
and Soul earned overwhelmingly favorable media coverage and sold well
considering its high retail price.
In November 2004, Jet magazine published excerpts from an interview
with Reverend Robert Robinson—Ray’s second eldest son, now an ordained
minister. Robinson told the reporter that in December 2002, his father had
organized a luncheon in Los Angeles attended by all twelve of his children
(some had never met each other before) and that, at the conclusion of the
meal, Ray had presented each of his offspring with a check for $1 million.
In the summer of 2003, Ray Charles was diagnosed with hepatocellular
carcinoma, a form of liver cancer, and abruptly canceled all further live performances.
The singer underwent chemotherapy while he continued to work
on Genius Loves Company , a new album jointly backed by Concord Records
and HEAR Music, an offshoot of the Starbucks coffee chain. Veteran producers
John Burk and Phil Ramone were at the controls for this duets collection that
paired Ray with longtime admirers like Van Morrison, James Taylor, Johnny
Mathis, Natalie Cole, Elton John, and Bonnie Raitt. The songs were all standards
of one sort or another, including the Lowell Fulson blues classic “Sinner’s Prayer” (with B.B. King) and the Frank Sinatra anthem “It Was a
Very Good Year” (with Willie Nelson). RC revisited his own catalog of 1960s
hits to cut new versions of “Here We Go Again” with Norah Jones and “You
Don’t Know Me” with Diana Krall.
Ray’s indefatigable energy and iron constitution had borne him through
countless trials and triumphs, and he’d kept his illness hidden from all but his
inner circle. Thus, many friends and fans were shocked to see him in a wheelchair
when the singer made his fi nal public appearance on April 30, 2004, for
the dedication of his RPM Studios building at 2107 West Washington Boulevard
as a Los Angeles historic landmark.
In one of his last conversations with David Ritz, Ray spoke admiringly of
some of the great musicians he’d worked with over the years—not only Fathead
Newman and Hank Crawford but lesser-known and equally gifted players
like the saxophonists James Clay and Don Wilkerson and the trumpeters
Marcus Belgrave and Johnny Coles.
With the locomotive rush of his career and the intensity of his demands, RC
admitted that “I feel like I hurt people. I know I hurt people. Well, tell them
I’m not an asshole. Tell them I have feelings too. I can feel their feelings, man.
Tell them I appreciate them. Tell them . . . just tell them Brother Ray loves
them.” 16 Then he began to cry.
Ray Charles died at his home in Beverly Hills, California, on June 10, 2004,
at the age of seventy-three. The Reverend Robert Robinson presided over the
funeral on June 18 at the First African Methodist Episcopal Church. The more
than 1,200 mourners in attendance included actor/director Clint Eastwood,
singer Glen Campbell, and the Reverend Jesse Jackson; there were musical
tributes from Stevie Wonder, Willie Nelson, and B.B. King. Later, Ray’s body
lay in state at the Los Angeles Convention Center, where thousands of fans
slowly fi led past to pay their last respects.
Genius Loves Company was released on August 31 and entered the Billboard
chart at number two—the fi rst Ray Charles album to reach the Top Ten
since Sweet and Sour Tears in 1964. On February 13, 2005, Genius Loves
Company swept the Forty-Seventh Annual Grammy Awards, winning eight
categories including Album of the Year and Best Gospel Performance (for
“Heaven Help Us All,” featuring Gladys Knight) as well as Record of the Year
and Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals (both for “Here We Go Again”). The
album sold over three million copies in the United States alone.
On October 29, the biographical motion picture Ray was released in U.S.
theaters. Director Taylor Hackford and screenwriter James L. White didn’t
shy away from depicting RC’s womanizing and drug addiction, but the fi lm
emphasized Ray’s monumental artistic achievements and the struggle to
overcome his physical and social handicaps. Jamie Foxx won the Academy
Award for Best Actor for his uncanny performance in the title role; a talented
singer and pianist, Foxx mostly lip-synched to RC’s original recordings on
the soundtrack. As Ray was fi lling the theaters, rap star Kanye West’s “Gold Digger” (from
his album Late Registration ) was en route to becoming the nation’s best-selling
single. The song was built upon a vocal sample from “I Got a Woman,” RC’s
breakthrough hit of 1955, along with an a cappella introduction by Jamie
Foxx. “Gold Digger” was the second-longest-running number one of 2005,
spending ten weeks at the top, and won the Grammy Award for Best Rap Solo
Performance.

LEGACY
Ray Charles changed the sound of popular music by combining the melodies
and emotional fervor of African American gospel music with the secular lyrics
and earthy sensibility of the blues. He added elements of traditional pop,
jazz, and country music in the course of becoming the single most important
fi gure in the transition from the rhythm and blues of the 1950s to the soul
music of the 1960s. Charles was a gifted singer, pianist, arranger, and bandleader
who truly deserved his oft-bestowed appellation of “The Genius.”
