Ray Charles Robinson Sr. (September 23, 1930 – June 10, 2004) was a singer, composer, and pianist from the United States. He is regarded as one of the most famous and influential singers in history and was often referred to as “The Genius” by his contemporaries. He favored the moniker “Brother Ray” among his friends and other artists. Charles was blinded as a child, possibly as a result of glaucoma.
Who is Ray Charles?
Ray Charles was born in Albany, Georgia on September 23, 1930. He was born in Greenville, Florida, to laborer Bailey Robinson and laundress Aretha (or Reatha) Robinson (née Williams).
Aretha’s mother died while she was a child. Her father was unable to keep her. Bailey, a coworker of her father’s, took her in. Aretha was informally adopted by the Robinson family—Bailey, his wife Mary Jane, and his mother, and acquired the surname Robinson. Aretha fell pregnant by Bailey a few years later. She departed Greenville late in the summer of 1930 to be with family in Albany during the impending scandal.
She and the infant Charles returned to Greenville after the birth of their kid, Ray Charles. Charles was raised by Aretha and Bailey’s wife, who had lost a son. The father abandoned the family, moved away from Greenville, and married another lady. Charles had a brother, George, by his first birthday.
Charles was strongly attached to his mother and subsequently remembers her resilience, self-sufficiency, and pride as guiding lights in his life, despite her bad health and difficulty.
Charles had an early interest in mechanical devices and would frequently see his neighbors working on their cars and agricultural machines. At the age of three, he was piqued by Wylie Pitman’s Red Wing Cafe, where Pitman performed boogie woogie on an antique upright piano; Pitman later taught Charles how to play the piano. Charles and his mother were always welcomed at the Red Wing Cafe, and they even lived there when they were in financial trouble. Pitman would also look after Ray’s younger brother George, relieving their mother of some of the stress. When George was four years old, he drowned by accident in his mother’s laundry tub.
What are some of Ray Charles influences on the Music Industry?
Charles possessed one of the most recognizable voices in American music. In the words of musicologist Henry Pleasants:
Sinatra, and Bing Crosby before him, had been masters of words. Ray Charles is a master of sounds. His records disclose an extraordinary assortment of slurs, glides, turns, shrieks, wails, breaks, shouts, screams and hollers, all wonderfully controlled, disciplined by inspired musicianship, and harnessed to ingenious subtleties of harmony, dynamics, and rhythm… It is either the singing of a man whose vocabulary is inadequate to express what is in his heart and mind or of one whose feelings are too intense for satisfactory verbal or conventionally melodic articulation. He can’t tell it to you. He can’t even sing it to you. He has to cry out to you or shout to you, in tones eloquent of despair or exaltation. The voice alone, with little assistance from the text or the notated music, conveys the message.
Pleasants continues, “Ray Charles is usually described as a baritone, and his speaking voice would suggest as much, as would the difficulty he experiences in reaching and sustaining the baritone’s high E and F in a popular ballad. But the voice undergoes some sort of transfiguration under stress, and in the music of gospel or blues character he can and does sing for measures on end in the high tenor range of A, B flat, B, C and even C sharp and D, sometimes in full voice, sometimes in an ecstatic head voice, sometimes in falsetto. In falsetto, he continues up to E and F above high C. On one extraordinary record, ‘I’m Going Down to the River’…he hits an incredible B flat…giving him an overall range, including the falsetto extension, of at least three octaves.”
His style and popularity in the genres of rhythm and blues and jazz-influenced a lot of extremely successful performers, including Elvis Presley, Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, Van Morrison, and Billy Joel, as Jon Pareles has remarked. James Booker, Steve Winwood, Richard Manuel, and Gregg Allman are among the other singers who have acknowledged Charles’ impact on their approaches. “The hit records he made for Atlantic in the mid-1950s mapped out everything that would happen to rock ‘n’ roll and soul music in the years that followed,” says Joe Levy, a Rolling Stone music editor.
Pink Floyd member Roger Waters said in the Turkish newspaper Hürriyet, “I was about 15 when I met Charles.” We were listening to jazz with pals in the middle of the night. Ray Charles’ version of “Georgia on My Mind” was playing. Then I thought, ‘One day, if I can make only one-twentieth of what I’m feeling now, that will be enough for me.’”
Ray, a biography on his life and career from the mid-1930s until 1979, was released in October 2004 and starred Jamie Foxx as Charles. For the portrayal, Foxx received the Academy Award for Best Actor in 2005.
Source: thpttranhungdao.edu.vn/en/
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Source: thpttranhungdao.edu.vn/en/
