Ray Charles

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Ray Charles Robinson, known to the world as Ray Charles, carried two nicknames that pulled in different directions. Contemporaries called him "The Genius." Among friends and fellow musicians, he preferred to be called "Brother Ray."

  Frank Sinatra went further and called him "the only true genius in show business," a label Charles himself played down. Billy Joel offered a bolder comparison. "This may sound like sacrilege, but I think Ray Charles was more important than Elvis Presley."

  Those are enormous claims to hang on one musician. This documentary asks how a boy raised in the small-town South became the standard that other artists were measured against. It asks why a performer with that much acclaim spent long stretches of his life off the radio. And it asks what Charles gained, and what it cost him, when he left a record label he did not want to leave.

  1418131020

• 2. Red Wing Cafe

  ›

  Wylie Pitman's Red Wing Cafe is where Ray Charles first met a piano. He was three years old when Pitman sat down at an old upright and played boogie woogie. Pitman later taught the boy how to play.

  Charles was born on the 23rd of September 1930 in Albany, Georgia, and grew up in Greenville, Florida. His mother, Aretha, worked as a laundress. When money ran short, the two lived at the cafe, where they were always welcome. Pitman also looked after the boy's younger brother, George, to ease the load on their mother.

  Before music took over, the cars and farm machinery of Greenville fascinated him. He liked to stand near neighbors while they worked on their engines.

  His brother George accidentally drowned in their mother's laundry tub at the age of four. Around the same period, Charles himself began to lose his sight. At four or five his vision was fading, and by seven he was blind, most likely from glaucoma. The dark sunglasses that became his trademark followed from that loss.

  Aretha Robinson was destitute, uneducated and grieving. She still used her connections in the local community to find a school that would take a blind African-American pupil. Charles protested at first, but he attended the Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind in St. Augustine from 1937 to 1945. There he learned piano, alto saxophone, clarinet, trumpet and organ, with the piano always coming first.

  Classical training shaped him in St. Augustine. His lessons covered Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin and Sibelius. His music teacher, Mrs. Lawrence, showed him how to read and write music in Braille. The method was painstaking. He read the left-hand part with his right fingers, then the right-hand part with his left, and finally combined the two.

  In the spring of 1945, when Charles was 14, his mother died. He later called the deaths of his brother and his mother "the two great tragedies" of his life. After the funeral he decided not to return to school. He headed for Jacksonville instead.

  1017283224

• 3. Seattle and the Road

  ›

  Four dollars a night was what the Ritz Theatre in LaVilla paid Charles to play piano for its bands. He had moved to Jacksonville to live with Charles Wayne Powell, a friend of his late mother, and he stayed at the Ritz for more than a year. He joined Local 632 of the American Federation of Musicians in hopes of finding work. The union hall had a piano, which he used to practice because he had none at home. He picked up licks by copying the other players there.

  Jacksonville gave him a reputation but not enough jobs. At 16 he moved to Orlando, where he lived in near poverty and sometimes went days without food. He began writing arrangements for a pop band. In the summer of 1947 he auditioned to play piano for Lucky Millinder and his sixteen-piece band, and he did not get the job.

  Later in 1947 Charles moved to Tampa and took two jobs. One was as pianist for Charles Brantley's Honey Dippers. In these years he modeled himself on Nat King Cole. His first four recordings were "Wondering and Wondering," "Walking and Talking," "Why Did You Go?" and "I Found My Baby There." They were allegedly made in Tampa, though some discographies place them in Miami in 1951 or Los Angeles in 1952.

  In March 1948 he followed a friend to Seattle, Washington. Charles had only ever played piano for other people, and he wanted his own band. Chicago and New York seemed too big, and he knew the biggest radio hits came from northern cities. In Seattle he studied under the record producer Robert Blackwell and befriended a 15-year-old named Quincy Jones.

  The McSon Trio, named by combining his friend's surname with Robinson, worked the 1-5 A.M. shift at the Rocking Chair. Charles played piano, with Milton Garred on bass. Publicity photos of this trio are among the earliest known pictures of him. In April 1949 the group recorded "Confession Blues," his first national hit, which rose to No. 2 on the Billboard R&B chart. He also arranged songs for other artists, including Cole Porter's "Ghost of a Chance" and Dizzy Gillespie's "Emanon."

