Ray Charles Biographers…Excellent.”
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“Lydon’s richly detailed account of Charles always powerfully evokes his times and context...essential reading for popular music fans.” — Booklist “Lydon has done his research…fine work.” — Newsday “Sets a high bar for future Ray Charles biographers…excellent.” — Milwaukee Journal Sentinel “Absorbing.” — Rolling Stone “Informative…engaging…enlightening.” — Publishers Weekly “Lydon’s biography of Charles is not just an account of survival, but one of tri- umph against imposing odds.” — The Plain Dealer “Reading the book is very much like watching a fine documentary…The power of the writing pulls us into the action. ” — BookPage “At long last, the great Ray Charles gets the respect he deserves, in Michael Lydon’s epic biography. Carefully researched and lovingly presented, this life will make true believers out of all readers.” — Laurence Bergreen, author of As Thousands Cheer: The Life of Irving Berlin and Louis Armstrong: An Extravagant Life “[A] remarkably well-researched, well-written, and complete biography of one of the music marvels of our time. Unsparingly honest.” — The Florida Times-Union “Rendered with passion, intelligence, and fairness. Lydon has cooked up a feast of facts. I devoured it in two days.” — David Ritz, coauthor of Brother Ray ALSO BY MICHAEL LYDON Rock Folk 1971 Boogie Lightning 1974 How to Succeed in Show Business by Really Trying 1985 Writing and Life 1995 Ray Charles Man and Music MICHAEL LYDON ROUTLEGDE NEW YORK LONDON Published in 2004 by Routledge 29 West 35th Street New York, NY 10001 Published in Great Britain by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane London EC4P 4EE Copyright © 1998, 2004 by Michael Lydon Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group. This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without permission in writing from the publisher. Book design by Mauna Eichner Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lydon, Michael. Ray Charles : man and music / Michael Lydon. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ), discography (p. ), and index. ISBN 0-415-97043-1 (alk. Paper) 1. Charles, Ray, 1930– 2. Singers—United States—Biography. I. Title. ML420.C46L93 2004 782.42164’092—dc22 [B] 2003058684 ISBN 0-203-49832-1 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-58050-8 (Adobe eReader Format) Song permissions may be found beginning on page 451 FOR MY DAUGHTER, SHUNA LYDON Tiger, tiger, burning bright In the forests of the night William Blake Contents £. Prologue xi PART I YOUTH 1. Greenville 1930–1937 3 2. St. Augustine – 13 3. The Death of Retha Robinson 23 PART II APPRENTICE 4. Jacksonville – 29 5. Orlando and Tampa – 39 6. Seattle – 51 7. Los Angeles 63 8. On the Road – 71 PART III THE 1950s: THE ATLANTIC YEARS ø9. Atlantic Records 85 10. New Orleans 92 11. The First Band 103 12. Breakthrough 117 13. Growth to Genius – 130 14. The Genius Moves On 155 PART IV THE 1960s: THE ABC YEARS 15. Georgia on My Mind 179 16. New Highs, New Lows 193 17. I Can’t Stop Loving You – 212 18. Busted in Boston 237 19. The Year Off 249 20. Coming Back – 260 21. Rolling Onward – 273 PART V THE 1970s: THE INVISIBLE YEARS 22. Volcanic Messages Early s 287 23. Life on the Road Mid-s 303 24. Divorce and Decline Late s 321 PART VI THE 1980s: THE LONG COMEBACK 25. Nashville Early s 341 26. Medals and Honors Late s 356 PART VII THE 1990s: THE GRAND MASTER 27. No Time to Waste Time Early s 373 28. Lion in Winter Late s 389 ££. Epilogue Into the New Century 399 ££. Acknowledgments 413 ££. Source Notes 415 ££. Bibliography 427 ££. Discography 430 ££. Index 436 xi Prologue Through the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, borne in the bodies and souls of millions of settlers and slaves, two great rivers of music, one from Europe, one from Africa, flowed three thousand miles west across the Atlantic. Washing up on the shores of the Americas, the rivers began to blend and commingle. The confluence came to full flood in the twentieth century as music wedded itself to electricity. This charged union gave birth to a new music, the popular music of our time. These grand events in music history open the broadest view upon the life this book relates. PARTYOUTH I The woodworking shop on South Campus at the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind, mid-1930s. Florida School for the Deaf and Blind 1 I was born with music inside me. Like my ribs, my liver, my kidneys, my heart. Like my blood. Ray Charles Greenville 1930–1937 For a hundred miles west of the Atlantic coast, the land of northern Florida lies flat as a floor covered by a thick rug