By Chris Albertson

The country had danced its last Charleston and the Roaring Twenties had disappeared into history when Ray Charles Robinson opened his eyes in Albany, Georgia, and uttered his first, no-doubt soulful, cry. Meanwhile, in New York, the air still carried the smell of magnesium flashes that had greeted the first aviators to fly over from Paris, while the air in Hollywood carried only perfume and the smell of success--Norma Shearer's Oscar for The Divorcee was probably developing its first layer of patina, and Garbo was learning her lines for Grand Hotel. The country had stumbled into the Great Depression, a fact that had some Wall Street speculators exiting by the window, but made little or no difference to anyone living in abject poverty. The latter applied to the family into which Ray Charles was born, September 23, 1930.

Charles’ life--he dropped his last name to avoid being confused with boxer "Sugar" Ray Robinson--is an American success story, a rags to riches tale that moves along a familiar show business path, but also takes some twists and turns of its own. However, it is not so much his climb from the bottom rung of the economic ladder that impresses us as it is the enormous impact of his artistry on several genres of music. As the mere turn of a TV or radio dial often demonstrates, fame and fortune are today readily obtained with minimal artistic talent, but Ray Charles belongs to that rare breed of artists whose creativity comes from deep within, whose emotions are not fabricated, whose music reflects true joys and sorrows. Louis Armstrong, Edith Piaf, Bessie Smith, Carlos Gardel and Billie Holiday were such artists, people who touched their audiences with the magnetism of their persona and the sincerity of their artistic expressions. They had what we might call "soul," a term to which Ray Charles gave new meaning when he emerged on the national music scene, in the Fifties.

Blinded by a form of glaucoma at age seven and orphaned eight years later, his had been a childhood of tragic events and circumstances that transcended his being born poor and black in a country that uses economic status and skin color to measure human worth. Paradoxically, this is also a country where even the most disadvantaged can achieve the stuff that dreams are made of, and if ever there was living proof of that, Ray Charles is it. Credit not only his considerable musical talent, but also his stamina and an enviable positive attitude towards life. As one writer recently observed, Ray Charles' delivery is so comforting that he makes even bad times sound good.

The memories of the early years--the slow-growing blindness, witnessing his younger brother’s accidental drowning, and the loss of his parents, five years apart--certainly must linger on, but, having successfully engaged the obstacle course, Charles has breezed with remarkable alacrity through the finishing line, and beyond. The suffering fate inflicted on him in the years of his youth certainly surfaces in Charles' music from time to time, but any bitterness--if, indeed, it exists at all--is tactfully kept away from his audiences. “People should never be bitter,” he told a reporter for London's Melody Maker, “because that accomplishes nothing. Instead, they should learn to fight for themselves and go out into the world.” That formula has obviously worked for Charles, who attended St. Augustine's School for the Deaf and Blind in Orlando, Florida until he was fifteen and, with his mother's admonition in mind, moved on to seek a better life for himself. “You are blind, not stupid,” she had told him. “You lost your sight, not your mind.”

Having a keen ear for music, he easily learned to play the piano and saxophone at St. Augustine’s, and left the school with enough expertise on these instruments to land jobs with various dance bands that toured Florida and Georgia. Resourceful and doggedly determined, he even managed to wangle a membership card from the musicians union by adding a few years to his age.

Having saved up enough money to make a substantial move, geographically, Charles picked Seattle, because--he told Whitney Balliett in a New Yorker profile--it was “a nice-sized city the furthest from where I was.” Chicago or New York would have been logical stops for a blues-oriented performer seeking a career in music, but these cities scared Charles.

