The story of Ray Charles

A hard childhood in the Deep South

Ray Charles Robinson was born on the twenty third of September 1930 in Albany, Georgia. His mother, Aretha Robinson, was a laundress from Greenville, Florida, who had lost her own mother as a child and was taken in by a local family. The man of that house, a laborer named Bailey Robinson, raped her, and she became pregnant. Amid the scandal she went to relatives in Albany to give birth, then brought her baby home to Greenville. There Ray was raised by two women, his mother Aretha and Bailey's wife Mary Jane, whom he called Mama and Mother. His father drifted away and started another family. By Ray's first birthday he had a little brother, George.[1] [2] [3]

Music found Ray at the age of three, at a place called the Red Wing Cafe. Its owner, Wylie Pitman, played boogie woogie on an old upright piano, and he let the little boy sit beside him and bang on the keys. Pitman became his first teacher, and the cafe was a second home. When money ran out, Ray and his mother even lived there for a while. Ray later said he was born with music inside him, and from the moment he found out there were piano keys to mash, he started mashing them. Sundays brought the singing at Shiloh Baptist Church, the gospel sound that would one day change popular music.[1] [2] [3]

Then came tragedy. When Ray was about five, his four year old brother George slipped into the big metal tub their mother used for washing clothes. Ray tried to pull him out, but the boy was too heavy in his soaking clothes, and by the time Ray ran screaming for his mother it was too late. A few months later Ray's own eyesight began to fail. Doctors never gave a firm diagnosis, though it was most likely glaucoma, and by the age of seven he was completely blind. His mother refused to let him feel sorry for himself. She made him fetch water, carry firewood and do his chores, telling him he was blind, not stupid.[1] [2] [3]

In 1937 Aretha found him a place at the Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind in St. Augustine, a state school that kept black children in a separate department. Ray protested at first, but he stayed for eight years. He learned Braille, typing and even how to repair radios and cars. Above all he studied music. He learned piano, alto saxophone, clarinet, trumpet and organ, and played Bach, Mozart, Chopin and Sibelius alongside the jazz of Art Tatum. His teacher showed him how to read music in Braille, a slow process that meant learning each hand's part separately. At night he tuned the radio to the Grand Ole Opry.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In the spring of 1945, when Ray was fourteen, his mother died suddenly. It hit him harder than anything else in his life. He later told his collaborator David Ritz that it was the only time he suffered what he called a nervous breakdown, and that for days he could not talk, sleep or eat. He described the drowning of his brother and the death of his mother as the two great tragedies of his life. He did not go back to school after the funeral. His father, who had hardly ever been part of his life, died a couple of years later, and by seventeen Ray was on his own.[1] [2] [3] [4]

From Florida clubs to Seattle and the road

At fifteen Ray moved to Jacksonville to live with friends of his late mother. He played piano in bands at the Ritz Theatre in the LaVilla district for about four dollars a night, joined the local musicians' union and practiced on the union hall's piano because he had none at home. Work came slowly. At sixteen he tried Orlando, where he sometimes went days without food, and in 1947 he failed an audition for Lucky Millinder's big band. He moved on to Tampa, where he played with Charles Brantley's Honey Dippers. In Florida he also played piano in what he later called a hillbilly band, an early taste of the country music he loved.[1] [2] [3]

Ray wanted a band of his own and a fresh start far from home. New York and Chicago felt too big, so he asked his friend, the guitarist Gosady McGee, which city was farthest from Florida. McGee drew a diagonal line across a map and it landed on Seattle. In March 1948, after a five day bus ride, the seventeen year old arrived. Seattle's Jackson Street scene was buzzing with dozens of clubs. Ray, McGee and bassist Milt Garred formed the McSon Trio, named after McGee and Robinson, and played everywhere from the black Elks Club to the late night Rocking Chair. They even appeared on one of Seattle's earliest live television broadcasts.[1] [2]