He became an international star who put his unmistakable vocal imprint on
everything he sang, from low-down blues to Broadway show tunes to country
ballads.
Beyond his skills as a live performer and recording artist, Ray Charles
was a canny entrepreneur. He presided over a large touring organization;
produced and engineered recordings for himself and others in a custombuilt
studio; and founded his own recording, publishing, and management
companies. Between 1957 and 1989, Ray placed more than thirty songs in
the Top Forty of the Billboard Hot 100 and more than seventy on the
R&B singles chart. He earned a career total of seventeen Grammy
Awards.
Elton John, Billy Joel, Van Morrison, Michael McDonald (Doobie Brothers),
Richard Manuel (The Band), and Stevie Wonder all have acknowledged
Ray’s infl uence, either through their public statements or their recording of
songs long associated with him. (Wonder’s second album, issued in 1962, was
titled A Tribute to Uncle Ray .) Joe Cocker, Michael Bolton, and Gregg Allman
are among the many post-Beatles rock and pop vocalists who owe a clear
stylistic debt to RC’s sound and style. Singer Taylor Hicks’s victory in the
2006 season of “American Idol” was due in part to his convincing take on
Ray’s eternal “Georgia on My Mind.”
“The variety and vitality” of Ray Charles’s lifetime output “have been staggering
and [have] permanently affected the course of popular music,” wrote
author and musicologist Lee Hildebrand. “While he charted little new musical
territory after the mid-1960s, he had clearly demonstrated that the diverse
strains of American music, though divided by ethnic, regional, and class distinctions,
were all parts of a common cultural heritage.” 17

TIMELINE
September 23, 1930
Ray Charles Robinson is born in Albany, Georgia.
October 23, 1937
He enrolls at the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind in St. Augustine, Florida.
Schoolmates give him the nickname RC.
October 1945
Ray Charles Robinson moves Jacksonville, Florida, to fi nd work as a professional
musician.
March 1948
RC moves to Seattle, Washington, to join guitarist Gossie McKee in the McSon Trio.
April 9, 1949
Released on Down Beat Records of Los Angeles, “Confession Blues” by the Maxin Trio
enters the Billboard R&B Singles chart, featuring Ray Charles Robinson on lead vocal
and piano. The song peaks at number two and remains on the chart for eleven weeks.
May 1950
RC relocates to Los Angeles. For professional purposes, he drops his last name and is
known hereafter as Ray Charles.
February 10, 1951
“Baby Let Me Hold Your Hand” on Swingtime Records is the fi rst song credited to
Ray Charles to enter the Billboard R&B Singles chart. It reaches number fi ve and remains
on the chart for six weeks.
June 1952
Ahmet Ertegun of Atlantic Records buys out RC’s contract from Swingtime for
$2,500.
September 8, 1952
Ray Charles’s fi rst Atlantic recording session in New York.
April 3, 1954
“It Should’ve Been Me” is the fi rst Ray Charles single on Atlantic to enter the R&B
chart. It reaches number fi ve and remains on the chart for nine weeks.
January 22, 1955
“I’ve Got a Woman” enters the chart and soon becomes RC’s fi rst number one R&B
single. The song combines gospel with rhythm and blues and is a prototype of a new
style called “soul music.”
April 5, 1955
Ray Charles marries Della Bea Howard in Dallas, Texas. She is the mother of his sons
Robert, David, and Ray Jr.
November 11, 1957
“Swanee River Rock (Talkin’ ’Bout That River)” enters the R&B chart and later becomes
the fi rst Ray Charles single to enter the Billboard Hot 100 (Pop chart), reaching
number thirty-four.
July 5, 1958
RC makes his fi rst appearance at the Newport Jazz Festival in Newport, Rhode Island.
The show is recorded and later issued as the Atlantic LP Ray Charles at Newport .
February 18, 1959
RC records “What’d I Say” in New York. Released in July, it becomes his fi rst millionseller
and the biggest-selling single in the twelve-year history of Atlantic Records,
reaching number one R&B and number six Pop.
November 1, 1959
Ray Charles signs a new long-term recording contract with ABC-Paramount that,
among other favorable terms, grants him ultimate ownership of his master recordings.
February 1960
The Genius of Ray Charles (Atlantic) is the artist’s fi rst LP to enter the Billboard
chart. It peaks at number seventeen and remains on the chart for eighty-two weeks.
November 14, 1960
“Georgia on My Mind” becomes RC’s second million-seller and the fi rst of three Ray
Charles singles to reach number one on the Hot 100. The song spends eighteen weeks
on the chart including fi ve weeks at number one.
