“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. Wild morning glories wrapped green vines and blue trumpets over sagging fence posts. Rickety shacks perched on tiny lots squeezed between forests and farms. Across from the big wooden New Zion Bap- tist Church, a nameless smaller road turned south across the railroad tracks and past a second wooden church, the modest New Shiloh Missionary Baptist. A half-mile farther a cluster of small houses and shacks stood under tall pines and oaks, a black quarter everybody called Jellyroll. The name, rightly, had a raffish air. Colored folk who had lived in Greenville for years lived in Blackbottom, the black quarter in town watched over by the white folks on top of the hill. Jellyroll was out from under white eyes, a sandy clearing in the woods where transient workers had thrown up tar-paper shacks when work held through more than one season. Nobody had lived in Jellyroll long, nobody knew where the others had come from or might go next. The men and women of Jellyroll were by and large greenhorns from the plantations, drawn by the promise of cash for menial labor. Living close to Greenville felt more like town than the sharecropper cabins they had left, but Jellyroll was still country. On Sunday the people prayed hard, all week they worked hard, and Saturday night they found a bit of the free and easy at Mr. Pit’s Red Wing Cafe. Wiley Pitman was a jovial brown-skinned man, fat, with a wide grin, and known far beyond Jellyroll as a fine piano player. With his wife, Miz Georgia, he owned the Red Wing, a wooden plank building facing the road from North Grand. The cafe doubled as a small general store where Miz Georgia sold kerosene and matches, flour and salt, cold beer and pig’s-foot sandwiches. A few tables filled the middle of the floor, and against one wall stood a jukebox and a piano. Out back stood a boarding- house where Mr. Pit had rooms for the watermelon pickers who overflowed the place in summertime, and rooms, as one longtime resident put it, “for husbands going with other men’s wives.” Behind the boardinghouse stood several shacks. Time has swept those shacks and the Red Wing Cafe into “the limbo of things that disappear,” as Dreiser wrote. Decades later, under gray December skies, only the tumbledown boardinghouse remained, a fading specter in a tangled wood of weeds and baby trees. Yet in September , the Red Wing was the lively hub of a village, and the shacks out back housed a family: Margaret Robinson, her grown son Bailey, his wife Mary Jane, and an orphan girl they had adopted, Aretha Williams. Bailey Robinson and his mother had come to Greenville from Albany, Georgia, a hundred miles to the north, in the s. That much two elderly Jellyroll natives, 6 YOUTH
Bessie Brown and Mrs. Mary Clemmons, remembered clearly. Neither knew where Mary Jane came from, and the deeper roots of the Robinson family may be lost forever. Jellyroll respected Margaret, called “Muh,” as a nice old lady and Bailey as a big, rough man, six feet tall or more and heavily muscular. He worked at a mill pulling logs into the skids; sometimes he laid track for the railroad. Mary Jane, a plain, thickset woman, worked at a mill too, stacking planks, “uneducated but a good person,” remembered a neighbor. Aretha was a slip of a girl, lovely to look at, with long wavy black hair. Her mother had died a year or two before. Her father, a man Bailey worked with, couldn’t keep her, and Bailey and Mary Jane took her in as their ward. Williams was her sur- name, but everybody called her Retha Robinson. That September , the goings-on at the Robinsons’ had all Jellyroll gossiping. Little Retha was pregnant, there was no way such a skinny girl could hide it. She wasn’t stepping out with anybody as far as anybody knew. Who could the daddy be? Bailey blamed a boy named Jack Wilkerson, because, as Bessie Brown remembered, Jack had gone with the two girls into the fields one day when their mamas sent them out to cut straw for brooms. Bailey told Jack he’d have to marry Retha. But Bessie told her aunt Eliza that Jack and Retha hadn’t done anything out in the fields. Instead, a few weeks before, Bailey had taken a few kids for a ride in his car down to Petty Springs. The group had gotten separated in the woods, and when Bessie and her friends came back, they found Bailey lying with Retha. Aunt Eliza spread that word about the quarter, Bailey stopped denying he was the daddy, and Jack was free to go. Few in Jellyroll had time for high and mighty attitudes, yet to judge by Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, set in a West Florida quarter just like Jellyroll, tongues must have wagged about swollen little Retha, just as they wagged over Janie when she came back from her adventure with Tea Cake: “What she doin’ com- ing back here in dem overhalls? Can’t she find no dress to put on?—Where’s dat blue satin dress she left here in?” To still such tongues, Margaret and Bailey sent Retha back to relatives in Albany late that summer to have the baby. Toward the end of September she gave birth to a baby boy. No birth certificate exists, but the baby, when grown, always declared his birthday to be September , . After a couple of months to get back on her feet, Retha returned to Jellyroll with her son. She named him Ray Charles Robinson.