One night a teenage trumpet player named Quincy Jones came to see the blind kid everyone was talking about. Quincy was around fifteen, Ray a couple of years older, and they became friends for life. Quincy was amazed that Ray lived alone, cooked, did his own laundry and crossed streets without a cane or a dog. At the Rocking Chair, a Los Angeles record man named Jack Lauderdale heard the trio and signed them. In early 1949 his Down Beat label released Confession Blues, written by Ray and credited to R. C. Robinson. It became Ray's first national rhythm and blues hit. The label printed the band's name as the Maxin Trio, much to their annoyance.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Seattle also gave Ray the habit that would shadow him for seventeen years. By most accounts it was here, eager to fit in with older musicians, that he got hooked on heroin. In those days he was still copying his heroes, Nat King Cole and Charles Brown, because that sound paid the bills. The singer Ernestine Anderson said you could close your eyes and swear Nat Cole was singing. Ray later said he woke up one morning and realized nobody knew his name. Everyone just called him kid and said he sounded like Nat. He dropped his surname, partly to avoid confusion with the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson, and became simply Ray Charles.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 1950 Ray moved to Los Angeles and spent the next few years on the road as musical director for the blues guitarist Lowell Fulson. In Fulson's band he met a young Texas saxophonist, David Fathead Newman, who would become his closest musical partner. Recording for Lauderdale's renamed label, Swing Time, Ray scored more hits with Baby, Let Me Hold Your Hand in 1951 and Kissa Me Baby in 1952. He also married for the first time, to Eileen Williams, on the thirty first of July 1951, but the marriage lasted barely a year. When Swing Time ran into trouble, a bigger label came calling.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Atlantic Records and the birth of soul

In June 1952 Atlantic Records, run by Ahmet Ertegun and soon joined by the producer Jerry Wexler, bought Ray's contract for two thousand five hundred dollars. His first session for them came that September. His first small hit, Mess Around, was written by Ertegun himself under his joke pen name Nugetre, which is Ertegun spelled backwards. Ertegun and Wexler soon realized the best thing to do with Ray was to leave him alone. He persuaded them to let him record with his own touring band. On the side, Ray arranged and produced Guitar Slim's The Things That I Used to Do, a million seller and number one rhythm and blues hit.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The breakthrough came from a gospel record he heard on the car radio in the summer of 1954, It Must Be Jesus by the Southern Tones. With his trumpeter Renald Richard, Ray turned its churchy drive into a secular love song. They cut I Got a Woman on the eighteenth of November 1954 in the studio of the Georgia Tech radio station WGST in Atlanta, with his seven piece band. Released that December, it became a major rhythm and blues hit in early 1955. Blending gospel fervor with blues and jazz, it is widely seen as one of the first soul records. Some listeners were uneasy hearing church music turned to worldly themes.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 1954 Ray met Della Beatrice Howard in Texas, a young woman he called Bea. They married on the fifth of April 1955, and their first son, Ray Charles Robinson Junior, was born that May while his father was away playing a show. Two more sons, David and Robert, followed. But the drugs were already a problem. That same year Ray and several bandmates were arrested backstage with marijuana and drug paraphernalia, the first of his drug arrests. It did nothing to slow him down. As his fame and income grew, so did his habit, and in 1958 he was arrested again on a Harlem street corner.[1] [2]

The hits kept coming. Drown in My Own Tears became his third number one on the rhythm and blues chart in 1956, and the joyous Hallelujah I Love Her So reached number five. Mary Ann, his fourth rhythm and blues chart topper that year, was written about Mary Ann Fisher, a singer who had recently joined his touring show and who became his lover despite his marriage. Fathead Newman had joined the band in 1954 on baritone saxophone and soon became its star tenor soloist. Wexler called him Ray's alter ego on tenor. Ray, meanwhile, was also recording pure jazz, including albums with the vibraphonist Milt Jackson.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The Raelettes and What'd I Say

Ray wanted female voices to answer him the way a church choir answers a preacher. In August 1956 he brought in an Atlantic vocal group called the Cookies, and by 1958 he had reshaped them into his own backing group, the Raelettes. The first lineup was Darlene McCrea, Margie Hendrix, Pat Lyles and Gwendolyn Berry. Margie Hendrix, a fiery singer from Georgia, was the standout. Ray said that Aretha, Gladys and Etta were all great, but on any given night Margie would scare you to death. She and Ray began an affair, and in October 1958 they recorded Night Time Is the Right Time, her voice trading lines with his.[1] [2] [3]

By 1958 Ray was no longer just a rhythm and blues act. He was headlining the Apollo in Harlem, and also playing Carnegie Hall. On the fifth of July he appeared at the Newport Jazz Festival with Fathead Newman, Hank Crawford and the Raelettes, and the show became his first live album. He was touring around three hundred days a year with a seven piece band. Since 1956 he had carried his own Wurlitzer electric piano on the road, because he did not trust the pianos he found at venues. Other musicians sometimes laughed at the little electric instrument. They would stop laughing soon.[1] [2] [3]

