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Ray Charles

© Barney Quick

Cultural observers love to be purists when it comes to defining rhythm & blues. Some contend that the jump music played in the 40s by Lionel Hampton, Louis Jordan, Johnny Otis et al was not yet fully formed r&b. Others assert that B.B. King is too rooted in traditional blues to qualify, or that Chuck Berry’s teen appeal puts him in a distinctly different category called rock & roll. There is the school of thought that says that classic 60s southern soul is something else besides r&b, or that classic Motown is too slick to be included. Those preoccupied with more recent decades either do or don’t classify funk pioneers such as Parliament and the Ohio Players, or balladeers such as Toni Braxton and Luther Vandross as r&b. This writer questions the late-90s revival of the term for charting the sales of current black popular music.

One figure ranks high on everybody’s list of all-time r&b giants, whatever their definiton of the term. Ray Charles has demonstrated for fifty years that the breadth and depth borne of a love for all good music can only enrich and dignify this art form called rhythm & blues.

The Genius embodies all manner of contrasts and makes their blend his own unique stamp. He’s gritty yet polished, down-home – even backwoods, yet elegant and sophisticated. He’s warm and affable, yet cool, streetwise and tough-minded. He is a paragon of musical discipline, yet he has abandon all self-control in the face of heroin, women, and even fancy cars (an interesting choice of material finery for a blind man). He is such a repository of musical traditions that his rendition of “America The Beautiful” stirs us in a way that no other does.

His spongelike absorption of all musical environments began early. He was born Ray Charles Robinson in Albany Georgia in 1930. He spent his youth in Greenville, Florida. His glaucoma claimed his sight at age six, but not before he’s seen his brother drown in the bathtub. His parents enrolled him in a school for the blind, where he immersed himself in music, becoming particularly drawn to Sibelius and Art Tatum. He learned several instruments and the art of big-band arranging. Robinson ran away at age fifteen, played hillbilly music with the Florida Playboys in Tampa, and then moved to Seattle. He worked with Bumps Blackwell, who was later Sam Cooke’s arranger, and a teenage Quincy Jones. In 1948, he signed with Swingtime Records and cut records under his own name, as well as doing arrangements for blues singer / guitarist Lowell Fulson.