[Today: Genius at work...]
Ray Charles Robinson was born into the blues. At age five he watched his younger brother drown in a wash tub, and then, in a cruel twist of fate, started to lose his eyesight just a few months later. By the time he was seven, he was completely blind. At 15 he was orphaned by the death of his young mother, Retha. Fortunately she had taught him to fend for himself, and so shortly after her death he left school to venture out in the world and make a living behind the piano. Charles had been tutored on the instrument by Mr. Wiley Pitman in his hometown of Greenville, FL, and by Mrs. Opal Lawrence at the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind in St. Augustine.
During his formative years, Charles learned to play a wide range of music, including classical, gospel, country and jazz. He spent several years kicking around the nightclub circuit, earning as little as $2 a night, before signing up with Swing Time Records in 1949. At this point he still hadn’t developed an individual style, but he showed enough promise that Ahmet Ertegun signed him up for Ertegun’s fledgling label, Atlantic Records. Between 1952 and 1959 (when he left Atlantic for a lucrative deal with RCA), Charles fused the blues, jazz and gospel into what would become known as soul music, and became a mainstay near the top of the charts (14 of the 20 tracks on this compilation were Top 10 R&B hits).
But Charles’ combination of gospel music and secular (some would say lewd) lyrics didn’t go over without controversy. As he remembered to author Robert Palmer, “There was a crossover between gospel music and the rhythm patterns of the blues, which I think came down through the years from slavery times, you know, because this was a way of communicating. But when I started doing things that would be based on an old gospel tune, I got criticism from the churches, and from musicians too. They thought it was sacrilegious or something, and what was I doing, I must be crazy.”
In December of 1954, he entered the studio of radio station WGST in Atlanta, and changed the face of modern music with his recording of the song ‘I Got A Woman’. With one foot in the church and the other in the gutter, this song represented the birth of a legend and the foundation of soul music. But it was the 1959 recording of ‘What’d I Say’ – a song that he improvised on the bandstand in Pittsburgh one night – that etched Charles’ name in the public consciousness. The song went #1 on the R&B charts and #6 on the pop charts, and made him a hot enough commodity that his days at Atlantic were numbered.
Asked by Life magazine in 1966 to define soul music, Charles replied, “What is soul? It’s like electricity – we don’t really know what it is, but it’s a force that can light a room.” If that’s the case, then The Best Of Ray Charles: The Atlantic Years provides enough sparks to light an entire city….
Listen: What’d I Say (Part 1)
Listen: I’ve Got A Woman
Listen: Hallelujah, I Love Her So
Listen: (Night Time Is) The Right Time
