Even today, the echoes of Ray Charles can be heard in almost every soul song.
But who was the man himself, and how did he become such an icon?
Here's a look at the life and legacy of the Father of Soul.
Ray Charles began to lose his vision as a very young child. One day, his eyes began leaking,
and his mother took him to the local doctors, who said Charles was going blind — without giving
any explanation as to why. The root cause has widely been reported to be glaucoma.
Charles was feeling intense pain in his right eye by age seven,
which resulted in the eye having to be removed altogether, rendering him completely blind.
"And with some of the news I hear about today, there are some things I absolutely don't wanna
see. No, really. And I feel sorry for you guys who have to put up with it."
Shortly thereafter, Charles was sent to the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind.
Despite the fact that many of the students could not see one another,
the school was segregated, and the Black students were situated in inferior facilities.
While attending the school, Charles learned to read, write,
and arrange music in Braille. He also learned to play several instruments,
but refused to learn the guitar in an attempt to avoid the stereotypical
image he had in his mind of the blind blues singer begging for change. He later said:
"Now it's important that you understand that there were three things I never wanted to own when I was
a kid: a dog, a cane, and a guitar. In my brain, they each meant blindness and helplessness."
As a teenager, Charles headed to live with friends of his family in Jacksonville,
Florida, which was the nearest metropolis to his boarding school. The 15-year-old went into
the city with some old clothes, a clarinet, and less than two dollars in his pocket.
He joined the musicians' union in Jacksonville and began to play shows, despite being underage.
Soon, he was headed to Orlando with a bandleader to play a string of shows there — but after they
arrived, the dates fell through, and Charles was stuck in the town. He later explained:
"It wasn't by choice. We got stranded,
and the guy didn't have the money to get back to Jacksonville."
Before long, Charles was renting a room for $3 a month, playing Black clubs for little pay,
and pooling his money with fellow musicians to help buy food. According to Charles:
"Sometimes you'd work in these places and don't get paid. Don't feel just because
you worked there you got your money [...] You didn't have no money anyway,
so you might as well go and take the chance that you might get paid."
By the age of 18, Ray Charles had moved to Seattle, Washington. There,
he met someone who would become a lifelong friend and collaborator:
Quincy Jones, who was just 15 years old at the time.
Charles and Jones formed a partnership and began playing together at small clubs and weddings.
In a 2018 interview for The Hollywood Reporter, Jones revealed that Charles
also introduced him to heroin when he was a teenager. He recalled how he and Charles
would play at "bebop jam sessions" in the late 1940s, telling the outlet:
"When they finished playing they'd go over in the corner and they had it on their thumb.
I just snuck in the line and got me a little hit."
Jones also revealed that the pair bought drugs from the minister and civil rights leader
Malcolm X, who went by the pseudonym "Detroit Red." But Jones quit taking heroin after five
months, when he got a wake-up call in the form of a serious fall. He said:
"The mistakes are what help you grow and learn.
That was a big one. [...] Thank God we did it and got it over with."
In a 2010 interview for Reuters, Jones called Charles "an amazing human being,"
adding that his friend was:
"A true innovator who revolutionized music and the business of music. [...] We spent a lot of
time talking and dreaming about things that brothers had never done before."
In 1959, Ray Charles left his label, Atlantic Records, and joined ABC-Paramount Records after
the latter offered him higher royalties and ownership of his master recordings. The deal
allowed him to launch own record label, Tangerine, and his music publishing companies, Tangerine
Music and Racer Music, which gave him considerable control over his career and creative output.
As the years went on, Charles wrote more than 200 songs, including multiple number-one and
Grammy-winning hits, and hired a big band to support him onstage. On the side, he managed other
artists and set up The Ray Charles Foundation to help individuals with hearing disabilities. Soul
singer Solomon Burke, who was at Atlantic at the same time as Charles, later said:
"He really was a genius. He did things the way he wanted."
Most people know Ray Charles as a pioneer of soul music,
but only some know he played a major role in popularizing the country genre.
Growing up in Georgia, Charles was sometimes allowed to stay up late to listen to the Grand
Ole Opry on the radio on Saturday nights. In his 1978 autobiography, he wrote:
"I just wanted to try my hand at hillbilly music. After all,
the Grand Ole Opry had been performing inside my head since I was a kid in the country."
When Charles decided to make a foray into country music, he was met with skepticism
from record executives, who predicted a commercial flop. But Charles followed his heart and released
Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, volumes one and two, in 1962. Both albums
turned out to be a major, chart-topping success among longtime and new listeners,
pushing against the idea of the genre being dominated by white artists and audiences.
By 1983, Charles was performing at the Grand Ole Opry himself,
and even earned a standing ovation. Charles' close friend, Willie Nelson, later told the Tennessean:
"When Ray did 'I Can't Stop Loving You,' that was probably the time when country music was
heard by more people than ever before. He kicked country music forward 50 years."