Retha came back to Jellyroll with little Ray, RC everybody called him, but there was no going back to how things had been. Bailey and Mary Jane soon separated, and Bai- ley moved south to Shamrock, another small town, where he took a new wife, Stella, GREENVILLE 1930–1937 7 by whom he had several children; he seldom came back to Greenville and had little to do with raising the boy. Retha and Mary Jane remained close—Mary Jane had lost a son, Jabbo, and doted on RC—but Retha, no more than sixteen and with a baby in di- apers, was on her own as never before. “What was life here like in the Depression?” said one Greenville man in his sev- enties. “Bad.” In , Loomis King, the town’s leading doctor, took in only $, much of that in hams or eggs. The Bank of Greenville survived the worst days, but out in Jellyroll, Jim Crow and poverty, like twin pitiless gods, decreed the destinies and daily lives of Retha, RC, and their Jellyroll neighbors. One Christmas the town police shot a black man near Mr. Pit’s cafe. “He hadn’t done nothing,” Mrs. Clemmons remem- bered. “After it happened, it was like it hadn’t happened at all.” Dinner in Jellyroll was a dish of homegrown greens; when they had no fuel to fry or boil their sweet potatoes, the people ate them raw. Folding money was as scarce as shoes on children. To keep abreast in this struggle, physical strength was a must, and Retha, in the memory of all, was weak. No one remembered just what was wrong with her—Mrs. Clemmons blamed it on giving birth so young—but she was “sickly,” “walked with a cane,” and “had a sore on her leg.” She couldn’t handle the better-paying mill work as Mary Jane could, nor could she run a laundry business, as many black women did, with white clients on the hill. Retha and RC were among the poorest of the poor in Jelly- roll, yet there was little chance they’d starve or be forced to move on. Everybody knew Retha and her story, and they liked her and her bright-eyed boy. The other women sent her their extra washing and ironing. Mary Jane became RC’s second mother, glad to watch him when Retha was working or had to lie down, and she loved to buy him sweets at the cafe. RC grew, a healthy, happy baby. By his first birthday he had a brother, George. No one remembered who George’s father was, but all remembered that Mr. Pit and Miz Georgia, who had no children of their own, adopted George to take the added burden off Retha. As soon as RC could run about, little George toddling behind him, the brothers were inseparable, a tiny Tom and Huck playing hide-and-seek in the woods, throwing rocks and stomping on bugs like boys from time immemorial. RC loved to play with matches, lighting them in the blackness of a moonless night and holding them before his face, feeling like he was “lighting up the whole world.” Retha believed in strict discipline, and by the time RC and George were five and four, she had set them to their chores, chopping wood and hauling water. Every Sun- day she took them to the New Shiloh Baptist Church back up the road toward Greenville. Founded before the Civil War as a mission to “our black brothers and sis- ters” from Greenville’s white Baptists, the New Shiloh had become a full black church, with fiery preachers stirring the spirits of the faithful to tears and shouts of joy, to 8 YOUTH
songs and beating tambourines, swaying hips and clapping hands. Sometimes Sunday meant chicken for dinner, and every great while, for sure once a year on May , the old maypole day colored folk still celebrated, all Jellyroll gathered for parties that lasted deep into the night, feasts when they barbecued whole hogs and goats over open pit fires, and the moonshine flowed free. Other nights Muh tucked the boys into bed and told them stories of the bad old days when hooded white men bearing torches thun- dered through the quarter, and they fell asleep shivering in fear and wonder. When still too young for school at Greenville Training, the town’s public school for colored children, RC and George began to evidence gifts of