  In 1950 Charles moved to Los Angeles and spent the next few years touring with the blues musician Lowell Fulson as his musical director. That same year a hotel performance in Miami impressed the record executive Henry Stone, who recorded a Ray Charles Rockin' record that did not catch on. While in Miami, Charles had to stay in Overtown, the segregated but thriving Black community.

  Signed to Swing Time Records, he recorded under the name Ray Charles and scored two more R&B hits. "Baby, Let Me Hold Your Hand" reached No. 5 in 1951, and "Kissa Me Baby" reached No. 8 in 1952. Swing Time folded the following year. Ahmet Ertegun, founder of Atlantic, signed Charles. Charles also worked as a producer in this period, and he oversaw Guitar Slim's No. 1 hit "The Things That I Used to Do." Henry Stone would later help the Atlantic producer Jerry Wexler find Charles in St. Petersburg.

  2931333428

• 4. Atlantic Alchemy

  ›

  In June 1952, Atlantic Records paid $2,500 for Ray Charles's contract. His first session for the label took place that September, though his last Swing Time release did not appear until February 1953. The partnership produced the sound that made his name. By blending blues, jazz, rhythm and blues, and gospel, he pioneered soul music during the 1950s.

  The first small Atlantic hit was "Mess Around" in 1953. The next year brought "It Should've Been Me" and "Don't You Know." In 1955 he followed with "This Little Girl of Mine" and "A Fool for You." Later hits included "Drown in My Own Tears" and "Hallelujah I Love Her So."

  Late in 1954, Charles recorded "I've Got a Woman." The bandleader Renald Richard had written the lyrics, yet Charles claimed the composition as his own. They later admitted the song went back to "It Must Be Jesus," recorded by the Southern Tones in 1954. It reached No. 2 on the R&B chart and became one of his best-known records.

  Jazz ran alongside the hits. He recorded The Great Ray Charles in 1957 and worked with the vibraphonist Milt Jackson on Soul Brothers in 1958 and Soul Meeting in 1961. By 1958 he was headlining the Apollo Theater in New York, along with larger venues such as Carnegie Hall and the Newport Jazz Festival. His first live album was recorded at Newport that year.

  Charles hired a female vocal group called the Cookies and renamed them the Raelettes. On the 3rd of August 1958, they played the Cavalcade of Jazz at the Shrine Auditorium, produced by Leon Hefflin Sr. Little Willie John and Sam Cooke headlined the same bill.

  Then came "What'd I Say," the high point of his Atlantic years. It added Latin music to the gospel, jazz and blues mix. Charles said he wrote it spontaneously while performing in clubs with his band. Some radio stations banned it for its sexually suggestive lyrics. It still became his first top-10 pop record, reaching No. 6 on the Billboard Pop chart and No. 1 on the R&B chart in 1959.

  His 1959 big band album The Genius of Ray Charles became his first Top 40 album, peaking at No. 17. That same year he released his first country song, a cover of Hank Snow's "I'm Movin' On."

  3537101741

• 5. Seventy-Five Cents on the Dollar

  ›

  "I made 75 cents on every dollar." That is how Charles remembered the contract ABC offered him when it lured him away from Atlantic. He said nobody had ever heard of a deal like it. He did not want to leave, so he showed the contract to Jerry Wexler and Ahmet Ertegun and asked only that they match it.

  Their answer, in his telling, was gracious. "Ray, if these people are sincere, if they're legitimate, then you go with them, because there is no way for us to match it." Charles said the friendship survived, and that he could call Ertegun for anything.

  The terms included a $50,000 annual advance, higher royalties than before, and eventual ownership of his master tapes. With ABC he became one of the first Black musicians given artistic control by a mainstream record company. The freedom changed what he recorded. His 1960 album Genius + Soul = Jazz, largely instrumental, came out on ABC's subsidiary label Impulse! By then he had given up writing and become a cover artist who gave existing songs his own eclectic arrangements.

  Hoagy Carmichael and Stuart Gorrell wrote "Georgia on My Mind" in 1930. Charles's 1960 recording was his first hit for ABC-Paramount and his first work with Sid Feller, who produced, arranged and conducted it. The single was the first of his three career No. 1 hits on the Billboard Hot 100. It brought national acclaim and four Grammy Awards, two of them for the song itself. Percy Mayfield's "Hit the Road Jack" earned him another Grammy.

