Born 96 Years Ago Today In Georgia, He Changed Soul Music Forever

There aren't very many musicians who can be credited with inventing an entire genre, a genre that's still a major part of music today, but that's just one of the accomplishments of Ray Charles, who would've turned 96 years old today. A big part of Charles' genius was combining gospel, country, blues, and jazz to create what would eventually be called soul music. "Ray is a nation. I mean you talk about everybody else and you talk about Ray Charles, that's the way I feel about it. He invented it," Quincy Jones once said about Charles (via the Ray Charles Video Museum). "He had the greatest balance between soul and science, heart and head."

Charles was born in Albany, Georgia, on September 23, 1930, and spent his childhood in Florida. Due most likely to glaucoma, he was completely blind by age 7. He faced other tragedies as well, including having to navigate poverty and witnessing his infant brother George die.

But Charles did more than overcome: He turned his life into one that's celebrated for his musical achievements, as well as for taking Jim Crow laws head-on by refusing to play a segregated concert in Georgia in 1961. So, we wish a very happy birthday to the man who's responsible for inventing soul music and creating so many cherished, celebrated songs throughout his career.

Whenever the musical genius of Ray Charles is mentioned, most people probably get an image of him bopping and swaying in front of the piano, but he had expertise in other instruments as well, like the clarinet, saxophone, and trumpet, which he picked up at the School for the Deaf and the Blind in Florida. He attended the school between the ages of 8 and 15, where he also learned to write compositions in Braille.

But even before that, Charles gravitated to music in a major way, whether it was him sitting in the church pews and soaking up the powerful harmonies of the choir, listening to swing music, or being intrigued as a child with barrelhouse, also known as Boogie-Woogie, a style of blues often played by pianist Wylie Pitman at a local café. Charles was practically a toddler at just 3 years old when he first heard Pitman, but he was already taking lessons.

"I would just hit all the keys, and he would say, 'Oh no no no, I'm going to teach you the melodies that you could play with one finger.' And that's how I got started," Charles once told American Routes. "And I was amazed, you could just strike a key and a tone would come out. That's really what really got me interested in music. By the time I was five and a half or six years old, I was playing with three notes as a chord." 

It was clear that Ray Charles' mother, Aretha Robinson, wanted her son to be autonomous, despite his blindness, and was always preparing him for the day he'd be on his own. Especially since his father, Bailey Robinson, was hardly around and died when Charles was just 10 years old. The gifted musician probably didn't think he'd have to face the world alone at such an early age, but that's what he was forced to do at 15, when his mother passed away.

Charles began playing in different Florida bands and used the money he earned to move to Seattle, Washington, where he started a group called the McSon Trio (later the Maxin Trio) and signed to Swing Time Records. They released "Confession Blues" in 1949, a song that reached the No. 2 spot on Billboard's Most-Played Juke Box Race Records chart, giving Charles his first taste of quantifiable success.

Then in 1952, the Florida-raised singer signed to Atlantic Records after the label bought out his Swing Time Records contract, and he released "I Got A Woman," which became his first No. 1 single. The cut pulls from blues and gospel music and is considered to be the very first soul song. From there, Charles continued to have big-time success throughout the '50s as well as the '60s, and before he died on June 10, 2004, from liver disease, he racked up three Hot 100 No.1 hits, 17 Grammy awards. Charles was one of the first inductees to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1986, and influenced a long list of musicians in soul music and many other genres.