particular intelligence. George amazed Jellyroll with his skill at arithmetic, his inventiveness in making toys from bits of wood and baling wire. RC showed a similar curiosity in mechanical things, poking his head between the men as they bent over sputtering Model T engines, tin- kering with broken bikes and farm machinery. Most of all, RC began to demonstrate an unusual interest in and aptitude for music. “Either RC was playing the piano or he was listening to the jukebox”—that is Greenville’s universal memory of the young Ray Charles, and the grown man’s mem- ory fully agrees. “I was a normal kid, mischievous and into everything,” Charles recalled years later, “but I loved music, it was the only thing that could really get my attention.” One day when he was about three, RC was playing by the shacks when he heard Mr. Pit break into a driving boogie-woogie on the Red Wing’s battered old upright. Mag- netized by the clanging chords and rocking beat, RC ran up the alley past the board- inghouse, pushed open the battered screen door, and stared amazed at Mr. Pit’s flying fingers. Seeing him, Mr. Pit laughed, swept the boy onto his lap, and let him reach out his hands to the keys, run his fingers up and down over their warm ebony and ivory textures. From then on whenever RC heard Mr. Pit playing, he’d race into the cafe and, as he remembered years later with gratitude, “the man always let me play.” Wiley Pitman was no amateur, as Ray Charles recalled him, but a stride pianist who, had he not cho- sen the simple life in Greenville, could have duked it out with giants like Pete Johnson and Willie “The Lion” Smith. That may be a student’s exaggeration, but Mr. Pit did prove to be a superb teacher, showing RC first how to pick out a melody with one fin- ger. “Oh no, son, you don’t play like that,” he said when RC banged too hard on the keys, but when out of awkward fumblings the boy got a beat going on his own, Mr. Pit encouraged him with noisy shouts of “That’s it, sonny, that’s it.” Near the piano stood the cafe jukebox, a marvel of flashing lights and moving metal. For a nickel, a mechanical arm would lift a black platter from a drum of records and set it spinning, the steel needle falling into the groove with a scratchy hiss, filling the room with electric sounds magically recorded long ago and far away. RC soon had GREENVILLE 1930–1937 9 a special place on a bench beside the jukebox where he sat for hours, his ear pressed up against the speaker. Sometimes when Mary Jane gave him a few coins for candy, they’d end up in the jukebox instead. More often RC didn’t have the money to pick his own songs, so he listened to everything anybody played: boogie-woogie piano by Albert Am- mons, gutbucket blues by Tampa Red, the big bands of Fletcher Henderson and Duke Ellington. Work and music, running in the woods, church on Sunday—life flowed on for RC and George, Retha and Mary Jane, with little to mark one day from the next, until one terrible afternoon in . “I can still hear the women shouting for help, the sound of their cries,” remembered Mrs. Clemmons’ daughter Elesta, then a girl of six or seven. The scene seared itself irrevocably into Ray Charles’ mind, leaving a scar that would never fully heal. The afternoon was hot and sunny. To cool off, the two boys splashed in and out of a big washtub behind the cafe. Retha was inside ironing. George climbed inside the tub, ducking under the water for a shiny penny, shouting and laughing. Suddenly RC realized that George’s splashings had a frightening urgency. His baby brother wasn’t playing, he was in trouble. For a moment he froze in terror, then he lunged to the tub to try and pull George out. He couldn’t; George was kicking and flailing his arms and legs, and RC, only a year older, didn’t have the strength. He ran to the shack scream- ing, “Mama, Mama.” Retha dropped her iron and came running. She lifted George from the tub and tried to shake, rub, and breathe life back into him, but it was too late. George had drowned. RC burst into tears, and Retha