of gray-green vegetation. In fertile fields, venerable live oaks, bearded by Spanish moss, bend grandly to earth. Bright green palmettos bunch cheerfully around slender brown trunks in the piney woods, and creepers tangle everything in flowered variety and profusion. East of the Suwannee River, the land is marshy; lakes and ponds and lazy creeks abound. West of the Suwannee, the land starts a gradual rise, and the old east-west road, U.S. , be- gins to undulate to the rhythm of mountains eroding into plain, a rhythm that accel- erates slowly into rolling hills and pastured valleys over the sixty miles to Tallahassee. Atop the first real hill in the rhythm stands the Madison County courthouse. The six windows of its silver cupola survey the territory in all directions like six bright eyes. In that territory was a wilderness. Then white settlers brought slaves to fell the virgin forests and to plant cotton and tobacco, wresting the land from the Indians and the Spanish, until in Spain ceded the whole peninsula to the new United States of America. Sandy Ford, at a ford on the Aucilla River, was the first settlement to spring up in Madison County’s western reaches. The second was Station Five, the fifth stop from Tallahassee on the Florida Central and Western Railway. 3 4 YOUTH In an ambitious settler, Elijah James Hays, bought a huge tract of land sur- rounding Station Five and began using the station to market his plantation’s livestock, cotton, tobacco, and timber. Hays owned a general store, a brickyard, and a turpentine still; he sold his cotton direct to W. W. Gordon, exporters in Savannah. Hays’ enter- prise drew tradesmen and their families, and the railroad village prospered as Sandy Ford declined. By the town’s Ladies Aid Society had decided that Station Five needed a more genteel name. Mrs. Morgan, a native of Greenville, South Carolina, sug- gested that Greenville sounded nice and refined. Their husbands spit skeptically at the notion that a new name would change rough-and-ready Station Five, but the ladies pre- vailed and Greenville the town became. Greenville grew with the infant century. In , the town passed a “milestone,” as a local history put it: an ordinance forbidding hogs to roam the streets. World War I and the booming twenties provided eager markets for all the lumber, cotton, and cat- tle Greenville could bring to rail, and other milestones followed: the first electric power company in , the first high school graduation in , and the first town well, feet deep, dug in . Busy North Grand Street, Greenville’s main drag, along the east-west railroad track, was still unpaved as the s began. On the station side, porters loaded trains from stacks of freight brought in by mule wagons and gasoline trucks. Ladies and chil- dren stepped off passenger coaches, back from a week’s vacation with relatives on the Atlantic coast. On the store side, planters in broad-brimmed hats signed bills with clerks in the shaded interior of Mr. Hays’ Bank of Greenville, talking among themselves about the price of cotton and the troubles on Wall Street. In the warehouses, farmers with cotton to sell bargained for harnesses and nails, canvas and candles, while their wives shopped for sundries at Reams’ department store. White teenagers spooned at King’s pharmacy, dawdling over their Cokes, and little colored boys, barefoot and in ripped overalls, hung on hitching posts and watched the world go by. Hot humid summer gripped Greenville in September . Through the still air came the puffing of trains, the screech of tenders trundling to and from warehouse de- pots. Smoke rose from the Prince Veneer and Southern Lumber mills, where sweating black men, stripped to the waist, wrapped iron chains around their wrists to tug raw trunks to the screaming blades that sliced tall yellow pine into board feet of lumber and skinned short white pine into orange-crate strips. Greenville’s business district extended a few blocks north of North Grand through drab streets lined with barbershops and cafes, a blacksmith and stables, to the Andrews Hotel, the biggest building in town. Be- hind its awninged windows the Porkchop Gang, rural politicians and their landowner cronies, met over bourbon and cigars to plot control of the state legislature, a discreet fifty miles west in Tallahassee. To the south of North Grand, the land rose in a slight GREENVILLE 1930–1937 5 hill, where stood the big white Baptist church and the houses of the town’s leading white families, unpretentious frame dwellings on streets canopied by spreading oaks. West of town, North Grand soon wore down to a double wagon track, and song- birds and buzzing bugs drowned out the sawmills.