  In 1961 Charles expanded his small road ensemble into a big band, partly in response to rising royalties and touring fees. Concerts in Antibes, Zurich, Lyon and Paris made him the No. 1 bestselling jazz artist in France for many years.

  In the early 1960s, his plane was flying from Louisiana to Oklahoma City when snow and a neglected defroster iced over the windshield completely. The pilot circled until he found a small clear patch and landed safely. Charles gave the escape a spiritual reading. He credited "something or someone which instruments cannot detect" for the opening in the ice.

  The 1962 album Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, and its sequel, carried country into the pop mainstream. The first volume became his first album to top the Billboard 200. His version of Don Gibson's "I Can't Stop Loving You" held No. 1 on the pop chart for five weeks and on the R&B chart for ten. It was also his only No. 1 record in the UK. In 1962 he founded his own label, Tangerine, which ABC-Paramount promoted and distributed. In 1963 "Busted" reached No. 4 and "Take These Chains from My Heart" reached No. 8.

  His version of Georgia's song would be proclaimed the state song of Georgia in April 1979. Charles would perform it, deeply moved, on the floor of the state legislature.

  104569643

• 6. Appetites and Reckoning

  ›

  "Cigarettes and smack are the two truly addictive habits I've known. You might add women." Charles said this in Brother Ray: Ray Charles' Own Story, his 1978 autobiography, where he described his obsession with women as lifelong. He added that he could not leave them alone.

  He married twice. His first wife, Eileen Williams, married him on the 31st of July 1951, and the marriage ended sometime in 1952. He met Della Beatrice Howard Robinson, whom he called Bea, in Texas in 1954. They married on the 5th of April 1955. Their first child, Ray Charles Robinson Jr., was born that year while his father was playing a show in Texas. Two more sons, David and Robert, followed, and the family lived in View Park, California. Charles felt his heroin addiction took a toll on Della. With his drug use, his affairs on tour and his volatile behavior, the marriage deteriorated, and she filed for divorce in 1977.

  He fathered 12 children with nine women. A six-year affair with Margie Hendrix, one of the original Raelettes, produced a son, Charles Wayne, in 1959. Hendrix died on the 14th of July 1973 at 38, and Charles then had to care for the boy. A daughter, Renee, was born in 1961 to Mae Mosley Lyles, another Raelette. In 1963 Sandra Jean Betts gave birth to Sheila Raye Charles, who became a singer-songwriter like her father and died of breast cancer on the 15th of June 2017. In 1977 a child was born to his Parisian lover, Arlette Kotchounian, whom he had met ten years earlier. His longtime partner at the time of his death was Norma Pinella.

  Heroin ran through those years for seventeen. Charles said he had been addicted since the age of 16. His first arrest came in 1955, when he and his bandmates were caught backstage with loose marijuana and drug equipment, including a burnt spoon, a syringe and a needle. It did not slow him down, and his use grew as he earned more. In 1958 he was arrested on a Harlem street corner for possession of narcotics and equipment.

  On the 14th of November 1961, detectives searched his Indiana hotel room before a performance and seized heroin and marijuana. The case was dismissed because of how the evidence had been obtained. Charles's situation did not improve for a few more years.

  On Halloween 1964, he was arrested for possession of heroin at Boston's Logan Airport. This time he resolved to quit. He entered St. Francis Hospital in Lynwood, California, where he endured four days of cold turkey withdrawal. He pleaded guilty to four narcotic charges, and prosecutors asked for two years in prison and a heavy fine.

  The judge listened to Charles's psychiatrist, Dr. Hacker, describe his determination to get clean. Charles was sent to McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts. The judge offered to put off the verdict for a year if Charles submitted to regular examinations by government-appointed physicians. Back in court, he received a five-year suspended sentence, four years of probation and a $10,000 fine.

  Charles answered the whole saga in song. "I Don't Need No Doctor" and "Let's Go Get Stoned" were written with Ashford and Simpson and Jo Armstead. "Let's Go Get Stoned" became his first No. 1 R&B hit in several years. His cover of Buck Owens's "Crying Time" reached No. 6 on the pop chart and won a Grammy the following March. He called his album Crying Time his first since kicking heroin.

