49 Fun Facts About Ray Charles

Ray Charles was raised largely in Greenville, a small town in which state?

Florida. He was a few months old when his mother brought him to Greenville, and as a teenager he put the state far behind him, crossing the country to Seattle to lead a band of his own.

What was Ray Charles's surname at birth, later dropped from his stage name?

Robinson. He dropped it as a young working musician so that audiences would not confuse him with the champion boxer Sugar Ray Robinson, then a household name.

Ray Charles was among the stars who sang on which 1985 charity single for African famine relief?

We Are the World. He recorded it with USA for Africa, a choir of American stars gathered for a single session, who filed in past a sign reading 'Check your ego at the door.'

Charles attended a school for the deaf and blind in which city from 1937 to 1945?

St. Augustine. At the state school he learned to repair radios and cars as well as to play piano, clarinet, saxophone, trumpet and organ, and he stayed until his mother died in 1945.

What style did café owner Wylie Pitman play on the piano that first drew three-year-old Ray Charles to music?

Boogie-woogie. Pitman sat the boy at the Red Wing Café's old upright and showed him where to put his fingers, the first piano lessons he ever had.

Which 1960 recording gave Ray Charles his first No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100?

Georgia on My Mind. In 1979 the state he was born in adopted his version as its official song, and he sang it for the lawmakers on the floor of the legislature.

Which actor won the Best Actor Oscar for playing Charles in the 2004 biopic Ray?

Jamie Foxx. He added a Golden Globe for the part, and the film, already finished when Charles died that June, reached cinemas four months after his death.

Contemporaries called Ray Charles 'The Genius'; what did he prefer friends and musicians to call him?

Brother Ray. He put the name on the cover of his 1978 autobiography, Brother Ray: Ray Charles' Own Story, which became a best seller.

Ray Charles moved to Seattle in the late 1940s and befriended which teenage future producer there?

Quincy Jones. The younger boy studied the way Charles built his arrangements, the two stayed friends for life, and four decades later they shared a Grammy-winning record.

What was the name of the group Ray Charles formed after moving to Seattle in the late 1940s?

The McSon Trio. It was the first band he led himself, yet its records came out under another spelling altogether, the Maxin Trio.

Which singer did Ray Charles say he tried to imitate early on 'because I loved him so much'?

Nat King Cole. Sounding like him got the young pianist work, until Charles realised that the people praising the likeness did not even know his own name.

Atlantic Records bought Ray Charles's contract from the Swing Time label for about how much?

$2,500. Atlantic's partners paid it without ever having seen him perform, and within three years 'I've Got a Woman' had given their label a No. 1 rhythm-and-blues hit.

Ray Charles's breakthrough 'I've Got a Woman', recorded in 1954, was reworked from which gospel song?

It Must Be Jesus. Charles heard the Southern Tones' record on the car radio while touring in 1954, reworked it with his trumpeter Renald Richard, and took the result to No. 1 on the R&B chart.

Charles hired a female vocal group called the Cookies and renamed them what?

The Raelettes. Their answers to his lead vocals, modelled on the call and response of a gospel choir, became a permanent part of his sound from the mid-1950s.

Which 1959 single, banned by some stations as suggestive, was Charles's first top-ten pop hit?

What'd I Say. He made it up on stage to fill time when his band ran out of songs at a dance, and the moans that got it banned did not stop it selling a million copies.

At his last Atlantic session in 1959, Ray Charles cut his first country song, 'I'm Movin' On', a hit for whom?

Hank Snow. The cover was the first of nearly a hundred country songs Charles would record, and it came three years before he gave whole albums over to the idea.

Charles's ABC contract included a then-rare perk: eventual ownership of what?

His master tapes. The recordings earned him so much over the years that, by some accounts, he lost the urge to write new songs and turned mostly to reinterpreting other people's.

Who wrote 'Hit the Road Jack', which earned Charles a Grammy?

Percy Mayfield. A hit singer himself until a 1952 car crash left him badly injured, he turned mainly to writing, and this two-minute quarrel became one of Charles's signature songs.

Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, released in 1962, was the first Charles album to do what?

Top the Billboard 200. It knocked the West Side Story soundtrack off No. 1 and stayed there for 14 weeks, although his label's executives had feared a country record would cost him his fans.

Which Don Gibson song gave Ray Charles his only UK No. 1 and a five-week US No. 1?

I Can't Stop Loving You. Gibson had written it in 1957 as a plain country ballad; Charles recast it as a lush big-band ballad, and his single sold more than a million copies.

What was the name of the record label Charles founded in 1962?

Tangerine. For its first few years the label issued other artists' records while its founder stayed on ABC, which distributed it; his own releases moved to Tangerine only in the mid-1960s.

Charles's 1961 Indianapolis drug case was dropped for what reason?

The search lacked a proper warrant. Detectives had found heroin in his hotel room before a show, but the way they obtained the evidence sank the case, and he soon returned to performing.

Ray Charles recorded 'I've Got a Woman' in 1954 in the studio of a radio station in which city?

Atlanta. He rang his label's bosses to come and hear his own seven-piece road band at the Royal Peacock club, then cut the song with it, the first time they let him record with his touring group.

In 2002 Ray Charles took on Larry Evans, a five-time United States champion, at which game?

Chess. Charles lost, but when Evans praised him for spotting a trap he shot back that he played badly, 'but not that bad'; he was known to set up a board between sets and take on fellow musicians.

