No other artist has starred across such a range of genres as Ray Charles, whose records hit the No. 1 position at various times on Billboard’s pop, R&B, jazz, and country charts. But blues was one his primary roots, along with gospel, and from the two he created soul music. As he said in a Rolling Stone interview, ‘Maybe I put together two things that hadn’t been put together before, but, hell, give credit to the church singers and the bluesmen who I got it from. I got enough credit. Let people know that it didn’t come from me. It came from before me. . . . But they didn’t get no money for it, and I did.’
Ray Charles Robinson, who dropped the Robinson early in his career to avoid confusion with boxing champ Sugar Ray Robinson, was born in Albany, Georgia, on Sept. 23, 1930, and raised in Florida, where he started playing piano. He picked the distant port of Seattle – as far from the sunshine state as he could get – to pursue his career in 1948, and by the next year he had his first hit with this group, the Maxin Trio, with “Confession Blues.” Under the sway of Nat King Cole and Charles Brown in his early years, Charles came into his own during a stint with Atlantic Records where his secular adaptations of gospel songs (such as “I’ve Got a Woman,” with its music taken straight from a gospel record he had just heard, “It Must Be Jesus” by the Southern Tones) broke barriers and brought him both fame among rock ‘n’ roll and R&B fans and criticism among the religious community. Charles recorded many blues during his career, including the Atlantic album “The Genius Sings the Blues” and a number of hits written by heralded blues composer Percy Mayfield. Earlier in his career he played piano for Lowell Fulson, then one of the country’s top blues acts, and also played on Guitar Slim’s blues smash “The Things I That I Used to Do.” After receiving almost every conceivable award the music industry could offer, including induction into the Blues and Rock and Roll Halls of Fame, Ray Charles died in Beverly Hills on June 10, 2004.
— Jim O’Neal
www.stackhouse-bluesoterica.blogspot.com