Artists
Ray Charles
Ray Charles has the distinction of being both a national treasure and an international phenomenon. He started out from nowhere; years later finds him a global entity.
Hundreds of thousands of fingers have hit typewriter and word processor keyboards telling and retelling his story because it is uniquely American, an exemplar of what we like to think is the best in us and of our way of life.
The Ray Charles story is full of paradoxes, part and parcel of the American Dream.
Rags to riches. Triumph overcoming tragedy. Light transcending darkness.
The name Ray Charles is on a Star on Hollywood Boulevard 's Walk of Fame. His bronze bust is enshrined in the Playboy Hall of Fame. There is the bronze medallion cast and presented to him by the French Republic on behalf of its people. There are the Halls of Fame: Rhythm & Blues, Jazz, Rock & Roll. There are the many gold records and the 12 Grammys...
There is the blackness and the blindness. There was the extreme poverty; there was the segregated South into which he was born.
It is music, Ray Charles' single driving force, that catapulted a poor, black, blind, orphaned teenager from there to here.
"I was born with music inside me. That's the only explanation I know of..." he remarks in his autobiography.
"Music was one of my parts... Like my blood. It was a force already with me when I arrived on the scene. It was a necessity for me - like food or water."
"Music is nothing separate from me. It is me... You'd have to remove the music surgically."
Ray Charles Robinson was not born blind, only poor.
The first child of Aretha and Baily Robinson was born in Albany , GA , on September 23, 1930.
He hit the road early, at about three months, when the Robinsons moved across the border to Greenville , FL. It was the height of the Depression years. And the Robinsons had started out poor.
"you hear folks talking about being poor," Charles recounts. "Even compared to other blacks. . . we were on the bottom of the ladder looking up at everyone else. Nothing below us except the ground."