December 3, 1960
RC’s fi rst album for ABC, The Genius Hits the Road , reaches number nine on the
Billboard chart. His fi rst Top Ten LP, it stays on the chart for fi fty weeks.
April 12, 1961
At the third annual Grammy Awards, “Georgia on My Mind” by Ray Charles wins
Best Vocal Performance, Single Record or Track—Male and Best Performance by a
Pop Single Artist. The Genius Hits the Road wins for Best Vocal Performance, Male,
and RC’s recording of “Let the Good Times Roll” wins for Best R&B Performance.
May 1961
Ray Charles headlines at Carnegie Hall in New York for the fi rst time in his career.
October 9, 1961
“Hit the Road Jack,” written by Percy Mayfi eld, becomes the second Ray Charles
single to top the Hot 100 (for two weeks) and the number one R&B song for fi ve
weeks.
April 21, 1962
Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music by Ray Charles enters the Billboard
chart. By July, it is the number one album in the country and remains on the chart for
101 weeks including 14 weeks at Number One.
June 2, 1962
“I Can’t Stop Loving You,” the fi rst single from Modern Sounds in Country and Western
Music , becomes RC’s third number one Pop hit. It tops the Hot 100 for fi ve weeks
and the R&B chart for ten weeks.
November 17, 1962
Ray Charles’s recording of “You Are My Sunshine” enters the Hot 100, where it
reaches number seven and also tops the R&B chart for three weeks.
October 31, 1964
RC is arrested at Logan Airport in Boston, and later indicted by a federal grand jury
on four charges related to possession of heroin and marijuana.
July 26, 1965
The singer enters a heroin withdrawal program at St. Francis Hospital in Los Angeles.
November 1967
Having pleaded guilty to all charges, RC receives a fi ve-year suspended sentence, four
years on probation, and a $10,000 fi ne.
March 2, 1967
In the ninth annual Grammy Awards, Ray Charles’s hit single “Crying Time” (number
six Pop/number fi ve R&B) is named Best R&B Recording and Best R&B Solo Vocal
Performance, Male.
December 1972
RC’s fi nal album through ABC Records, Through The Eyes of Love , peaks at number
186 on the Billboard chart.
April 24, 1979
Ray Charles’s version of “Georgia on My Mind” is declared “the offi cial song of the
State of Georgia.”
June 20, 1980
The Blues Brothers , directed by Jon Landis, opens in U.S. theaters. Ray Charles plays
“Ray,” a streetwise storeowner, and performs “Shake a Tail Feather.”
January 21, 1985
RC performs during festivities for the second inauguration of President Ronald
Reagan.
April 23, 1985
“Seven Spanish Angels,” a duet by Ray Charles and Willie Nelson, reaches number
one on the Billboard Hot Country Singles chart.
January 23, 1986
Quincy Jones inducts Ray Charles into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at the organization’s
fi rst induction dinner, held in New York City.
March 2, 1988
The National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS) presents RC with a
Lifetime Achievement Award at the Thirtieth Annual Grammy Awards.
January 27, 1990
“I’ll Be Good to You,” a Quincy Jones–produced duet by Ray Charles and Chaka
Khan, reaches number eighteen on the Hot 100—RC’s fi rst Top 30 Pop hit since
1967.
February 21, 1991
The Rhythm and Blues Foundation presents RC with its Legend Award at a ceremony
in New York.
March 1, 1994
Ray Charles wins his twelfth career Grammy Award, for “A Song for You” as Best
Male R&B Performance, in the Thirty-Sixth Annual Grammy Awards.
March 2, 1995
Ray Charles is given the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Rhythm and Blues Foundation’s
annual Pioneer Awards.
April 30, 2004
Ray Charles makes his fi nal public appearance when his RPM Studios building at
2107 West Washington Boulevard is declared a Los Angeles historic landmark.
June 10, 2004
At the age of seventy-three, Ray Charles dies of hepatocellular carcinoma, a form of
liver cancer, at his home in Beverly Hills, California.
August 31, 2004
Genius Loves Company enters the Billboard Top 200 at number two—the fi rst Ray
Charles album to reach the Top 10 since Sweet and Sour Tears in 1964. The twelve
tracks feature Ray in duet performances with Natalie Cole, Elton John, Norah Jones,
Gladys Knight, B.B. King, Johnny Mathis, Van Morrison, Bonnie Raitt, and James
Taylor, among others.
February 13, 2005
In the Forty-Seventh Annual Grammy Awards, Genius Loves Company wins in eight
categories including Album of the Year and Best Gospel Performance (for “Heaven
Help Us All,” featuring Gladys Knight) as well as Record of the Year and Best Pop
Collaboration with Vocals (both for “Here We Go Again,” featuring Norah Jones).