One night in December 1958, at a dance that ran into the small hours, Ray's band ran out of songs with about twelve minutes still to fill. He told the Raelettes he was going to fool around and they should just follow him. He started a riff on the electric piano, the drummer found a Latin beat, and Ray began calling out loose, playful lines. The Raelettes and the horns shouted back, and the room began to shake. People asked where they could buy the record. There was no record yet. After the same thing happened several nights running, Ray called Jerry Wexler and said he had something new to cut.[1]

They recorded What'd I Say on the eighteenth of February 1959 in Atlantic's small New York studio, on a brand new eight track machine run by the engineer Tom Dowd. It took just a few takes. The problem was that it ran over seven and a half minutes, so Dowd split it into two parts across both sides of a single. Released in June 1959, it was banned by many radio stations for its suggestive call and response, yet it climbed to number one on the rhythm and blues chart and number six on the pop chart. It was Ray's first gold record, and from then on he closed every single concert with it.[1] [2]

What'd I Say crossed over in a way nothing of his had before, and it echoed across the Atlantic. In Hamburg the young Beatles played it at every show, trying to stretch it as long as possible, and Paul McCartney said hearing it made him want to make music. Ray noticed something sour, though. Stations that had banned his record happily played cover versions by white artists, which he said made it seem as though white sex was cleaner than black sex. On the first of October 1959 Margie Hendrix gave birth to his son, Charles Wayne. That autumn Atlantic released The Genius of Ray Charles, a big band album that became his first top forty LP.[1] [2] [3]

The ABC deal and Georgia on My Mind

In November 1959 Ray signed with ABC Paramount. The deal was extraordinary for any artist, let alone a black artist in 1959. It included a fifty thousand dollar annual advance, higher royalties, a production arrangement and, crucially, eventual ownership of his own master tapes. Ray said he showed the contract to Ertegun and Wexler and offered to stay if they matched it, and that they told him they simply could not. Atlantic was hit hard. Losing Ray and Bobby Darin in the same period took away about a third of its sales, and Wexler later recalled thinking the company was going to die.[1] [2] [3]

At ABC he teamed up with the arranger and producer Sid Feller, who would work with him for thirty years. Their first album was The Genius Hits the Road, a set of songs about places across America. On it was Hoagy Carmichael's 1930 ballad Georgia on My Mind, reportedly suggested by Ray's driver. With lush strings and a soft choir, Ray turned it into something deeply personal for a man born in Albany, Georgia. It went to number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1960, his first pop chart topper, and helped him win four Grammy Awards that year. Ray once said that if they called him a genius, Sid Feller was Einstein.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The hits came fast. In 1961 Percy Mayfield's Hit the Road Jack, a sparring duet between Ray and Margie Hendrix, spent two weeks at number one on the pop chart and five weeks on top of the rhythm and blues chart. Ray was so taken with Mayfield that he signed him to a five year deal as his personal songwriter. Unchain My Heart followed, with another short solo from Fathead Newman. Ray also cut Genius plus Soul equals Jazz, a big band album arranged by Quincy Jones and Ralph Burns, on which he played Hammond organ. Its instrumental One Mint Julep reached number one on the rhythm and blues chart.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

On the fifteenth of March 1961, Ray was due to play a dance at Bell Auditorium in Augusta, Georgia. Students from Paine College told him the dance floor would be for white fans only, with black fans confined to the balcony. Ray cancelled and left town, explaining publicly why. The promoter sued him for breach of contract, and in June 1962 he was fined seven hundred and fifty seven dollars. He kept refusing to play segregated venues and became a supporter of the civil rights movement. On the twenty third of October 1963 he returned to Augusta and played the same hall to an integrated crowd.[1] [2]

The early sixties also brought danger and scandal. Flying from Louisiana toward Oklahoma City, his plane's windshield iced over completely. The pilot circled blind until a small patch cleared and he could land, and Ray believed something beyond the instruments had saved them. Then on the fourteenth of November 1961, police searched his hotel room in Indianapolis before a show and found heroin and marijuana. Ray told them he had been an addict since he was sixteen. The case was thrown out because the search had been improper. Around the same time, the former disc jockey Joe Adams became his manager, a role he would hold for the rest of Ray's life.[1] [2] [3]

Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music

In 1961 Ray told his label he wanted to make a country album. Friends, fellow rhythm and blues musicians and ABC executives were baffled, and some were negative. For Ray it was a test of whether the label truly respected his artistic freedom. He had grown up with country music, never missing the Grand Ole Opry on Saturday nights, and he believed country and the blues told the same honest stories in plain words. When his contract was renewed in early 1962, it came with his own label, Tangerine, and a green light for the project.[1] [2] [3]

