Ray Charles Trivia
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49 free Ray Charles trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Ray Charles trivia quiz covers the man his peers called The Genius, from a boogie-woogie piano in a Florida café to the songs that fused gospel, blues, jazz and country into soul music. The easy questions cover the landmarks: where he was born, why he wore dark glasses, the state song he made his own, and the actor who won an Oscar playing him. From there the quiz gets into his early years in Seattle with a teenage Quincy Jones, the Atlantic hits, the ABC deal that gave him ownership of his masters, and Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music. The hard and expert questions are for people who have read Brother Ray: the name of his first trio, the Cookies who became the Raelettes, the heroin arrests and the rehab, the Augusta concert he cancelled over segregation, the chess hobby, his Country Music Hall of Fame induction, and the duets album that won eight Grammys after his death. Every answer was checked against Ray Charles's encyclopaedia entry before publishing. If you enjoy this, try our soul music, jazz and Motown quizzes next.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Ray Charles was raised largely in Greenville, a small town in which state?
Florida
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.
Q 02What was Ray Charles's surname at birth, later dropped from his stage name?
Robinson
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.
Q 03Ray Charles was among the stars who sang on which 1985 charity single for African famine relief?
We Are the World
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.'
Q 04Charles attended a school for the deaf and blind in which city from 1937 to 1945?
St. Augustine
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.
Q 05What style did café owner Wylie Pitman play on the piano that first drew three-year-old Ray Charles to music?
Boogie-woogie
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.
Q 06Which 1960 recording gave Ray Charles his first No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100?
Georgia on My Mind
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.
Q 07Which actor won the Best Actor Oscar for playing Charles in the 2004 biopic Ray?
Jamie Foxx
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.
Q 08Contemporaries called Ray Charles 'The Genius'; what did he prefer friends and musicians to call him?
Brother Ray
Brother Ray. He put the name on the cover of his 1978 autobiography, Brother Ray: Ray Charles' Own Story, which became a best seller.
Q 09Ray Charles moved to Seattle in the late 1940s and befriended which teenage future producer there?
Quincy Jones
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.
Q 10What was the name of the group Ray Charles formed after moving to Seattle in the late 1940s?
The McSon Trio
The McSon Trio. It was the first band he led himself, yet its records came out under another spelling altogether, the Maxin Trio.
Q 11Which singer did Ray Charles say he tried to imitate early on 'because I loved him so much'?
Nat King Cole
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.
Q 12Atlantic Records bought Ray Charles's contract from the Swing Time label for about how much?
$2,500
$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.
Q 13Ray Charles's breakthrough 'I've Got a Woman', recorded in 1954, was reworked from which gospel song?
It Must Be Jesus
Q 21What was the name of the record label Charles founded in 1962?
Tangerine
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.
Q 22Charles's 1961 Indianapolis drug case was dropped for what reason?
The search lacked a proper warrant
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.
Q 23Ray Charles recorded 'I've Got a Woman' in 1954 in the studio of a radio station in which city?
Atlanta
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.
Q 14Charles hired a female vocal group called the Cookies and renamed them what?
The Raelettes
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.
Q 15Which 1959 single, banned by some stations as suggestive, was Charles's first top-ten pop hit?
What'd I Say
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.
Q 16At his last Atlantic session in 1959, Ray Charles cut his first country song, 'I'm Movin' On', a hit for whom?
Hank Snow
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.
Q 17Charles's ABC contract included a then-rare perk: eventual ownership of what?
His master tapes
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.
Q 18Who wrote 'Hit the Road Jack', which earned Charles a Grammy?
Percy Mayfield
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.
Q 19Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, released in 1962, was the first Charles album to do what?
Top the Billboard 200
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.
Q 20Which Don Gibson song gave Ray Charles his only UK No. 1 and a five-week US No. 1?
I Can't Stop Loving You
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.
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.
Q 24In 2002 Ray Charles took on Larry Evans, a five-time United States champion, at which game?
Chess
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.
Q 25Charles's 1966 hits 'I Don't Need No Doctor' and 'Let's Go Get Stoned' were co-written by which songwriting duo?
Ashford & Simpson
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.
Q 26Charles cancelled a 1961 concert in Augusta, Georgia, after learning what?
The dance floor was whites-only
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.
Q 27Which patriotic standard did Ray Charles remake in gospel-soul style in 1972 and sing at the 1984 Republican convention?
America the Beautiful
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.
Q 28Charles appeared in which 1980 musical comedy film?
The Blues Brothers
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'.
Q 29In 1981 Ray Charles broke a cultural boycott to perform at Sun City, a resort in which country?
South Africa
South Africa. The United Nations had called the boycott over apartheid, and the resort paid stars heavily to ignore it.
Q 30'Seven Spanish Angels' was a country hit duet between Charles and which longtime friend?
Willie Nelson
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.