Larry Schwartz
IN an era when the term “legend” is too readily bandied about, Ray Charles is the genuine article. But though others say he’s among the biggest of stars, he comes across as rather self-effacing.
“Why thank you, sir,” he says. And, “Does that kind of help you out on that question?” “Well thank you a lot my friend. You take care now.”
The 71-year-old singer, composer, arranger, pianist, saxophone player and bandleader, who was once hailed as the father of soul music, plays down accolades.
Frank Sinatra once described him as “the only genius in our business”. “Oh, he’s just a nice man,” Charles says. “He only said that cause I knew him.”
Ray Charles Robinson, as he once was, is a veritable giant of post-World War Two (or any other) music. His influence has been enormous and remains so. Perhaps few have expressed his early achievements as aptly as the late blues writer, Robert Palmer, who said Charles had “almost single-
handedly created soul music, by fusing the intensity, inflection and structures of gospel music, the subject matter of the blues and punching horn riffs of south-western jazz”.
Not that he was alone, or first, in blending the sacred and profane. But he was a rising star, not some obscure bluesman. The stakes were high – and there was a cost.
Charles recently revisited a once-controversial early hit when he recorded a version for a new album, Thanks For Bringing Love Around Again, due out next month.
The song is among his best loved. In 1959, What’d I Say? sold more than a million copies, despite being banned by many American radio stations for being too sexually suggestive.
He laughs at the memory. “I didn’t get that point. All I was doing was just, you know, humming and saying `hmmmmm’, `ahhhhh’. You make out of that what you want. I was not using anything vulgar. I was not saying anything nasty. I was just singing the song. But some people thought, `Oh,
that’s sexually suggestive’, and I’m thinking, `Is that what you do? Is that how you sound in bed?”‘
Now on his 135th world tour, Charles has visited Australia several times before. “It’s nice down there if you don’t mind my putting it that way. It’s very, very nice …”
He sidesteps questions that might cause controversy, gently declining to be drawn into a response on Australia’s policy on asylum seekers or the plight of Aborigines. “I can talk about this country (America),” he says. “I can say anything I like. But I don’t feel I have the right to really say
anything except what wonderful times I personally enjoyed in a country.”
He once stirred controversy among anti-apartheid activists by visiting South Africa in the mid-1970s, when entertainers were staying away from that country in droves. “Well, you know people did not understand my situation. In my contract … I made it perfectly clear that the blacks could
sit anywhere they want. And when I played they could. After the show was over, I don’t know where they went or what happened after that. But in my concerts everybody sits where they want to sit.”
He championed civil rights in America and stood his ground against bigotry. In the 1950s, he refused to play at a venue in Augusta, Georgia, after hearing the audience was segregated, with blacks sitting upstairs only and whites below.
“I never could agree with that,” Charles says, “and so I must tell you I lost a lot of money from a lot of towns that we could have played, that we didn’t play, because I wouldn’t play under those circumstances.
“I never felt that it was right because it was my people who made me what I am. And if they can’t come and sit in a comfortable seat where they want, I mean, that’s crazy. So I just said, `OK, well, if that’s the way it is, I don’t play’. And they said, `OK we’re going to sue you’. I said, `OK’. And
they sued me and I lost money.
“But I didn’t care, man. You’ve got to go with what you believe in. Your own personal beliefs have to mean something to you.”
Charles was born into extreme poverty in Albany, Georgia, on September 23, 1930, and raised in the rural Florida town of Greenville. His father, Bailey Robinson, was a railroad repairman and rarely home. His mother, Aretha, took in washing.
Charles was five when a younger brother drowned in a washtub. “I tried to pull him out but he was too heavy,” he has said. “I went into the house to get my mom but it was too late.”
By seven, another tragedy had struck. He began waking with eyes blurred by mucus. Two years later, he was completely blind. In the years of darkness, he has held on to the image of his mother, who died when he was just 15.
“There are two things that I definitely remember very vividly in my mind’s eye and that’s the way my mom looked and colours.
“I mean, if you say to me, green or red or purple or blue or something like that, I know what you mean.”
Regrets, he surely has a few. But none he’d care to mention. He does not dwell on what might have been or what he might have seen. Nor does he bemoan his blindness.
“It’s like somebody asking me about some of the things that I’ve done in my life that was not so good, not so nice,” he says, “and they’ll ask me do you have any regrets and when I say, `No’, they’re very shocked.
“Everything I did, at the time I did it, I felt pretty good about it. So why should I regret it now? That’s nuts. I mean, what you did is what you did. The good thing about it is you learn not to do it any more.”
Among the not-so-nice pastimes was a 17-year heroin addiction. He kicked the habit in 1965. “I don’t want anybody to ever think that using drugs is beneficial because it’s not, OK? If I were to say to you that in some of the best music that I made and some of my greatest hits I was using
drugs, you’d think that somebody would say, `Oh, if Ray Charles used drugs when he made them great songs, then I can use drugs too. It’s going to be good for me too.’ See that’s all total bull. It don’t.
“So I tell people, `Look man, you know, keep your life straight, keep your life clean, keep what the Good Lord gave you when you came into the world’.”
He learned to compose and arrange music in braille and play piano, clarinet, alto saxophone, organ and trumpet at the St Augustine School for the Deaf and the Blind in Florida.
“I was just happy to run around and play, you know, with the rest of the boys,” he says. “But I always was into the music thing.”
He found his unique sound after emerging from the shadow of early influences Nat “King” Cole and Charles Brown.
Charles, who dropped the Robinson surname to avoid confusion with boxing champion Sugar Ray, has penned more than his share of classics – I Got A Woman, Hallelujah, I Love Her So, What Kind of Man Are You? to name a few. He’s covered others – from New Yorker Doc Pomus (Lonely
Avenue) to Hoagy Carmichael (Georgia On My Mind) – so distinctively, he’s made them his own.
He’s ranged far and wide in popular music, disregarding perceived barriers, as when recording country songs, making a hit, for instance, of Hank Snow’s I’m Moving On when it was not necessarily a smart move for an emerging soul star.
“Duke Ellington once said, `There’s only two kinds of music, good and bad’, and I think that’s very true, you know.”
He does not hesitate to acknowledge others for their “genius”. “Art Tatum for instance,” he says. “To me that was God – OK? – when it comes to piano. Or you take Ella Fitzgerald or Aretha Franklin or Barbara Streisand. Or you look at Frank Sinatra, who I think was really and truly incredible.”
He readily concedes he’s out of sync with some contemporary sounds. “Let me just give you the biggest thing from what I hear that’s going around,” he says. “Say, rap. Do they have rap in Australia?”
Absolutely.
“I’m not knocking what people enjoy. Everybody don’t like cabbage or everybody don’t like fish, you know. So whatever you like, that’s fine, you know. I’m for that.
“But if you speak to me personally about rap, I can’t find anything in it that can make my brain move. I can’t find anything. If you say to me that somebody is reciting a poem to music, well I did that 25, 30 years ago, at least. So there’s nothing there for me to jump up and say, `Wow, did you
hear what that guy just did? Did you hear what he played? Did you hear what she just sung?’
“I always tell people if you like rap music, what I want you to do is hum me the melody. Think about that now. Just hum. If I want to hum Stardust, I can go get the melody right. So you name me a rap tune and then hum me the melody and then I’ll go along with you.”
I defer to the legend and tell him I’ll pass on that one.
Sunday Age. 10th of February 2002
Larry Schwartz Writer