Sid Feller canvassed the big Nashville publishers and collected about two hundred and fifty songs on tape for Ray to choose from. Ray recorded in three sessions in February 1962, two at Capitol Studios in New York and one in Hollywood, with a big band arranged by Gerald Wilson and Gil Fuller, and strings arranged by Marty Paich. He kept firm control, sending the arrangers piano demos of exactly what he wanted. At one point, Feller said, Ray rewrote a botched arrangement on the spot and dictated every part to eighteen musicians. Feller thought Don Gibson's I Can't Stop Loving You was the weakest song and placed it eleventh on the record.[1] [2]

He could not have been more wrong. Released in March 1962, Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music became Ray's first number one album, knocking the West Side Story soundtrack off the top in June. I Can't Stop Loving You spent five weeks at number one on the pop chart, topped the rhythm and blues and easy listening charts at the same time, and became his only number one in Britain. One Atlanta distributor said people without record players were buying it. It won a Grammy, and Billy Joel later said it was a black man giving you the whitest possible music in the blackest possible way, while the civil rights movement raged.[1] [2] [3] [4]

A second volume followed within months, and it too went gold. From it, Take These Chains from My Heart reached number eight in America and number five in Britain, and in 1963 Harlan Howard's Busted climbed to number four and won another Grammy. Ray toured Europe with a big band and the Raelettes, and France took him to its heart. Behind the scenes, though, things were unraveling. Margie Hendrix had begun drinking heavily and using heroin, and her behavior grew erratic. During a European tour in July 1964, after a furious argument in which she told him she had been seeing one of his trumpet players, Ray fired her and sent her home.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Rock bottom and recovery

On Halloween 1964, Ray was arrested for heroin possession at Boston's Logan Airport. It was not his first arrest, but this time he decided to quit for good. He checked himself into St. Francis Hospital in Lynwood, California, and went through four days of cold turkey withdrawal. He pleaded guilty to four narcotics charges. Prosecutors asked for two years in prison, but his psychiatrist, Dr. Friedrich Hacker, convinced the judge that Ray was serious, and he was sent to McLean Hospital in Massachusetts. After a year of checks by government doctors, he received a five year suspended sentence, four years of probation and a ten thousand dollar fine.[1] [2] [3]

It was the only real break in a career of more than half a century. Ray stepped off the road for about a year. During his therapy Dr. Hacker taught him to play chess, and it became a lifelong passion. He used a special board with raised squares and pegged pieces. Asked whether people cheated against a blind man, he joked that you cannot cheat at chess because he would see it. He never used heroin again. He did not quit everything, though. Later in life he drank gin every day and smoked marijuana at night, and he told his biographer that what he did with his own body was his own business.[1] [2] [3]

Ray came back with a wink. His 1966 comeback included I Don't Need No Doctor and Let's Go Get Stoned, a song by the new writing team of Ashford and Simpson, which gave him his first number one rhythm and blues hit in several years. His version of Buck Owens's Crying Time reached number six on the pop chart in early 1966 and won two Grammys. Ray said he recorded Owens's songs out of pure admiration, keeping his own style while watching it work in new ways. In 1967 he had a top twenty hit with the ballad Here We Go Again, a song that would return to him decades later.[1] [2] [3]

For Margie Hendrix, there was no comeback. After leaving the Raelettes she signed with Mercury Records, but none of her singles charted. She married Robert Fulson, the brother of Lowell Fulson, survived a serious car crash in Texas in 1967, divorced, and was dropped by a second label. By 1971 she had quit singing altogether. She died in New York on the fourteenth of July 1973, at thirty eight, reportedly almost penniless. No autopsy was done and the official cause was never established. Ray took responsibility for raising their son, Charles Wayne. In the 2004 film Ray, Regina King played her.[1] [2]

America the Beautiful and the country years

By the late sixties the music scene had moved toward psychedelic rock and harder soul, and Ray's records got less airplay. He recorded pop standards, Beatles songs like Eleanor Rigby and country covers, and critics either loved or hated the results. In 1972 he released A Message from the People, produced with Quincy Jones, a protest album of sorts about poverty and civil rights. On it was his gospel version of America the Beautiful, which opens with the song's third verse. Some people found his changes too radical. Over time it became one of the best loved patriotic recordings in the country, and he sang it for President Nixon in 1972.[1] [2] [3]

In 1974 Ray left ABC and launched his own label, Crossover Records, and his version of Stevie Wonder's Living for the City later won him a Grammy. In 1977 he returned to Atlantic and his old friend Ahmet Ertegun, and that November he hosted Saturday Night Live. In one sketch a producer insists on giving his song to a squeaky clean white group called the Young Caucasians, mocking the way white covers had once outsold black originals. His private life was also changing. Della Bea filed for divorce in 1977, worn down by his addiction, his affairs on the road and his temper.[1] [2] [3]

