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Ray Charles: Ray Charles Robinson
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Ray Charles Robinson (September 23, 1930 – June 10, 2004) known by his stage name Ray Charles, was a pioneering American pianist and musician who shaped the sound of rhythm and blues. He brought a soulful sound to country music, pop standards, and a rendition of "America the Beautiful" that Ed Bradley of 60 Minutes called the "definitive version of the song, an American anthem — a classic, just as the man who sang it."[1]
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Born in Albany, Georgia, during the depression, and blind by the age of seven, Ray Charles Robinson certainly had the deck stacked against him from the beginning. But as he himself was known to declare, Ray wasn't good because he was blind; Ray was good because he was good. Influenced by both the pop vocal stylings of crooners like Nat King Cole and the smooth West Coast Blues of Charles Brown, Ray started off cutting rather unadventurous (yet still viscerally exciting) jump blues and R&B in New Orleans.
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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. St. Augustine's was the Florida state school for the deaf and blind. Ray Charles was accepted as a charity student.
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Born in extreme poverty in Georgia, Ray Charles Robinson grew up in Greenville, Florida. He was slowly blinded by glaucoma until, by the age of seven, he had lost his sight completely. Earlier, he had been forced to cope with the tragic death of his brother, whom he had seen drown in a water tub. He learned to read and write music in Braille and was proficient on several instruments by the time he left school. His mother Aretha died when Ray was 15, and he continued to have a shared upbringing with Mary Jane (the first wife of his absent father).
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Ray Charles Robinson was born in Albany, Georgia. He lost his sight by age seven as a result of what was believed to be glaucoma. Charles received his first musical training at the Saint Augustine (Florida) School for the Deaf and Blind. At age 15, with both his parents dead, Charles left school, formed his own trio, and began touring the South (shortening his name to avoid confusion with boxer Sugar Ray Robinson). A few years later he moved to Seattle, Washington, where he continued to learn and experiment with various musical styles. Two of Charles’s biggest influences during this time were the smooth R&B sounds of Nat “King” Cole and the piano blues of Charles Brown.
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Ray Charles Robinson was not born blind, only poor. The first child of Aretha and Baily Robinson was born in Albany, Georgia, on September 23, 1930. He hit the road early, at about three months, when the Robinsons moved across the border to Greenville, Florida. 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.
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Ray Charles Robinson