  Therapy brought one more habit. The psychiatrist Friedrich Hacker taught Charles chess, and Charles played on a special board with raised squares and holes for the pieces. Asked whether people cheated a blind man, he joked, "You can't cheat in Chess... I'm gonna see that!" In a 1991 concert he called Willie Nelson "my chess partner." In 2002 he played the American grandmaster and former U.S. champion Larry Evans and lost. When Evans praised him for spotting a trap, Charles replied, "Come on man, I play bad, but not that bad!"

  10989910021

• 7. Fading Airplay, Firm Stands

  ›

  By the 1970s, radio stations rarely played Ray Charles. Psychedelic rock and harder forms of rock and R&B had narrowed his appeal. His habit of recording pop standards and covers of current rock and soul hits did not help. Owning his masters had also removed his motivation to write new material.

  He kept recording anyway. Most of his work between 1968 and 1973 was either adored or panned. A Message from the People in 1972 moved toward the progressive soul of the day. It carried protest songs about poverty and civil rights, along with a gospel-flavored "America the Beautiful." Critics often complained that the song strayed too far from the original.

  Charles left ABC in 1974 and recorded several albums on his own label, Crossover Records. His 1975 recording of Stevie Wonder's "Living for the City" won another Grammy. In 1977 he reunited with Ahmet Ertegun and re-signed with Atlantic, recording the album True to Life and staying until 1980. By then the label was focused on rock acts, and soul artists like Aretha Franklin were being neglected. In November 1977 he hosted NBC's Saturday Night Live, and in 1980 he performed in the musical film The Blues Brothers.

  On the 15th of March 1961, Charles was due to play a dance at Bell Auditorium in Augusta, Georgia. Students from Paine College told him the main dance floor was restricted to whites. Black patrons would have to sit in the Music Hall balcony. He cancelled, told the public why, and left town immediately. The promoter sued for breach of contract, and on the 14th of June 1962 Charles was fined $757 in Fulton County Superior Court in Atlanta.

  On the 23rd of October 1963, he returned with the Raelettes and played a desegregated Bell Auditorium. In Albany, Ray Charles Plaza opened on the 7th of December 2007, with a revolving, lighted bronze sculpture of him seated at a piano. He had supported Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement in the 1960s.

  His record was not spotless. In 1981 he performed at the Sun City resort in South Africa during an international boycott against apartheid, and he was criticized for it. Charles defended the decision, insisting that the audience of Black and white fans would integrate while he was there.

  In 1983 he signed with Columbia and recorded a string of country albums. His hit duets included work with George Jones, Chet Atkins, B. J. Thomas, Mickey Gilley, Hank Williams Jr. and Dee Dee Bridgewater. He recorded "Seven Spanish Angels" with his longtime friend Willie Nelson. In 1985 he joined the charity single "We Are the World." In 1989 a cover of "Itoshi no Ellie," made for a Japanese Suntory advertisement, reached No. 3 on Japan's Oricon chart as "Ellie My Love." He also made a guest appearance at the Verona Arena with the Italian singer Zucchero Fornaciari that year.

  A duet with Billy Joel, "Baby Grand," brought him back to the pop charts. In 1990 he hit No. 1 on the R&B chart with "I'll Be Good to You," a duet with Quincy Jones and Chaka Khan. The song won Charles and Khan a Grammy. That same year he appeared for the first time at Italy's Sanremo Music Festival with "Good Love Gone Bad," written by Toto Cutugno.

  In 2001-02 he appeared in commercials for the New Jersey Lottery. In 2003 he headlined the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner, attended by President George W. Bush. That year he also presented Van Morrison with his Songwriters Hall of Fame award, and the two sang "Crazy Love." His last public appearance was on the 30th of April 2004, at the dedication of his Los Angeles music studio as a historic landmark.

  In 2002 he held a family luncheon for his 12 children, and ten attended. He told them he was terminally ill and that $500,000 had been placed in trusts for each of them, to be paid out over five years. In 2003 he had successful hip replacement surgery and planned to return to touring, until other ailments began.