In the spring of 1979, the Georgia legislature made Ray's recording of Georgia on My Mind the official state song. He was invited to sing it at the state capitol in Atlanta, and he was visibly moved. A year later he appeared in the film The Blues Brothers, singing Shake a Tail Feather at the electric piano. Then came a misstep. In 1981 he played the Sun City resort in South Africa, in defiance of an international cultural boycott against apartheid. He was widely criticized. Ray insisted that his black and white fans would sit together at his shows while he was there.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 1983 he signed with Columbia and leaned fully into country. He cut duets with George Jones, Chet Atkins, Hank Williams Junior and his chess partner Willie Nelson. Their 1984 duet Seven Spanish Angels, the tale of an outlaw and his lover making a last stand, spent a week at number one on the country chart and became the biggest of his country hits. In January 1985 he joined the all star session for We Are the World. Stevie Wonder greeted the stars by joking that if they didn't finish in one take, he and Ray, two blind men, would drive everybody home.[1] [2] [3]

The honors piled up. In 1986 Ray was among the very first inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, alongside Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry, and he received the Kennedy Center Honors the same year. The Grammys gave him a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1987. In 1986 he also set up the Robinson Foundation for Hearing Disorders, which later became the Ray Charles Foundation and also supports education. He also sang America the Beautiful at the 1984 Republican National Convention, one of many times he would perform it at big national events.[1] [2] [3]

Late hits, last years and farewell

Ray kept finding new audiences. He had a pop hit with Baby Grand, a duet with Billy Joel, who said singing with him felt like an evangelical event with Ray as the minister. In 1989 Quincy Jones put Ray and Chaka Khan together on a remake of the Brothers Johnson's I'll Be Good to You. It went to number one on the rhythm and blues chart, his first chart topper there in twenty four years, and won them a Grammy. That same year he recorded a Japanese pop song, Ellie My Love, for a Suntory advertisement, and it reached number three in Japan. In 1990 he even competed at Italy's Sanremo festival.[1] [2] [3]

Through the nineties Ray toured relentlessly, playing concerts around the world for most of every year. In 1991 he sat at the piano for the opening titles of the sitcom Designing Women, which used Georgia on My Mind as its theme. He received the National Medal of Arts in 1993 and shared Sweden's Polar Music Prize with Ravi Shankar in 1998. In 2001 he sang America the Beautiful at Super Bowl thirty five, and gave two million dollars to Morehouse College in Atlanta. The drinking had taken its toll, however. He later told David Ritz he had been diagnosed with alcoholic liver disease and hepatitis C.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In 2002 Ray held a family luncheon for his twelve children, the only time so many of them met him together. Ten came. He told them he was terminally ill and that half a million dollars had been placed in trust for each of them, paid out over five years. Most of the rest of his fortune would go to his foundation. His vague wording left some children believing they would get more, which sowed years of conflict. In 2003 he had a hip replacement and hoped to tour again, and he headlined the White House Correspondents' Dinner in front of President George W. Bush.[1] [2]

Ray spent his final months finishing an album of duets with friends and admirers. Willie Nelson said the sessions were emotional, because everyone knew Ray was sick and that this would be the last record, but Ray never talked about dying, he just laughed. His final public appearance came on the thirtieth of April 2004, when his Los Angeles studio was dedicated as a historic landmark. On the tenth of June 2004 Ray Charles died at his home in Beverly Hills, of complications from liver disease. He was seventy three. He had hoped to see the finished film about his life, which premiered four months later.[1] [2] [3] [4]

His funeral on the eighteenth of June at the First African Methodist Episcopal Church in Los Angeles felt like a revival meeting. His son, the Reverend Robert Robinson, told the crowd it might be crying time, but they should clap their hands and stamp their feet. B.B. King struggled through tears, Stevie Wonder and Glen Campbell sang, and Willie Nelson performed Georgia on My Mind, joking that after losing so many chess games he once asked Ray if they could turn on the lights next time. The Reverend Jesse Jackson said heaven now had a maestro. As mourners filed past the open casket, Ray's duet with Johnny Mathis on Over the Rainbow played.[1] [2] [3]

