The remarkable 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," Ray 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." It took three years, starting when Ray Charles was four, for the country boy who loved to look at the blazing sun at its height, the boy who loved to try to catch lightning, the boy who loved to strike matches to see their fierce, brief glare, to travel the path from light to darkness.  But Ray Charles has almost seven years of sight memory - colors, the things of the backwoods country, and the face of the most
important person in his life: his mother, Aretha Robinson. 
 

In Seattle he became a minor celebrity in local clubs. There he met an even younger musician, Quincy Jones, whom he took under his wing, marking the beginning of an inter-twining of two musical lifetimes...It was from Seattle that he went to Los Angeles to cut his first professional recording. And it was in Seattle, with Gossady McGee, that he formed the McSon Trio -- Robin (son) and (Mc) Gee -- in 1948, the first black group to have a sponsored TV show in the Pacific Northwest.  As Ray Charles, he toured for about a year with Lowell Fulsom's band. He formed a group and played with singer Ruth Brown.  He played the Apollo, the landmark showcase for black talent and aspired to play Carnegie Hall, then as now epitomizing the pinnacle of artistic success.  These were also the years that brought Charles the first band of his own, his first big hit record, "I Got A Woman." By the early 1960's Ray Charles had accomplished his dream. He'd come of age musically. He had become a great musician, posting musical milestones along his route:

He'd made it to Carnegie Hall. The hit records ("Georgia," "Born to Lose") successively kept climbing to the top of the charts. He'd made his own first triumphant European concert tour in 1960 (a feat which, except for 1965, he's repeated at least once a year ever since). Charles had treated himself to the formation of his first big band in 1961. In 1962, together with his long time friend and personal manager, Joe Adams, he oversaw construction of his own office building and recording studios in Los Angeles, RPM International He had taken virtually every form of popular music and broken through its boundaries with such awe inspiring achievements as the LP's "Genius Plus Soul Equals Jazz" and "Modern Sounds in Country & Western." Rhythm & blues (or "race music" as it had been called) became universally respectable through his efforts. Jazz found a mainstream audience it had never previously enjoyed. And country & western music began to chart an unexpected course to general acceptance, then worldwide popularity. Along the way Ray Charles was instrumental in the fresh invention of rock & roll.  In short, Ray Charles is an unrivaled phenomenon.