Ray Charles

Ray Charles: The Man Who Married the Church to the Bar

Frank Sinatra called him "the only true genius in show business," and the label attached so firmly that it became a brand. What Charles actually did to earn it was an act of splicing. In late 1954 he took the shape of a gospel hymn, put a secular lyric on top of it, and released "I've Got a Woman." Churches were appalled. Soul music started there.

Greenville, Florida

Charles was born on 23 September 1930 in Albany, Georgia, to Bailey Robinson, a labourer, and Aretha Robinson, a laundress, and grew up in Greenville, Florida. Two events defined the childhood. His younger brother George drowned in their mother's laundry tub at the age of four, and at around four or five Charles began to lose his sight, becoming completely blind by seven, most likely from glaucoma. His mother died in the spring of 1945, when he was fourteen. He later called those two deaths the two great tragedies of his life.

The School for the Blind

From 1937 to 1945 he attended the Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind in St. Augustine, and what he received there was not a consolation but a conservatory training. He learned piano, alto saxophone, clarinet, trumpet and organ. He studied classical repertoire - Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Sibelius. Above all he learned to read and write music in Braille, a process requiring him to feel a passage with one hand while playing it with the other, holding the rest in his head. Every arrangement he later dictated to a band rested on that habit of memory.

The Climb

He moved to Tampa in 1947, modelling himself closely on Nat King Cole, then to Seattle in 1948, where he met the producer Robert Blackwell and befriended a teenage Quincy Jones. "Confession Blues" reached number two on the Billboard R&B chart in 1949. He settled in Los Angeles in 1950, and in 1952 Atlantic Records bought out his contract for 2,500 dollars. "Mess Around" in 1953 was his first modest Atlantic hit; "I've Got a Woman" in late 1954 went to number two R&B and changed the vocabulary of American popular music. "This Little Girl of Mine" and "A Fool for You" followed in 1955. In 1958 he cut the jazz album The Great Ray Charles, recorded Soul Brothers with the vibraphonist Milt Jackson, and assembled the backing singers he renamed the Raelettes. Then, in 1959, "What'd I Say" - gospel, jazz, blues and Latin rhythm in a single record - reached number six on the pop chart and number one R&B, his first top-ten pop hit.

Georgia, Nashville and Control

Moving to ABC in 1960 bought him something rarer than money: he became one of the first Black musicians granted artistic control by a mainstream record company. "Georgia on My Mind" was the first fruit and won four Grammys; "Hit the Road Jack" won another. By 1961 he was fronting a big band and had become, for years, the best-selling jazz artist in France. Then in 1962 he did the thing nobody wanted him to do. Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music - a Black R&B star singing Nashville material at the height of segregation - topped the Billboard 200, and "I Can't Stop Loving You" held number one on the pop chart for five weeks and the R&B chart for ten. He founded his own label, Tangerine, the same year. "Busted" and "Take These Chains from My Heart" followed in 1963, "Let's Go Get Stoned" in 1966, "Here We Go Again" in 1967, and in 1972 the gospel-inflected "America the Beautiful" that Barack Obama would later call "the most patriotic piece of music ever performed."

Seventeen Years

Charles tried marijuana at eighteen and was addicted to heroin for seventeen years. He was arrested in 1955, again in Harlem in 1958, and in Indianapolis in 1961, where the case collapsed over a faulty warrant. On Halloween 1964 he was arrested at Boston's Logan Airport with heroin. He checked into St. Francis Hospital in Lynwood, California, for withdrawal, pleaded guilty, and received a five-year suspended sentence, four years' probation and a 10,000-dollar fine. He never used again.

Why Ray Is Called a Genius

Sinatra's phrase is the origin of the title, and it is worth being honest about what it was: a showbiz compliment, not an analysis, and one the industry promptly turned into packaging. The defensible version of the claim is narrower and more interesting. Charles's distinctive cognitive act was category recombination - he heard structural equivalence between musical forms that mid-century America insisted were opposites, and had the nerve to execute the merger commercially. Gospel harmony under a lyric about a woman. Country songs sung by a Black R&B singer in 1962. Latin rhythm inside an electric-piano blues. Each of those was a judgement about what a form actually is beneath its social labelling, and each was right.

The counter-case is that this is taste and courage rather than intellect. Charles was not a theorist; he invented no harmonic system and left no body of technical innovation the way a Coltrane did. He was a synthesist and, above all, a performer, and the critic Henry Pleasants located his power somewhere below language entirely: "It is either the singing of a man whose vocabulary is inadequate to express what is in his heart and mind or of one whose feelings are too intense for satisfactory verbal or conventionally melodic articulation." What tips the balance back is the training - a blind child reading Bach in Braille, playing five instruments, arranging for a big band from memory - and the consistency. He made the same kind of correct, unpopular structural judgement for fifty years. Billy Joel's version: "This may sound like sacrilege, but I think Ray Charles was more important than Elvis Presley."

Legacy

Charles won seventeen Grammys from thirty-seven nominations, five of them posthumously, and took the Lifetime Achievement Award in 1987. He placed thirty-three singles in the Hot 100 top forty, sixty-one in the R&B top forty and eight in the country top forty; ten of his recordings sit in the Grammy Hall of Fame. He was among the inaugural inductees to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986 and received the Kennedy Center Honors the same year, the National Medal of Arts from Bill Clinton in 1993, and the Polar Music Prize in 1998. Georgia adopted "Georgia on My Mind" as its official state song in 1979. He died on 10 June 2004 in Beverly Hills, aged 73, of complications from liver failure; his final album, Genius Loves Company, was released posthumously and won eight Grammys. In 2022 he became only the third African-American inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame - sixty years after the record that made it necessary.