American singer and pianist; James Baldwin wrote and narrated The Hallelujah Chorus around his music at Carnegie Hall in 1973, a decade after Paris sold out the Olympia for him.
Ray Charles was born Ray Charles Robinson in Albany, Georgia, in 1930, was blind by the age of seven, and became one of the principal inventors of soul music by joining gospel technique to rhythm and blues.[1] France took him up early: the jazz festival at Antibes in July 1961, a Paris debut that October, and a sold-out run at the Olympia music hall in May 1962. A decade later James Baldwin wrote, produced, and narrated The Hallelujah Chorus, a Carnegie Hall program of 1 July 1973 built around Charles and his orchestra, with the actress Cicely Tyson performing scenes drawn from Baldwin's short story Sonny's Blues.
His mother, Aretha Williams, moved with him to Greenville, Florida, shortly after his birth and raised him there.
When he was about five, he watched his younger brother drown. His sight began to fail at around the same age, and by seven it was gone. No firm diagnosis was made at the time; the cause is generally given as juvenile glaucoma.[2]
He was enrolled at the Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind in St. Augustine, where he learned to read and write music in Braille and trained on piano, clarinet, and other instruments.[3] The school gave him his musical grounding; the radio gave him everything else he listened to, gospel and blues alongside jazz and country.
Aretha Williams died in 1945, when her son was fifteen, and he set out as a working musician. In 1948 he moved across the country to Seattle, where he formed the McSon Trio and dropped his surname to avoid confusion with the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson. He performed as Ray Charles from then on.
Atlantic Records signed him in the early 1950s. The breakthrough came out of a session in Atlanta in November 1954: I Got a Woman, written with his trumpeter Renald Richard on the frame of a gospel song the two had heard on the radio.[4] It reached number one on the rhythm-and-blues chart early in 1955.[4]
The record drew a specific objection. Devout listeners heard church music put to secular use, and the blues singer Big Bill Broonzy accused him of "mixing the sacred with the profane." Charles kept at it. What'd I Say, recorded with his backing singers the Raelettes, arrived in 1959, his last year on Atlantic, by which time the label was billing him as "The Genius" — the big-band and string album The Genius of Ray Charles appeared that October.
In late 1959 ABC-Paramount signed him away from Atlantic on terms almost unknown in the record business: a higher royalty, the right to produce his own sessions, and eventual ownership of his master recordings.[5] He was twenty-nine. The deal made him one of the first popular artists to control his own catalogue[5], and the records that followed are the ones most listeners now know first:
Modern Sounds drew complaints from listeners who thought the country material a dilution of his sound. Charles had grown up on the music and did not treat the album as a stunt. Country, he later said, "was the closest music, really, to the blues."[6]
Music to me is just like breathing.
In March 1961 Charles was booked into the Bell Auditorium in Augusta, Georgia, for a segregated show: the dance floor reserved for white patrons, Black ticket-holders admitted as spectators. Students at Paine College, a Black institution in the city, sent him a telegram laying out the arrangement. Charles cancelled the concert.[5] The promoter sued for breach of contract, and a court later ordered him to pay damages.
Heroin ran alongside the whole ascent. Charles used the drug for much of his adult life and was arrested for possession in the fall of 1964. In 1965 he quit, going through withdrawal at a Los Angeles hospital, and the addiction did not resume.
His first French engagement came in July 1961, when the jazz festival at Antibes–Juan-les-Pins put him on for four concerts, 20 to 23 July, with French television and radio recording the run. He was back that October for his Paris debut at the Palais des Sports.
The Olympia followed in May 1962: a sold-out series of dates at the music hall on the boulevard des Capucines, with his big band and the Raelettes. Recordings from the run were issued decades later by the French label Frémeaux as Live at the Olympia — Paris 1962.[7]
On 1 July 1973 Charles played two shows at Carnegie Hall inside a frame James Baldwin built for him. The Hallelujah Chorus, written, produced, and narrated by Baldwin, set Charles, his orchestra, and the Raelettes against dramatic pieces performed by the actress Cicely Tyson, the actor David Moses, and Baldwin's br[8]other David Baldwin, with material drawn from Baldwin's short story Sonny's Blues.