Genius Loves Company and the legacy

Genius Loves Company came out on the thirty first of August 2004. It featured duets with Norah Jones, Elton John, B.B. King, Willie Nelson, Van Morrison, Bonnie Raitt, Gladys Knight, James Taylor and others. Sold partly through Starbucks coffee shops, it sold two hundred and two thousand copies in its first week and eventually reached number one, his first chart topping album since 1962. It became the best selling album of his career, with more than three million sold in America alone. At the Grammys in February 2005 it won eight awards, including Album of the Year, and Here We Go Again with Norah Jones won Record of the Year.[1] [2] [3]

Two months after the album, the film Ray opened, starring Jamie Foxx. The director Taylor Hackford spent well over a decade trying to get it made. Every major studio passed, and the conservative billionaire Philip Anschutz ended up paying for the whole forty million dollar film, on the condition that it be rated PG 13. Ray had read a Braille copy of the script and objected to only two scenes, and he told Foxx to tell the story honestly, warts and all. Foxx, who had studied classical piano, won the Academy Award for Best Actor. The film grossed about one hundred and twenty five million dollars worldwide.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Behind the celebrations, Ray's estate became a battlefield. In 2008 the Los Angeles Times reported that several of his children were suing his longtime manager Joe Adams, who controlled Ray Charles Enterprises, the foundation and the children's trusts. They accused him of shutting them out, and a federal lawsuit alleged he took nearly one point two million dollars in improper pay. Adams's spokesman called the claims old and baseless. The family also objected to posthumous albums that overdubbed other singers onto Ray's recordings. Adams stepped down as president of the foundation and the company. He died in 2018 at the age of ninety four.[1] [2] [3]

The honors have continued. In 2016 President Barack Obama hosted a tribute to Ray at the White House, recalling his stand in Augusta and joking about his chess wins over Willie Nelson. In 2022 Ray was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, only the third African American member, introduced by Ronnie Milsap while Garth Brooks sang Seven Spanish Angels. He won seventeen Grammy Awards in all, five of them after his death. Rolling Stone ranked him the second greatest singer of all time in 2008. His foundation was set up to fund hearing research and education. As Quincy Jones put it, the Ray Charles sound was pain converted into joy.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The people around Ray Charles

Ray Charles and Quincy Jones. They met in Seattle in the late forties, when Quincy was a teenage trumpeter and Ray the blind prodigy lighting up the clubs. Quincy was dazzled by his independence and joked that Ray only acted blind when a pretty girl was around. Quincy arranged for The Genius of Ray Charles and Genius plus Soul equals Jazz, produced A Message from the People, and brought Ray back to number one with I'll Be Good to You in 1989.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Ray Charles and Della Bea Robinson. Ray met Della Beatrice Howard in Texas in 1954 and married her the next year. They had three sons and made their home in Los Angeles. His heroin addiction, his affairs on the road and his temper wore the marriage down, and she filed for divorce in 1977. She once said that on one side of her door Ray belonged to her, and on the other side he belonged to the world.[1] [2] [3]

Ray Charles and Margie Hendrix. The fiery lead voice of the Raelettes sang with Ray on Night Time Is the Right Time and Hit the Road Jack, and became his lover while he was married. Their son Charles Wayne was born in 1959. When Ray would not leave his wife, the relationship soured, and in 1964 he fired her after a bitter argument. She died in 1973, and Ray raised their son.[1] [2] [3]

Ray Charles and Mary Ann Fisher. Mary Ann Fisher joined Ray's touring show as a featured singer in the mid fifties, and despite his marriage the two became lovers. He wrote Mary Ann about her, and it became his fourth number one rhythm and blues hit. She left in 1958 after the Raelettes arrived. David Ritz felt the film Ray reduced her to a cartoon, describing the real woman as sometimes endearing and sometimes infuriating.[1] [2]

Ray Charles and Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler. The Atlantic Records partners bought Ray's contract in 1952 and gave him room to invent soul. Ertegun wrote his early hit Mess Around, and Wexler said the best thing he could do with Ray was leave him alone. Ray's move to ABC in 1959 nearly sank the label, and a later row over his contract caused friction, yet Ray returned to Atlantic in 1977, and Ertegun joined Ray in urging Taylor Hackford to make the film Ray.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Ray Charles and David Fathead Newman. They met in Lowell Fulson's band in 1951, and Newman joined Ray in 1954. His short, singing saxophone solos on hits like Unchain My Heart became central to the Ray Charles sound. Ray presented and played piano on his debut album and said nobody could make a sax sing a song like him. Newman stayed until 1964, returned briefly around 1970, and later objected to how the film Ray portrayed him.[1] [2] [3]

