Ray Charles: Man and Music

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
Hallelujah We Love Him So

Ray Charles is an American musical icon, known to many as the Genius of Soul. Certainly one of the hardest-working men in show business, he has earned and enjoyed massive success as an R & B singer, songwriter, and piano player. Like anyone, Charles has also had his faults and flops. Michael Lydon's Ray Charles: Man and Music follows Charles admiringly through the good times and respectfully through the bad, never losing sight of Ray's ultimate genius and determination.

Ray Charles Robinson was born in Albany, Georgia, in 1930 and raised in Greenville, South Carolina. The son of an unwed mother and her guardian, Charles spent his early years in Jellyroll, Greenville's black quarter, with his mother, her guardian, and his younger brother. Charles remembers these years as a time of poverty but also of warmth; friends and neighbors remember him as a bright boy who loved music and played piano from the age of three. Sadly, when RC, as he was called, was five, his world darkened: His younger brother drowned in a washtub as Charles stood by, unable to save him. A few months afterward, congenital juvenile glaucoma set in, which would soon render him completely blind.

Charles' mother, extraordinarily determined and certainly no fool, realized that life in the South for a blind black man would not be easy. When she found a way to send him to the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind, he was packed off in short order. By his second year there he had settled in socially and academically; music instruction occupied most of his timeandinterest.

When his mother died, in 1945, Charles had learned everything the school could teach him. He began the long task of establishing himself as a musician, playing every gig he could. His style was, by all reports, derivative; this criticism would follow him for years until he developed his own musical signature. In these years, however, beginning in 1946, he styled his singing primarily after Nat "King" Cole.

In 1948, Ray's star truly began to rise. He moved to Seattle with a friend and began building his reputation as a solid singer, piano player, and crowd-pleaser. However, it was also in Seattle that he first slipped under the influence of alcohol and drugs; he quickly developed a heroin habit that would pursue him for almost 20 years. In 1952 he signed a recording contract with Atlantic Records, and although his first several releases were ignored, he hit it big in 1954 with "I Got a Woman," a song that combined the best elements of gospel and blues into a sound that was beginning to be uniquely his. In the book's most interesting moments, Lydon enthusiastically charts the development of Charles's own inimitable style, which would make him a household name.

Charles switched record companies in 1959, shrewdly negotiating an unusually sweet deal even as his record "What'd I Say" was peaking on the charts. "Georgia on My Mind" (1960) was his first No. 1 hit. Throughout his career, Charles had toured relentlessly, and he continued to do so now. He made ripples in 1961 when he refused to play segregated venues any longer, but he also received some bad press when he was busted in Indianapolis for heroin. A more serious bust in Boston in 1964 convinced him to kick his habit for good, and this he did with typical determination. He had toured every year of his career since 1945, but he took 1965 off and stayed at home in Los Angeles, recovering and noodling around in his studio. (Lydon admires Charles's determination to quit cold turkey but notes that he seemed to switch his dependency to gin, which he drank all day long from a coffee mug.)

Through the '70s, Charles was virtually invisible. Though he'd been a major success for several years, new musical styles were evolving that made his sound began to seem antiquated and irrelevant. Charles plugged along, continuing to tour, but he produced no more hits until the '80s, when he returned to the rich tradition of country and western, a musical blend that had yielded him a number of hits in the early '60s. Singing "America" at the Republican convention in 1984 brought him close to the forefront again, and in 1990 Pepsi launched an ad campaign featuring Charles that once again pulled him out of near-obscurity. But as both he and his signature style grew older, Ray knew his time in the American public eye was nearly over.

As a chronicle of Ray's career, Ray Charles: Man and Music is strong and principled. Although clearly an admirer of Ray Charles at his best, Lydon is not sentimental about his failures and flaws (as, indeed, Charles himself is not). Ray Charles: Man and Music brings clarity and perspective to the involving story of one of America's R & B greats.
Julie Robichaux is a freelance writer. She lives in New York City.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The first comprehensive, definitive biography of Ray Charles. Based on extensive interviews with Ray Charles himself, as well as more than 150 other sources.
Includes 16 pages of photos.

SYNOPSIS

Ray Charles: Man and Music is a complete biography of this seminal singer/pianist who has been active on the American music scene since the mid-'50s. Originally published in 1995 by Penguin Books, and universally hailed as the definitive biography, this new edition will bring Charles's life up to date, covering the last 7 years of his life.