In Seattle, he formed a group called the Maxim Trio, and started to make a name for himself with a style that bore deliberate similarity to those of Nat King Cole and Charles Brown. Cole’s trio and Brown’s Three Blazers were doing rather well at the time, so emulating them was an easy way to make money, but there was a limit to how long Charles could go on sacrificing his artistic integrity--soon the real Ray Charles had to emerge. Recordings made in 1949 show his gospel-tinged, mellow blues style in its formative stages. Even then, his voice had the plaintive quality that has since become a trademark, a gentle urgency that wrings the emotions dry as readily as it moves the body. It is easy to understand why Ray Charles now was beginning to attract the attention not only of youthful fans, but also such veteran performers as Lil Armstrong, whose song, “Just For a Thrill,” he would include in a best-selling 1959 album. “I think it was at the Apollo, but I can’t be sure where,” said the one-time pianist of Louis Armstrong’s legendary Hot Five group as she tried to recall her first meeting with Charles in a 1961 interview. “I know it was very early, I mean he wasn’t known at all, but what a voice! He was singing some slow blues, and it was like a spiritual I used to hear when I was going to Fisk [University], but it had something else, and it took me a while to figure out what it was. Now, I’m not saying that the Fisk Jubilee Singers didn’t have soul, but Ray Charles had kind of stirred up the soul a little bit--every word tore you up and made you get goose bumps.”

More and more people were sharing that feeling. Throughout 1949 and well into the following year, Charles recorded for Swingtime, a small Los Angeles-based label, first with the trio, then with small bands that included such jazz players as Teddy Buckner, Jack McVea, Marshall Royal, Oscar Moore and Stanley Turrentine. During that period, he also toured extensively with blues singer/guitarist Lowell Fulson, another Swingtime artist, and he was beginning to experiment with an engaging mixture of modern black Pentacostal church music and romping, earthy rhythm and blues.

When this combination of sacred and secular sounds eventually came to be known as “soul” music, a new euphemism was added to the American language. We had soul brothers and sisters with whom we ate soul food and listened to soul jazz on soul labels (the old “race” records in new dress), and many of us even climbed aboard TV’s Soul Train once a week, to watch some soul dancing.

In the early Fifties, Charles caught the ear of Atlantic Records, a jazz label that now also was gravitating toward rhythm and blues--his eclectic style was perfect for the label, for it seemed to fit somewhere betwixt and between the two idioms. For two years, Atlantic released Ray Charles recordings without notable success, but then something happened and suddenly everything Ray Charles had been cooking up came to a boil. It was late 1954 when Charles called Atlantic and asked Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler to come and hear his band in Atlanta. “Except for Ray and the band, the place [the Peacock nightclub] was empty,” Wexler recalled four years later, “and as soon as we walked in, Ray counted off and they hit into “I’ve Got a Woman,” and that was it.” Indeed, it was. Before returning to New York, Ertegun and Wexler had recorded “Woman” and three other selections in a borrowed radio studio, and Ray Charles had his first real hit, a 16-bar tune with unmistakable gospel chord progressions. It represented the Ray Charles soul recipe in its most basic form, and led to a string of hits that caught the imagination of an unusually broad spectrum of music fans. Even more followers came to the fold as Charles expanded the formula to include backup singers--the Raelets--and strings. Other black artists were on the same track, but they steered toward black audiences while Charles seemed to set course for the whole world; he even gained the respect of the white campus jazz crowd, at a time when it was “in” to show disdain for commercial success, and the walls separating jazz and pop music seemed impenetrable. Nat King Cole had made a successful cross-over, but his was a one-way trip, and as the commercial music world embraced him, Charles’ “defection” was considered traitorous by jazz purists. Charles, on the other hand, straddled a number of fences: he impressed jazz fans with his incisive piano and alto saxophone playing on recordings with Milt Jackson, Kenny Burrell and Bobby Brookmeyer; hit the middle of the roa Of course, Charles did not single-handedly invent soul music, nor was he the first to bring a little church onto the dance floor, but when he took the barrel house and boogie woogie styles of players like Piano Red (Rufus Perryman) and Cripple Clarence Lofton, threw in some gospel progressions, sprinkled the steamy stew with rhythmic tambourine tinkles, accented it with shouts and served it with a spicy garnish of backup vocals, the result was a new and exciting hybrid, a joyous, stompy meeting of heaven and hell. As Henry Pleasants observed in his book The Great American Popular Singers (Simon & Schuster, 1974), Charles “released it [soul or gospel singing], as an idiom, from the confines of storefront Holiness and Sanctified churches, introduced it to a wider secular public, both black and white, and prepared the way for the subsequent secular success of many singers reared in gospel, among them Ruth Brown, Sam Cooke, Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, Lou Rawls and Dionne Warwicke.” He also opened the door for such pianists as Les McCann, Ray Bryant and Ramsey Lewis, who boogied to the bank with the Ray Charles blend, and he certainly influenced the sound of such popular small bands as the Jazztette, the Jazz Crusaders, and groups led by Cannonball Adderley and Horace Silver in the Sixties.