started wailing in pain. Neigh- bors came running. All Jellyroll mourned the little boy, and even white Greenville heard about the colored child who had died so sadly. To have a beloved brother die at any age is a bitter, wrenching blow; to have that brother die while you and he are still infants, to see it happen and be powerless to pre- vent it, can only be a primal experience that will reverberate through a lifetime. Grief, guilt, anger, fear, loneliness, a bewildered sense of innocence crushed by fate—all must have coursed through RC’s little-boy spirit. A second blow followed on the heels of the first. A few months after George’s death, mucus began to ooze from RC’s eyes like thick tears, and he woke every morn- ing to find his eyelids stuck shut. Retha bathed off the crusts, but it still took the boy ten minutes to adjust to the light. Over months the breadth of his vision began to shrink, and he found he could see less and less distance into the world. People and things became unfocused blobs. Retha took the boy into Greenville to see Frank McLeod, the doctor who saw the colored people in town. Dr. McLeod peered into RC’s eyes with bright lights, prescribed drops and ointments, then sent Retha and the boy on to a clinic in Madison, fourteen miles away, RC’s longest trip to date. The clinic doc- 10 YOUTH
tor examined him and told Retha what Dr. McLeod hadn’t dared say: RC was losing his eyesight and in time would be stone blind. There was no cure. “I understand,” said Retha. She took RC by the hand, and they went home to Jellyroll. Years laters doctors guessed that congenital juvenile glaucoma had caused RC’s blindness. If so, only coincidence connects the illness with George’s death; the boy’s emotions didn’t contribute to his loss of sight. As an adult Ray Charles has described going blind matter-of-factly, “not as bad as you’d think,” he has said. “I was never too frightened.” Yet when the thick tears began, RC was still in shock over George’s death, and the pain of the first loss may have numbed him to the fresh pain of the second, both tragedies fusing into one life-changing event. Losing his sight may have seemed to RC a darkly fitting sequel to losing his brother. “I saw something bad, now I can’t see; I did bad, now bad is happening to me”—these may paraphrase the wordless whispers, such whispers as we all hear, that little RC heard way down deep inside. The two blows hit Retha hard too. Two sons, so bright and full of promise; one dead, the other handicapped for life. Childish pleasures could still divert RC, but Retha, no more than twenty-three, faced unrelenting grown-up problems: How could she, penniless, uneducated, and ill, provide for her blind son’s future? What could she give her boy to equip him for life? In answering these questions, Retha Robinson more than proved her mettle; she rose to quiet greatness. As Ray Charles and others remember her, Retha had an old head on young shoul- ders, a character flinty and tough. “Retha was weak in body,” recalled Gertrude Rid- dick, another of RC’s playmates, “but strong in mind.” Her own trials had taught Retha the cost of depending on others, and though no woman of the world, she could imagine the blighted life a blind black man might lead in the South if he had to beg help. Penury or prison, vagrancy or a vegetable state at a charity home were all likely fates. Retha would not let blindness cripple Ray Charles Robinson. Fools wait for just rewards, she knew; the Lord helps those who help themselves. RC must be armed with the weapons to defend himself. The dangers were too great to let a moment be wasted. Retha kept RC at his chores. Whether he tripped on a tree root on the way to the pump or bruised his shins with kindling sticks flying off the chopping block, the boy must learn to do for himself. Neighbors tsk-tsked to see a blind boy scrubbing floors, and Mary Jane wanted to coddle him, but Retha would have none of it. Pity could only harm the boy. RC must be kept as busy as any other child, and he couldn’t stay at home all day either. He needed to know his way around Jellyroll, learn the mile of dirt roads and sandy shortcuts to the busy streets of Greenville proper. She must teach RC, teach him something every day. “I won’t be here forever,” she told him again and again. Retha taught RC his letters and sums, but she knew he needed more education in order to develop the talents that blindness hadn’t taken away. He couldn’t go to GREENVILLE 1930–1937 11