Charles's 1966 hits 'I Don't Need No Doctor' and 'Let's Go Get Stoned' were co-written by which songwriting duo?

Ashford & Simpson. They wrote both songs with Jo Armstead, and 'Let's Go Get Stoned' gave Charles his first R&B No. 1 in years just as he came back from kicking heroin.

Charles cancelled a 1961 concert in Augusta, Georgia, after learning what?

The dance floor was whites-only. Students from a local Black college warned him that Black ticket-holders would be kept to the balcony; he was sued by the promoter, and came back in 1963 to play the hall desegregated.

Which patriotic standard did Ray Charles remake in gospel-soul style in 1972 and sing at the 1984 Republican convention?

America the Beautiful. It first appeared on A Message from the People, an album that set it beside songs calling for racial unity and for help for the poor.

Charles appeared in which 1980 musical comedy film?

The Blues Brothers. He plays Ray, the music-shop owner who sells the band its instruments and shows that a keyboard still works by tearing into 'Shake a Tail Feather'.

In 1981 Ray Charles broke a cultural boycott to perform at Sun City, a resort in which country?

South Africa. The United Nations had called the boycott over apartheid, and the resort paid stars heavily to ignore it.

'Seven Spanish Angels' was a country hit duet between Charles and which longtime friend?

Willie Nelson. Nelson credited Charles's 1962 country albums with introducing those songs to millions of new listeners, and their 1984 duet took Charles himself to No. 1 on the country chart.

'Baby Grand', Charles's 1980s return to the pop charts, was a duet with which singer-songwriter?

Billy Joel. He counted Charles among his greatest influences, gave his daughter the middle name Ray in his honour, and brought him in to sing on his 1986 album The Bridge.

Charles and Chaka Khan's 1990 R&B No. 1 'I'll Be Good to You' covered a song by which group?

The Brothers Johnson. The man who had produced the brothers' original hit revived the song himself for an all-star album of his own, and the remake won Charles and Khan a Grammy.

Ray Charles sang 'You got the right one, baby, uh-huh!' in early-1990s television ads for which drink?

Diet Pepsi. The campaign began in 1990, the year he turned 60, and carried his voice and his catchphrase to a generation of viewers too young to know his records.

Ray Charles won a 1975 Grammy for his version of 'Living for the City', first a hit for which artist?

Stevie Wonder. The admiration ran both ways: as a 12-year-old newcomer at Motown, Wonder had put out a tribute album built on songs made famous by Charles.

Charles's final album, released two months after his death and winner of eight Grammys, was titled what?

Genius Loves Company. An album of duets with a dozen admirers, completed shortly before he died, it became the biggest seller of his whole career and took Album of the Year.

Ray Charles's duet 'Here We Go Again' won Record of the Year after his death; who sang it with him?

Norah Jones. Charles had already taken the song into the pop top twenty on his own in 1967, and the remake won at the ceremony where his last album also took the top prize.

Charles died in June 2004 of complications from what?

Liver failure. He had come through a hip replacement the year before and was booked to tour again when acute liver disease set in; he died at home in Beverly Hills, aged 73.

In 1986 Ray Charles was one of the ten inaugural inductees of which institution?

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He went in alongside Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry and James Brown, although he had written that he never considered himself part of rock 'n' roll.

Ray Charles's foundation, set up in 1986, was created to fund research into what?

Hearing disorders. A musician who had been blind since childhood chose to fund the sense he depended on, backing research and education on the causes and cures of hearing loss.

In 1971 Ray Charles joined which singer on stage for her live album recorded at the Fillmore West?

Aretha Franklin. He joined her for a reprise of 'Spirit in the Dark', and their duet runs to nearly nine minutes, longer than her own version of the song.

At Ray Charles's last public appearance, in April 2004, Los Angeles declared what a historic landmark?

His recording studio. He had worked out of the Washington Boulevard building since the early 1960s and kept it as his headquarters for the rest of his life; he died six weeks after the ceremony.

Ray Charles made a seven-figure gift to which historically Black college, now home to a performing arts centre in his name?

Morehouse. The donor's own schooling had ended at 15, when his mother died and he left to earn his living as a musician; the centre that carries his name opened after his death.

In which Georgia city was Ray Charles born in September 1930?

Albany. He left as a baby, yet the city claimed him all the same: in 2007 it opened Ray Charles Plaza, where a lighted bronze of him at the piano slowly revolves.

What is the most likely cause of the blindness that overtook Charles by age seven?

Glaucoma. Nobody treated or even diagnosed it at the time, so the cause is a later judgement; his sight began to fail when he was about five and was gone two years later.

How did Charles's younger brother George die when Ray was a small child?

Drowned in a laundry tub. Ray, about five, saw George go under in their mother's washtub and tried to haul him out, but was too small to manage it.

At school in St. Augustine, how did Charles learn to read and write music?

The method meant reading the left-hand part with the right hand and vice versa, then combining the two from memory.

What was Charles's first national hit, recorded in Seattle in April 1949?

It reached No. 2 on the Billboard R&B chart while he was still playing the late shift at the Rocking Chair.

Which singer called Ray Charles 'the only genius in our business'?

Frank Sinatra. Fellow musicians had started calling Charles 'The Genius' in the 1950s, and his labels put the word in his album titles from 1959.

'Georgia on My Mind' was written in 1930 by Stuart Gorrell and which composer?

Hoagy Carmichael. He published the song in 1930, the very year Charles was born in the state it names, and decades passed before singer and song met on record.