FROM THE CRITICS

People Magazine

...[E]xhaustively researched, movingly written...

Peter Guralnick

Absolutely fresh and compelling. This is a book not just about Ray Charles but about the world that nourished and inspired him. A true revelation.

— author of Last Train to Memphis and Careless Love

Jonathan Yardley

Ray Charles may well be the ultimate American story....Remarkably candid. A scrupulous and perceptive piece of work.

— The Washington Post

People

An exhaustively researched, movingly written biography of the man Frank Sinatra once called 'the only genius in our business.

Jeff Turrentine

Admirable...engrossing...Lydon isn't afraid to peek under those dark glasses and present a complete picture of this phenomenally talented but equally complicated man.

— ForbesRead all 11 "From The Critics" >

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

From a barnesandnoble.com e-nnouncement

As a founding editor of Rolling Stone magazine, Michael Lydon has been a music industry insider for more than 25 years. He has witnessed firsthand how the music has progressed and how the role of the musician has evolved in the latter part of the 20th century. In his latest book, RAY CHARLES: MAN AND MUSIC, Lydon has written a full-length biography of the man called the Genius of Soul. And in a barnesandnoble.com exclusive e-nnouncement(sm), read how Ray Charles's trailblazing career as an African-American entrepreneur has opened doors for the musicians of today.

Ray Charles: African-American Entrepreneur by Michael Lydon

In 1959, Ray Charles had been a successful singer for a decade, making good money from concerts and records, owning a Cadillac and a comfortable home in Los Angeles, and salting away a savings bank nest egg. Yet, like most rhythm and blues artists, Ray had remained passive in business, signing long-term recording and publishing contracts without checking into them deeply.

That summer, however, Ray had a huge hit with "What'd I Say," and suddenly ABC-Paramount, a major label, wanted to sign him away from little Atlantic Records. To get Ray's attention, ABC offered him not a 5% percent royalty as a singer, but a 75 percent royalty as the producer of his own records. The ABC offer came to Ray Charles like a wake-up call, opening his eyes to a potential for his music he had never dreamed possible. Ray grabbed his chance and struck it rich: The next three years brought his three biggest hits, "Georgia," "Hit the Road Jack," and "I Can't Stop Loving You."

Being an entrepreneur appealed to Ray's independent streak, and he poured his newfound millions into a foundation for his own business. With his manager, Joe Adams, himself a successful investor, Ray bought land in a black neighborhood in Los Angeles and built a combination office building and studio that he staffed, Ebony noted, with black professionals. Under that one roof, Ray housed the many divisions of Ray Charles Enterprises for 30 years; there he's had the freedom to rehearse his band and record his albums on his own schedule. Ray even ran his own record company, Tangerine Records. In the end Tangerine proved to be one of Ray's few investments that didn't pan out, but Ray never regretted trying. "We didn't lose money," Charles later said, "and with what I learned, I figure we broke better than even."

Ray is, to say the least, a hands-on entrepreneur. "Joe Adams helps Ray," one staffer revealed, "but Ray always has the last word." On tour Ray stays in daily touch with his home base; in L.A., he gets to the office every day by 10am, moving along the corridors so quickly, you'd never guess he was blind. He has a key to every door in his building, and when a fuse blows, he's the one to fix it. Why does the CEO pay such attention to detail? Because Ray is endlessly curious about the world -- "I like to know," he says -- and because his mother nurtured a go-it-alone spirit in Ray when he was a little boy and newly blind. "If you can't do it yourself, son, no one else will do for you," she told him, words the adult businessman has taken to heart.

Few entertainers gain such complete control over their work -- Clint Eastwood and Woody Allen are similar artist-entrepreneurs -- and Ray faced high barriers because of his race. "When I started out, Jim Crow ruled the roost," Charles reflected. "Being black has always been a bigger handicap than being blind." Yet Ray Charles has never let any handicap stop him, and at 68 he is still president and sole owner of Ray Charles Enterprises, still negotiating his own contracts for CD re-releases, celebrity endorsements, and European tours. Ray Charles's music has long inspired pop stars like Stevie Wonder, Babyface, and Puff Daddy, and their music-business success has also been much inspired by Ray's trailblazing career as an African-American entrepreneur.