The evening left little printed trace, and the script sat in an archive for four decades. The scholar Ed Pavlić's 2015 essay "But Amen is the Price" became the first substantive account of the collaboration after the script resurfaced.[8]
On 7 March 1979 Charles performed Georgia on My Mind before the Georgia General Assembly, eighteen years after the Augusta cancellation. The legislature adopted the song as Georgia's official state song, citing his recording, and Governor George Busbee signed the measure into law that April.[2]
Charles died of liver disease at his home in Beverly Hills on 10 June 2004, at seventy-three. He had just completed Genius Loves Company, an album of duets. At the Grammy Awards the following February the album won eight awards, including Album of the Year; Here We Go Again, his duet with Norah Jones, took Record of the Year.
Charles began to lose his sight as a small child in Greenville, Florida, and was blind by the age of seven. The cause was almost certainly glaucoma, though every account hedges it. The New Georgia Encyclopedia says most likely congenital juvenile glaucoma.[2] His own foundation and the standard reference works give his age at onset as four, five and six respectively. The retrospective diagnosis has never been confirmed.
What he described himself was a gradual loss rather than a single event. His mother, Aretha Robinson, understood what was coming and began teaching him to manage without sight before he had lost it. She would show him where a chair stood and make him remember it. He said later that she was responsible for what he became, because she had instilled in him that it was vital to be independent.
In the same year that his sight began to fail, his younger brother George drowned in their mother's laundry tub, aged four. Charles later called his brother's death and his mother's the two great tragedies of his life. The often-repeated version of this story has him watching the drowning and losing his sight from the shock of it. No source establishes that he saw it happen, and glaucoma is not caused by grief. The two things happened in the same year of one childhood, which is all that the record supports.
From 1937 Charles attended the Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind at St. Augustine, a segregated state institution several hundred miles from home. He stayed until 1945. It is where he was trained as a musician, and the page of his life that explains how a blind man came to arrange for a big band.
He learned piano, alto saxophone, clarinet, trumpet and organ, and took classical lessons in Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Chopin. He did not get into the piano class at first. By his own account he took up the clarinet instead, because he admired Artie Shaw, and got into the piano class the following year.
The most consequential thing he learned there was how to read music in Braille, taught by a teacher he remembered as Mrs. Lawrence. The mechanics are worth spelling out, because they explain a great deal about how he worked. A hand reading Braille cannot play at the same time, so each hand's part has to be read with the other hand and then memorised separately, one at a time, before the two can be put together. A musician trained that way carries the whole score in his head. Charles later dictated arrangements note by note to a copyist.
He left in 1945 when his mother died. He was fourteen or fifteen, and did not go back after the funeral.
In the summer of 1954, touring with his band, Charles heard the Southern Tones singing a gospel number called “It Must Be Jesus” on the radio and rebuilt it as a secular song. He recorded it on 18 November 1954 at WGST, the Georgia Tech radio station in Atlanta, with Jerry Wexler producing for Atlantic. It reached number one on the rhythm and blues chart in January 1955. The lyrics were written by Renald Richard, the trumpeter in his band, though Charles claimed the composition and the credit has been disputed since.
The record is usually described as the point where gospel and rhythm and blues fused into what became soul music. It was also the point at which Charles was accused of desecration. The specific critics are not named in the surviving record. His own account of the reaction is consistent, though: a lot of people thought it was too religious, that he was bastardizing the church, and the criticism came from every direction.
He was unrepentant and, in the end, vindicated by the vocabulary itself. As he put it, once enough other people were doing the same thing, they stopped calling it a scandal and started calling it soul music.
Born Ray Charles Robinson in Albany, Georgia, on 23 September. His mother, Aretha Williams, moves with him to Greenville, Florida, soon after.
Blind by age seven, probably from juvenile glaucoma, he enrolls at the Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind in St. Augustine and learns to read music in Braille.
His mother dies. He is fifteen, and begins working as a professional musician.
Moves to Seattle, forms the McSon Trio, and drops his surname to avoid confusion with the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson.
I Got a Woman, recorded in Atlanta the previous November, reaches number one on the rhythm-and-blues chart.
What'd I Say closes out the Atlantic years; in the fall he signs with ABC-Paramount on terms that include eventual ownership of his masters.
Georgia on My Mind, recorded in March, reaches number one on the pop chart in November.
Cancels a segregated show at Augusta's Bell Auditorium in March. Hit the Road Jack tops the pop chart; he plays the Antibes jazz festival in July and makes his Paris debut in October.
A sold-out run at the Olympia in Paris in May. Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music holds the top of the album chart for fourteen weeks.
Performs an overnight concert at Amsterdam's RAI building on 11 May, photographed at the piano by the Dutch press agency Anefo.