  Charles died on the 10th of June 2004, at age 73, from complications of liver failure at his home in Beverly Hills, California. His funeral was held eight days later at the First African Methodist Episcopal Church of Los Angeles. B. B. King, Glen Campbell, Stevie Wonder and Wynton Marsalis each played a tribute. He was interred in Inglewood Park Cemetery.

  His final album, Genius Loves Company, came out two months after his death. It paired him with admirers and contemporaries, including Van Morrison, Willie Nelson, James Taylor, Gladys Knight, Michael McDonald, Natalie Cole, Elton John, Bonnie Raitt, Diana Krall, Norah Jones and Johnny Mathis. The album won eight Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year. Record of the Year went to "Here We Go Again," with Norah Jones. His duet of "Over the Rainbow" with Johnny Mathis was played at the memorial service.

  9089565557

• 8. Voice and Legacy

  ›

  The musicologist Henry Pleasants drew a line between Ray Charles and the crooners who came before him. Sinatra, and Bing Crosby earlier, had been masters of words. "Ray Charles is a master of sounds." Pleasants heard slides, wails, shouts and screams in the records, all disciplined by musicianship.

  Pleasants also described a voice that changed under pressure. Charles was usually called a baritone, and his speaking voice suggested it. In gospel or blues material, however, he could stay for long stretches in the high tenor range. In falsetto he climbed to E and F above high C. On "I'm Going Down to the River," Pleasants heard an incredible B flat. He put Charles's overall range, falsetto included, at three octaves at least.

  Charles named Nat King Cole as his primary influence, along with Art Tatum, Louis Jordan and Charles Brown. His own influence traveled far. According to Jon Pareles, it reached Elvis Presley, Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, Van Morrison and Billy Joel. Others who credited him included James Booker, Steve Winwood, Richard Manuel and Gregg Allman.

  Rolling Stone's Joe Levy said, "The hit records he made for Atlantic in the mid-1950s mapped out everything that would happen to rock 'n' roll and soul music in the years that followed." Roger Waters of Pink Floyd told the Turkish newspaper Hürriyet about hearing "Georgia on My Mind" at about 15, late at night with friends. "One day, if I make some people feel only one-twentieth of what I am feeling now, it will be quite enough for me."

  The numbers are large. Charles had 61 singles in the Top 40 of the R&B chart, 33 on the Hot 100 and eight on the Hot Country chart. He won 17 Grammy Awards from 37 nominations, five of them posthumously, and 10 of his recordings are in the Grammy Hall of Fame. In 1986 he was one of the first inductees to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and he received the Kennedy Center Honors that year. The Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award followed in 1987.

  President Bill Clinton presented him with the National Medal of Arts in 1993. In 1998 he shared the Polar Music Prize with Ravi Shankar in Stockholm. Rolling Stone placed him No. 10 on its list of the 100 Greatest Artists and No. 2 on its 100 Greatest Singers. In its 2023 revised list of 200 singers, Whitney Houston took the second spot and Charles placed sixth.

  In 2022 he was inducted posthumously into the Country Music Hall of Fame. He was the third African-American to be inducted, after Charley Pride in 2000 and Deford Bailey in 2005. He was also the 13th person inducted into both the Country and Rock Halls of Fame.

  In 2016, President Barack Obama wrote through his press secretary that Charles's version of "America the Beautiful" would always be, in his view, "the most patriotic piece of music ever performed." The film Ray, released in October 2004, covered his life from the mid-1930s to 1979. Jamie Foxx played Charles and won the 2005 Academy Award for Best Actor.

  Charles gave back as well. In 2001 he donated $2 million to Morehouse College, and a $20 million, 76,000-square-foot Ray Charles Performing Arts Center and Music Academic Building opened there in 2010. After his death, he endowed a professorship of African-American culinary history at Dillard University, described as the first such chair in the nation.

  The Ray Charles Foundation was founded in 1986 as the Robinson Foundation for Hearing Disorders and was renamed in 2006. It funds institutions researching hearing loss, including Benedict College and Morehouse. When Albany State University left a $3 million donation unused for over a decade, the foundation made it return the money.

  The foundation's executive offices sit in the historic RPM International Building, former home of Ray Charles Enterprises. The Ray Charles Memorial Library on the first floor opened on the 23rd of September 2010, what would have been his 80th birthday. Visits require a reservation, because the library is meant for large groups of underprivileged young people.

  5842597172