Ray Charles began using heroin when he was 18 years old, and was addicted to the
drug for the next 17 years. He was busted for possession for the first time on November 17th,
1956, backstage after a show in Philadelphia. Charles' manager bailed him out, and his
lawyer ultimately managed to have all charges dropped, reportedly in exchange for $6,000.
But that incident wasn't enough to get Charles to stop using.
As music journalist and producer Jerry Wexler once explained:
"There wasn't an instance where his addiction interfered with his work. When it came to Ray's
professionalism, there could be no grounds for complaint. He worked his ass off."
Charles was arrested again in 1965,
allegedly for possession of a planeload of heroin. He reportedly spent three
months in medical and psychiatric treatment in California and took a year off from touring.
"I didn't commit myself to cure myself,
I went to hospital because it was the right thing for me to do under the circumstances."
Record executive Ron Granger later told Rolling Stone:
"He took that year off to kick it. It took a year."
During a 1970 interview for Playboy magazine, a journalist asked Charles
whether he might be an inspiration for his fans to overcome addiction. The singer replied:
"Bulls--t. Everybody's aware that cigarettes probably cause cancer,
but how many people do you think would give them up just because Ray Charles stopped smoking?"
In his autobiography, Ray Charles wrote:
"Cigarettes and smack are the two truly addictive habits I've known. (You might add women.)"
Charles had lost his virginity when he was just 12 years old, to a woman eight years his senior.
The effect this had on him is largely unknown, but as an adult,
Charles' self-proclaimed "addiction" only grew. He even once wrote:
"Being blind keeps me honest about sex. In fact,
if I'm forced to choose between a beautiful woman and a homely one — sight unseen — I
suppose I'd select the gal without the looks. That's because the gorgeous chicks sometimes
take the attitude that they're doing you a favor by letting you make love to them."
One thing Charles was less crazy about, it seems, was using protection. As a result,
he fathered 12 children with 10 different women.
In 1981, Ray Charles performed at the Sun City Resort in South Africa. This wouldn't have been
a particularly controversial thing to do, had it not been in the midst of the international
backlash to the country's apartheid regime. At the time, the United Nations had sanctioned a
cultural boycott of the racially divided state, which Charles defied with his performances.
The UN boycott was supported by the African National Congress and activist movements
including the Black Consciousness Movement, which vocalized its opposition to Charles' appearances.
When Charles defied the sanction and its supporting movements,
he was met with protests in South Africa and throughout North America.
In response, the United Nations compiled a blacklist of entertainers who had defied the
cultural boycott, which included the Beach Boys, Cher, and Frank Sinatra,
along with Charles himself. A statement from the UN Center Against Apartheid read:
"Some of the collaborators had perhaps visited South Africa because of ignorance of the
situation, or lure of exorbitant fees, [while] others have shown deliberate insensitivity or
hostility to the legitimate aspirations of the oppressed people of South Africa."
Many of the other entertainers on the list apologized, but Charles refused to do so
and instead instructed his critics to, in his words, "kindly kiss [his] far end."
While treating Ray Charles for heroin addiction in 1965,
one of the musician's doctors taught him how to play chess. Charles would even
challenge fellow patients to chess games when he couldn't sleep. As he later said:
"We'd sit up late at night, and he beat the hell out of me, but I learned.
See, you always learn when people beat you 'cause you pay attention and find out why."
Charles' chess board was designed for visually impaired players,
featuring raised dark squares and lowered light squares, as well as sharper dark
pieces and rounder white pieces. The musician once told Chess Life columnist Larry Evans:
"I love to play chess. I play with my hands."
Charles challenged fellow musicians and friends,
and once referred to country musician and friend Willie Nelson as his "chess partner." He said:
"We start with the same pieces in the same places.
You've got to outwit, outthink, and outmaneuver the other person."
Charles' chess set was even put on display at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame from 1986 to 2005.
The iconic musician Billy Joel once said:
"This may sound like sacrilege, but I think Ray Charles was more important than Elvis Presley."
This kind of praise will come as no surprise to people who know Joel's influences well,
however. In fact, Joel would even sometimes impersonate Charles
during his own live performances. As he once told the New York Times:
”Ray Charles was my hero when I was growing up.
As good a pianist or as big a star as I could ever become, I could never be Ray Charles,
who is a total natural and one of the greatest singers of all time."
"Ray Charles bridged the gap from blues to rock and roll and country-western."
In 1985, Joel named his daughter, Alexa Ray, after the musician.
After Charles heard about his namesake from Quincy Jones, he reached out to Joel to discuss
a potential collaboration, which became the 1986 song "Baby Grand." Joel told the Times:
"[Charles] sent word that he would love to record with me if I had the right song.
I was so excited that that very night I sat down and wrote 'Baby Grand,'
and polished it up the next morning. It was one of those rare songs [...] that
[seems] to come all at once — it seemed almost as though I had heard it before."
Joel and Charles had their first recording session in Los Angeles. Joel recalled:
"I started singing very tentatively. And Ray, assuming that's what I wanted,
came in sounding like me — a white kid from Hicksville. When we started it again,
I did my Ray Charles imitation, and Ray kicked in as Ray — the rest was smooth sailing."
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