Charles stayed under contract to Atlantic until 1959. The relationship was a mutually beneficial one, culminating in the releases of an extraordinary single, “What'd I Say?,” and The Genius Of Ray Charles, a best-selling album that not only brought him his nickname but virtually tore off its hinges the door to middle-of-the-road success. The next move was to accept an offer from the ABC Paramount label, which soon yielded one of Charles’ most memorable ballad performances, “Georgia On My Mind.” But there was more to come, more hits and more pioneering.

In 1962, Charles broke further ground by recording in a decidedly black style an album of such country &western songs as “Born To Lose” and “I Can’t Stop Loving You.” Cries of commercial sell-out were heard from critics and fans who felt betrayed by the messiah of soul, but, again, Charles emerged with his integrity intact; the album was enormously successful and it proved, in a most eloquent way, the folly of placing music into strictly defined categories. The idea of a black man singing country songs seemed offbeat at the time, but, quiet as it was kept, there were black cowboys, too. To Charles it was a perfectly logical blend of idioms; he had enjoyed listening to the Grand Old Opry radio shows in his younger days, and he had even performed country music--and learned to yodel--while working with the Florida Playboys, a white hillbilly group. “When I heard him sing those country songs, all I could think of was how foolish we are to think that certain songs belong only to certain people,” said Alberta Hunter, who herself was a bit of a musical chameleon. “I mean, he puts so much feeling into them that you can’t help but like them, and the words fit everybody.” The success of Charles’ country soul broadened his audience and helped to weaken racial barriers as it cleared a path for such singers as Charley Pride, who has often acknowledged the debt.

There are those who maintain that if Charles were to sing the Salt Lake City yellow pages the message would lose none of the urgency with which he imbues his performances. Not so, says he, citing the “Star Spangled Banner,” “Nature Boy,” and “Stardust” as examples of songs he can’t get any feeling for.

When he first came along, in the mid-Fifties, Charles’ organic no-nonsense sounds offered welcome relief from the bland, predictable pop fare of Eddie Fisher and the Crew Cuts, and, as the decade ended, even the Platters, The Fleetwoods and Chubby Checker failed to approach the shattering intensity “What'd I Say?” By the end of the Sixties, Ray Charles had come to symbolize raw, driving black pop music; wonderful things had been heard from Wilson Pickett, Solomon Burke, the Motown gang and the incomparable Aretha Franklin, to mention just a few of the artists whose performances could match or equal Charles’, but he remained the uncontested guru of soul.

Ray Charles has also experienced setbacks in his adult life, bouts with narcotics among them, but his story continues to be a triumphant one. A wealthy man, he could have retired a long time ago, but the show goes on--Raelets, big band and all--as he tours for nine months out of the year, flying in one of his two airplanes and working out of a Los Angeles building he owns. He also continues to record--now for Columbia, where his most recent release was his first Christmas album--and his television appearances in the Eighties have ranged from his own special to a guest shot on the Knight Rider series, and lighthearted performances on Saturday Night Live and in commercials for Pioneer LaserDisc players. Firmly established as a class act, Ray Charles still has a youthful as well as an adult following, but now he mainly takes his artistry down the middle of the road. The screams and sounds of frenetic adulation that once regularly greeted his ears now belong to another generation, to Prince, Sting, Springsteen, Michael Jackson and even a contemporary, Tina Turner. If you ask them who’s the boss, don’t be surprised if the answer is Ray Charles.

This article appeared in Stereo Review in the summer of 1995.