Arrested for heroin possession in the fall; he quits the drug at a Los Angeles hospital the following year.
The Hallelujah Chorus, written, produced, and narrated by James Baldwin around his music, plays two shows at Carnegie Hall on 1 July.
Performs Georgia on My Mind before the Georgia General Assembly on 7 March; the song becomes Georgia's official state song in April.
Dies of liver disease at his home in Beverly Hills on 10 June, at seventy-three.
Genius Loves Company, his final album of duets, wins eight Grammy Awards in February, including Album of the Year and Record of the Year.
I am not a country singer. I'm not a jazz singer. I am not a blues singer. What I am is I am a singer that can sing country music. I can sing the blues. I can sing a love song, but I'm not a specialist like you would say B.B. King is a blues singer.
A lot of people thought that it was too religious and I was bastardizing the church, and, ah, man, we got all kinds of criticism for that.
She knew I was going to lose my eyesight. And so since she knew I was going to lose my sight, she started showing me how to get around and how to do things without seeing.
Collaborated with · 1973
The Hallelujah Chorus — written, produced, and narrated by Baldwin around Charles's music, with Cicely Tyson performing — played two shows at Carnegie Hall on 1 July 1973. Baldwin's interludes drew on Sonny's Blues; the script resurfaced in an archive four decades later.
His sight began to fail when he was about five and was gone by age seven; no firm diagnosis was made at the time, and the cause is generally given as juvenile glaucoma. He learned to read and write music in Braille at the Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind in St. Augustine, where he trained on piano, clarinet, and other instruments.
To avoid confusion with the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson. He was born Ray Charles Robinson in Albany, Georgia, in 1930, and began performing as Ray Charles after moving to Seattle in 1948.
The writer James Baldwin wrote, produced, and narrated The Hallelujah Chorus, a program built around Ray Charles and his orchestra that played two shows at Carnegie Hall on 1 July 1973, with the actress Cicely Tyson performing scenes drawn from Baldwin's short story Sonny's Blues. The script sat in an archive for four decades; Ed Pavlić's 2015 essay "But Amen is the Price" was the first substantive account of the collaboration.
In May 1962, a sold-out series of dates at the Olympia music hall on the boulevard des Capucines, later issued by the French label Frémeaux as Live at the Olympia — Paris 1962. His French debut had come in July 1961 at the Antibes jazz festival, followed by a first Paris appearance at the Palais des Sports that October.
Because the Georgia legislature adopted it in 1979, citing Ray Charles's recording. The song, written by Hoagy Carmichael and Stuart Gorrell in 1930, became his first number-one pop hit in 1960; on 7 March 1979 he performed it before the Georgia General Assembly, and Governor George Busbee signed the measure into law that April.
Of liver disease, at his home in Beverly Hills, California, on 10 June 2004, at seventy-three. His final album, Genius Loves Company, won eight Grammy Awards the following February, including Album of the Year.
Collaborated with · 1973
The Hallelujah Chorus — written, produced, and narrated by Baldwin around Charles's music, with Cicely Tyson performing — played two shows at Carnegie Hall on 1 July 1973. Baldwin's interludes drew on Sonny's Blues; the script resurfaced in an archive four decades later.
Performed at · 1962
Charles's first stand at the Olympia was a sold-out series in May 1962, later issued by Frémeaux as Live at the Olympia — Paris 1962. His Paris debut had come the previous October at the Palais des Sports.
The sources below include biographies, scholarly essays, interviews, and primary materials that informed this page. They reflect both the historical record and ongoing critical conversations about Ray Charles and their work.
A Smithsonian account of Charles's musical synthesis, career, and remarks about music as a physical necessity.
Reference article cross-checked for the school years, the instruments and the Braille music teaching.
The NPR transcript of Terry Gross's Fresh Air interview of 19 October 1998, the source of most of the quotations here.
The label documentation for the surviving May 1962 Olympia recordings.
The Fresh Air Archive transcript of the same 1998 interview, cross-checked against the NPR text.
The 2004 memorial rebroadcast transcript, used as a third check on wording.
The foundation's record of RPM International and the 2004 landmark ceremony.
Smithsonian collection overview of Charles's career, recordings, instruments, and cross-genre legacy.
National Museum of American History exhibition record documenting Charles's career and surviving performance artifacts.
These references anchor the page in the documented record and in the scholarly conversations around Ray Charles. Every claim on this page traces back to one or more of the works listed here.
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