"I was born with music inside me," he said. Above all, he loved picking out boogie-woogie tunes on the upright piano owned by a neighbor named Wylie Pitman. He felt loved by two women: his mother, whom he called "Mama," and his father’s first wife, a woman he called "Mother." He loved the singing he heard on Sundays at the Shiloh Baptist Church. But he was hardly ever around" (Charles, 4).ĭespite the poverty, Charles recalled his early childhood as a happy time. to tell the truth, I wouldn’t bet a lot of money he and my mother ever were married. "The old man wasn’t part of my life," Charles wrote in his 1978 autobiography. Bailey Robinson became little more than an occasional visitor after that. A second child soon followed, a son named George. The family moved across the border to Greenville, Florida, when Charles was a few months old. Nothing below us except the ground" (Charles, 4). "Even compared to other blacks," Charles recalled, "we were on the bottom of the ladder looking up at everyone else. The family started out poor and stayed that way throughout the hard years of the Depression. His father worked off and on for the railroads his mother took in laundry. Ray Charles Robinson was born September 23, 1930, in Albany, Georgia, the first child of Aretha and Bailey Robinson. And if you ever want to say where I got my start, you have to say that" (MacDonald). Seattle is the town where I made my first record. The people were friendly, the people took to me right away. "I met a lot of very good friends here," he told one interviewer. Charles often spoke of Seattle as a pivotal point in his long and hugely successful career as a singer/songwriter. He stayed only two years, but during that time he cut his first record and began to develop the genre-bending musical style that would make him an international star. Ray Charles was a poor, blind, newly orphaned teenager living in Tampa, Florida, in 1948 when he decided to move to Seattle, picking the city because it was as far away as he could get from where he was.
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