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Ray Charles died from acute liver disease Thursday June 10, 2004. He was 73. He left behind a long list of hits and Grammy awards and the musicians he influenced are as diverse in genre as the music he wrote, arranged, performed and recorded.
The great Ray Charles was an explorer who returned time and again from expeditions across musical boundaries to give us, in his own unique way, melodious stories and charts of his adventures. In so doing he changed what had previously been only a black and white territorial paper map of American music into a 3-D, solid terrain model, full of color.
Charles was born during the Great Depression in the Deep South and was raised on blues, country, gospel, jazz and big band music. Throughout his long career he skillfully and artistically gathered and combined these separate musical elements together, added his own unique personality and styling, and freed the end result for the world to hear.
Ray Charles Robinson was born Sept. 23, 1930, in Albany, Ga. His father, Bailey Robinson, was a mechanic and a handyman, and his mother, Aretha, stacked boards in a sawmill. His family moved to Greenville, Fla., when Charles was an infant. During the Great Depression there was almost no such thing as financial gain for anyone and especially for a black family living in the totally segregated South.
Charles recalled how poor his family was in his 1978 autobiography, “Brother Ray”: “Even compared to other blackswe were on the bottom of the ladder looking up at everyone else. Nothing below us except the ground.
Although it was a poor existence, and his father was “hardly ever around”, he described himself as a “happy kid”. The tragedy and painful memories of the next several years however would change him forever.
At just five years old Charles had to endure the trauma of witnessing the drowning death of his younger brother in his mothers large portable laundry tub. Soon after the death of his brother he gradually began to lose his sight and by 7 years of age Ray Charles was blind. Although it is presumed that untreated glaucoma was the cause, no official diagnosis was ever made. His mother refused to let him wallow in self-pity however and since the sight loss was gradual, she began to work with him on how to find things and do things for himself.
Ray had shown an interest in music since the age of 3, encouraged by a cafe owner who played the piano. At 7, he became a charity student at the state-supported school for the deaf and blind in St. Augustine, Fla. Although he was heartbroken to be leaving home, it was at school where he received a formal musical education and learned to read, write and arrange music in Braille; score for big bands; and play piano, organ, sax, clarinet, and trumpet. His influences were the popular stars of the day like big band clarinetist Artie Shaw, big band leaders and pianists Duke Ellington and Count Basie, jazz piano giant Art Tatum, alto sax man and witty vocalist and bandleader Louis Jordan, and the great classical composers like Chopin and Sibelius. But Ray Charles loved it all. At night he listened on the radio to the raw melodies and hillbilly twang of the Grand Ole Opry, to the sanctified soulfulness of gospel, and to the secular emotional venting of the blues. Then at 15 his mother died and Charles, who said he never used a cane or guide dog or begged for money, left school and began touring the South on the so-called chitlin circuit with a number of dance bands that played in black dance halls.
In the South in 1945 the opportunities and outlook for any young black musician, just getting started and hoping for a career in music, would have been bleak. Add Mr. Charles loss of site and new found love for heroin (a habit he did not kick for nearly 20 years) and one would think the situation to be nearly hopeless.