Ray Charles

Who Was He?

Ray Charles did something in 1954 that sounds obvious now and was close to scandalous then. He took the sound of the Black church, the call and response, the moaning, the ecstatic release, and put it behind songs about wanting a woman rather than wanting salvation. Gospel had never been used that way. What came out the other side was soul music.

Then he refused to be its prisoner. Over the next decade he made a big-band jazz record, a blues record, and, in 1962, an album of country songs that became the best-selling record of his career and one of the most quietly radical gestures in American music.

People called him The Genius, a nickname he found slightly embarrassing. The case for it is simple: almost nobody else changed the shape of a genre and then walked out of it.

The Story

Seventy-three years, and a career that kept refusing the box it had just been put in.

1. 1930

   Born in Albany, Georgia

   Born September 23, 1930, and raised in Greenville, Florida. He began losing his sight around age four or five and was blind by seven, most likely from glaucoma.

2. 1937

   The Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind

   He attended the school in St. Augustine from 1937 to 1945, where he learned to read and write music in braille. The formal training underneath the feel starts here.

3. 1949

   First chart record

   "Confession Blues" reaches number two on the Billboard R&B chart. At this point he is working in the smooth, elegant style of Nat King Cole and Charles Brown, and sounds very little like himself.

4. 1954

   "I've Got a Woman" and the invention of soul

   Recording for Atlantic, he takes the structure and fervor of a gospel song and writes secular words over it. It reaches number two on the R&B chart, draws real anger from churchgoers, and changes popular music permanently.

5. 1959

   "What'd I Say"

   Six minutes of electric piano, call and response with the Raelettes, and mounting frenzy. It reaches number six on the pop chart and number one R&B, and finally breaks him to a white audience.

6. 1960

   "Georgia on My Mind," his first number one

   Newly signed to ABC-Paramount, he turns a 1930 standard into something that sounds like memory itself. It becomes his first number one hit.

7. 1962

   Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music

   A Black R&B star records an album of country songs, at a moment when American radio and American life were both strictly segregated. It tops the Billboard 200 and becomes the biggest record he ever made.

8. 1964

   The arrest, and getting clean

   Arrested at Boston's Logan Airport on Halloween for heroin possession, after years of addiction. He entered a hospital, went through four days of withdrawal, and quit. He received a suspended sentence, probation, and a fine, and resumed his career.

9. 2004

   Genius Loves Company, and the end

   He died on June 10, 2004, in Beverly Hills, of complications from liver failure. The duets album he finished shortly before became the biggest commercial success of his late career.

Start Here

Three performances, in the order the story happened. Watch what changes and what does not.

The Albums 5 to start with

His singles are the famous part, but these five records are where you can hear him deciding what he wanted to be next.

Playlists

One curated YouTube Music playlist of Ray Charles essentials, running roughly in the order he made them.

The Players

He was the writer, arranger, bandleader, and voice, but the records depend on the people he built around himself.

• Ray CharlesVocals, piano, arrangementsWrote, arranged, and led from the piano bench, reading and writing music in braille
• The RaelettesBacking vocalsThe vocal group he renamed from the Cookies; the answering voices that make the call and response work
• Ahmet Ertegun & Jerry WexlerAtlantic producersGave him the freedom in the 1950s to find the gospel-and-blues fusion that became soul
• Hank CrawfordSaxophone, arrangementsA central voice in the horn section and a key arranging hand in the ABC years
• Billy PrestonOrganJoined the touring band as a teenager, later a major artist in his own right

Influences

Two streams feed him: the polished, sophisticated piano-and-voice tradition he imitated first, and the church music he was not supposed to mix it with.

Interviews

Two long conversations, thirty years apart, both with him doing the talking.

Going Deeper

The catalog is enormous and unevenly served by compilations. A few directions worth taking.

• The Atlantic years. The 1952 to 1959 run is where soul music is actually invented; the complete Atlantic recordings collect it properly.
• Modern Sounds, volume two. The 1962 sequel is nearly as good as the first and far less discussed.
• What he made possible. Aretha Franklin, Sam Cooke, and James Brown all build on the door he opened.
• The country side. Follow the 1962 record forward into his later duets with country singers, and backward into Hank Williams.

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