Ray Charles and Joe Adams. The former disc jockey and actor became Ray's manager in 1961 and stayed at his side until the end. Later in life Ray's children felt Adams controlled access to their father. Ray tried to replace him with a French manager in 1997 but backed down when Adams refused to leave. After Ray's death, Adams ran the estate and foundation and faced lawsuits from the family, which he called baseless.[1] [2]

Ray Charles and Willie Nelson. Willie Nelson said Ray's 1962 country album did more for country music than anyone ever had. The two became close friends and regular chess opponents, and Ray usually won. Their 1984 duet Seven Spanish Angels went to number one on the country chart. Nelson sang Georgia on My Mind at Ray's funeral, and their live duet on Busted appeared on a posthumous album.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Ray Charles and Sid Feller. Feller became Ray's producer, arranger and conductor when he moved to ABC in 1959, starting with Georgia on My Mind, and worked with him for thirty years. He gathered some two hundred and fifty songs for the Modern Sounds project, though he doubted the idea and misjudged its biggest hit. Ray joked that if he was a genius, Feller was Einstein.[1] [2]

Ray Charles and Aretha Robinson. Ray's mother raised him in poverty in Greenville, Florida, and after he went blind she refused to coddle him, insisting he learn to do everything for himself. She fought to get him into the school for the blind. Her sudden death in 1945 devastated him. Decades later his foundation named the academic wing of the Ray Charles Performing Arts Center at Morehouse College after her.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Ray Charles and Billy Joel. Billy Joel called Ray more important than Elvis Presley and dueted with him on Joel's song Baby Grand in the eighties. Joel said singing with Ray felt like a revival, with Ray as the minister and himself as the congregation. He also wrote that Ray took the growl in Nat King Cole's voice and turned every grunt and groan into music.[1] [2]