Greenville Training; they didn’t know how to teach blind children there. Where could he go to school? How could Retha find out? For answers to questions of that kind in the South of , colored folks had to go to white folks, and that’s what Retha did. She talked to the lady at the post office and to Dr. McLeod, and soon all Greenville knew about the blind boy in Jellyroll and his determined mother. Dr. McLeod told her there was a state school for the deaf and blind in St. Augustine that took a few colored children. Retha didn’t read or write well enough to apply to the school, but Mitty King, a Jellyroll neighbor, cooked for the Reams family, who lived on the hill. Mr. Reams owned the big store in town and Miz Ruth was a nice lady. Maybe the Reamses would help. Reams is still a common name in and around Greenville, twenty-one listings in the Madison County phone book, all descendants of Albert Reams, a settler con- temporary with Isaac Hays and a cofounder of the bank. Mitty King’s Reamses—Al- bert’s son Albert Dupree, his wife, the former Ruth Scruggs, and their three children—ranked among Greenville’s first families, and the Madison Enterprise Recorder respectfully noted their comings and goings. Yet they lived more like plain folks than aristocrats. A.D.’s knack for business made him rich, but he remained a farmer at heart, and Ruth, known affectionately as “Ma Pop,” taught Sunday school at Greenville Bap- tist and kept busy on civic projects sponsored by the Women’s Club. “A.D. and Ruth lived the country tradition of helping your neighbor,” recalled a neighbor who grew up playing with their children. “They tried to act on what they heard in church.” Retha, with RC by the hand, walked up to the Reamses’ white house on the west- ern slope of the hill. Mitty King, smiling encouragement, met them at the kitchen door. In the living room, RC played for the company on Miz Ruth’s piano, and Retha told her story one more time. A.D. and his wife were taken with the bright boy and his forceful mother, and, yes, if they could help a blind child get his chance in life, they’d do all they could. Dr. McLeod told A.D. whom to write to, and soon word came back: the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind did have a department for colored children. The fall term had begun September , but RC could begin school whenever he got there. The state paid room, board, and tuition, plus train fare to and from in the fall and spring. It wouldn’t cost Retha a thing. She could put RC on a train, the conductor would keep an eye on him, and a teacher from the school would meet him at the station in St. Au- gustine. Retha knew at once that RC would go to the blind school, no doubt about it. This was her son’s only hope; she had to make him take it. Little RC, barely seven, knew just as certainly he didn’t want to leave Mama and Mary Jane, his playmates Johnnycake and Elesta Mae, all of Jellyroll and Greenville. “Mama,” he cried, “don’t make me go, 12 YOUTH
Mama. I wanna stay with you.” He ran and hid behind Mary Jane’s skirts as she argued on his side against Retha. How could she send RC so far from home, alone among strangers? He’d be better off here where folks knew and loved him. Retha didn’t budge. The morning came, and the little family walked up the road from Jellyroll to town. The locomotive steamed into the train station, eastbound from Tallahassee. RC had never been on a train before, and this one was no more than a black blob to his failing eyes. This was RC Robinson, Retha told the conductor, going to the blind school. The conductor said the boy would be fine. “All aboard!” With a last hug and kiss from Mary Jane, a last “Mind your teachers, son!” from Retha, RC climbed up the metal steps and took a seat on a hard wooden bench in the colored car. The other passengers gave the blind boy a passing glance, then paid him no more mind. RC sat by himself, as unhappy as a little boy can be, and didn’t say a word. From Madison County the train ran clickety-clack out of the low hills, east into the rising sun, over the bridge across the Suwannee, and on to the flatlands and the coast. Bibliography