Rare facts about Ray Charles

• Ray learned to write music in Braille, which meant learning each hand's part separately before putting them together. At the school in St. Augustine, his teacher taught him to read music in Braille. He had to read the left hand part with his right hand and the right hand part with his left, then combine them from memory.[1]
• At the school for the blind, Ray also learned to repair radios and cars. Alongside Braille, typing and basket weaving, the school in St. Augustine taught him practical trades, including fixing radios and cars. As a small boy he had loved watching neighbors work on their engines.[1] [2] [3]
• Ray chose Seattle because a friend drew a line on a map to the city farthest from Florida. His friend Gosady McGee ran a diagonal across a map of the United States and landed on Seattle. Ray took a five day bus trip there in March 1948.[1]
• Ray's first hit record credited his band under a name they did not want, the Maxin Trio. Confession Blues, released in 1949, was recorded by the McSon Trio, named after McGee and Robinson. The label listed them as the Maxin Trio instead, against their wishes.[1] [2]
• He dropped the name Robinson partly to avoid being confused with the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson. By around 1950 he was billed simply as Ray Charles. He also said he wanted his own identity, since everyone called him kid and said he sounded just like Nat King Cole.[1]
• Before his own fame, Ray produced Guitar Slim's million selling blues hit The Things That I Used to Do. The 1954 record, released by Specialty Records, spent weeks at number one on the rhythm and blues chart and became a blues standard. It is often cited as an early step toward soul music.[1] [2]
• Atlantic Records bought Ray Charles's contract in 1952 for just two thousand five hundred dollars. Atlantic paid that sum in June 1952. Seven years later, Ray and Bobby Darin together accounted for about a third of the label's sales.[1] [2]
• His early hit Mess Around was written by Atlantic boss Ahmet Ertegun under the pen name Nugetre. Nugetre is simply Ertegun spelled backwards. Ertegun used it for several rhythm and blues songs, including another Ray Charles side, Heartbreaker.[1]
• I Got a Woman was recorded in a college radio station studio in Atlanta. Ray and his band cut it on the eighteenth of November 1954 at WGST, the station of Georgia Tech, because Atlantic let him record on the road with his own band.[1] [2]
• Ray toured with his own electric piano because he did not trust the pianos at venues. From 1956 he carried a Wurlitzer electric piano on the road. Other musicians mocked it, but its riff opened What'd I Say, the first electric piano John Lennon ever heard.[1]
• On What'd I Say you can hear Ray slapping his leg in time when the music drops out. Atlantic had just bought an eight track recorder, and the clarity of the small studio recording captured tiny details, including his hand hitting his leg during the call and response.[1]
• Ray never played an encore after What'd I Say. For the rest of his career it was always his closing song. He said that once he played it, the show was finished, with no encore and nothing else.[1]
• On Genius plus Soul equals Jazz, Ray played Hammond organ on every track. The 1961 album, arranged by Quincy Jones and Ralph Burns with members of Count Basie's band, spent forty eight weeks on the album chart and peaked at number four.[1]
• Sid Feller thought I Can't Stop Loving You was the weakest song on Modern Sounds. He placed it eleventh in the running order. It became the album's biggest single, and Ray was disappointed with Feller's call.[1]
• I Can't Stop Loving You held a chart record for thirty one years until Whitney Houston broke it. In June 1962 it topped the pop, rhythm and blues and easy listening charts at the same time for weeks. Whitney Houston's I Will Always Love You finally beat that run in 1993.[1]
• An Atlanta distributor said people who did not even own record players were buying I Can't Stop Loving You. She told Billboard in 1962 that the record was that hot in her district. By the time it left the top, it had sold nearly one and a half million copies.[1]
• Willie Nelson once begged Ray, after too many chess defeats, to turn on the lights next time. Ray played on a board with raised squares. Nelson told the joke at Ray's funeral, and President Obama later listed beating Willie at chess among Ray's accomplishments.[1] [2] [3]
• In 2002 Ray played the grandmaster Larry Evans at chess, and lost. When Evans praised him for spotting a trap, Ray replied that he played badly, but not that badly.[1]
• After quitting heroin, Ray favored what was called the Ray Charles cocktail, coffee with sugar and gin. CBS's 60 Minutes reported he was rarely without it. He told his collaborator David Ritz he drank gin daily for the rest of his life.[1] [2]
• Ray said blindness cost him only about one percent of what life is about. He told 60 Minutes he still remembered basic colors like black, red and white from childhood, and the only real loss was seeing his children and the moon.[1]
• When Ray hosted Saturday Night Live in 1977, a sketch had the cast play a bland white group called the Young Caucasians. The sketch mocked how white cover versions of black hits got airplay while the originals were banned, something Ray had lived through with What'd I Say.[1] [2]
• In 1989 Ray had a top three hit in Japan singing a Japanese pop song. He recorded Southern All Stars' Itoshi no Ellie as Ellie My Love for a Suntory advertisement, and it reached number three on the Oricon chart.[1]
• There was another Ray Charles, a choral leader who backed Perry Como and sang the Three's Company theme. Born Charles Raymond Offenberg, he led the Ray Charles Singers on Como's records and shows for thirty five years. MusicBrainz notes he is not the famous blind pianist.[1] [2]
• Director Taylor Hackford first thought Ray might be faking his blindness. At their first meeting Ray glided around the office without touching anything and talked about a Lakers game, and Hackford briefly wondered whether the whole thing was a hoax.[1]
• Universal agreed to distribute Ray partly because its president used to hitchhike to Ray Charles concerts. After every other studio passed, Ron Meyer, who had hitchhiked to the Hollywood Palladium as a teenager to see Ray, watched a test screening with a lively audience and said yes.[1] [2]
• Some scenes in the film Ray never happened, including Ahmet Ertegun warning Ray about heroin. That conversation was based on one Ertegun later had with Eric Clapton. Quincy Jones also never met Ray at Newport as shown, though he said they often discussed the subject.[1]
• Unchain My Heart was the working title of the film Ray. The song's writer, Bobby Sharp, had originally sold it for fifty dollars and later fought to win back his rights.[1]
• Twelve of the thirteen tracks on Genius Loves Company made the Hot Digital Tracks top fifty at once. It set a record for the most tracks from a single album. Starbucks stores alone accounted for nearly thirty percent of its American sales.[1]
• Ray's version of America the Beautiful starts with the song's third verse. On A Message from the People in 1972 he opened with the third verse before returning to the first, and he kept that shape whenever he sang it.[1] [2]
• After his death, Ray endowed a professorship in African American culinary history at Dillard University. It was the first such chair in the nation. He had received an honorary degree from Dillard in 2003.[1]
• Ray's 2004 Google Doodle was one of the first ever made for someone's birthday. It ran in September 2004, marking what would have been his seventy fourth birthday.[1]
• The Ray Charles Foundation made Albany State University return a three million dollar gift. The foundation said the money had gone unused for more than a decade, against its mission of supporting education and hearing research.[1]
• Stevie Wonder said he did not know he shared blindness with Ray when he first fell for his records. At the funeral Wonder said that long before he knew they had so much in common, Ray's voice made him want to love deeper and reach out to the world.[1]
• The original 1930 song Georgia on My Mind entered the American public domain on the first of January 2026. The Hoagy Carmichael and Stuart Gorrell composition is now free to use, though Ray's 1960 recording remains protected as of 2026.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.