BOOKS
Anthony, Otis R. Black Tampa: The Roots of a People. Tampa: The Black History Project, . Balliett, Whitney. American Singers. New York: Oxford University Press, . Berry, Jason, Jonathan Foose, and Tad Jones. Up from the Cradle of Jazz: New Orleans Music Since World War II. New York: Da Capo, . First published Athens: University of Georgia Press, . Branch, Taylor. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years. New York: Simon & Schuster, . Britt, Stan. Dexter Gordon: A Musical Biography. New York: Da Capo, . First published, as Long Tall Dexter, London: Quartet Books, . Broven, John. Walking to New Orleans. Bexhill-on-Sea, Sussex: Blues Unlimited, n.d. Brown, Ruth, and Andrew Yule. Miss Rhythm: The Autobiography of Ruth Brown, Rhythm & Blues Legend. New York: Donald I. Fine, . Charles, Ray, and David Ritz. Brother Ray. New York: Da Capo, . First published New York: Dial, . Chilton, John. Let the Good Times Roll: The Story of Louis Jordan and His Music. Ann Arbor: Uni- versity of Michigan Press, . Dance, Helen Oakley. Stormy Monday: The T-Bone Walker Story. New York: Da Capo, . First published Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, . de Barros, Paul. Jackson Street After Hours: The Roots of Jazz in Seattle. Photographs by Eduardo Calderon. Seattle: Sasquatch Books, . Floyd, Samuel A., Jr. The Power of Black Music. New York: Oxford University Press, . Gillespie, Dizzy, with Al Fraser. To Be or Not . . . to Bop. New York: Doubleday, .
427 428 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Gillett, Charlie. Making Tracks: The Story of Atlantic Records. London: Souvenir Books, . ———. The Sound of the City. New York: Pantheon Books, . Gioia, Ted. West Coast Jazz, –. New York: Oxford University Press, . Gordy, Berry. To Be Loved: The Music, the Magic, the Memories of Motown. New York: Warner Books, . Guralnick, Peter. Sweet Soul Music. New York: Harper & Row, . ———. Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley. New York: Little, Brown, . Hannush, Jeff. I Hear You Knocking: The Sound of New Orleans Rhythm and Blues. Ville Platte, LA: Swallow, . Haskins, James, and Kathleen Benson. Nat King Cole. New York: Stein and Day, . Heilburt, Anthony. The Gospel Sound: Good News and Bad Times. New York: Limelight Editions, . Hirshey, Gerri. Nowhere to Run: The Story of Soul Music. New York: Times Books, . James, Etta, and David Ritz. Rage to Survive: The Etta James Story. New York: Villard Books, . Klein, Norman M., and Martin J. Schiesl, eds. th Century Los Angeles: Power, Promotion, and Social Conflict. Claremont, California: Regina Books, . Lomax, John, III. Nashville: Music City USA. New York: Harry N. Abrams, . Lydon, Michael. Boogie Lightning. New York: Da Capo, . First published New York: Dial, . ———. Rock Folk. New York: Citadel, . First published New York: Dial, . Miles, Betty T., Daniel J., and Martin J. The Miles Chart Display, Volume I, The Top , –. Boulder, Colorado: Convex Industries, . Millard, Andre. America on Record: A History of Recorded Sound. New York: Cambridge Univer- sity Press, . Mingus, Charles. Beneath the Underdog. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, . Otis, Johnny. Upside Your Head! Rhythm and Blues on Central Avenue. Hanover: Wesleyan Uni- versity Press, . Palmer, Robert. Deep Blues. New York: Penguin, . Ruppli, Michel. Atlantic Records: A Discography, Vol . Westport, Connecticut, and London: Greenwood Press, . Russell, Ross. Bird Lives! New York: Charterhouse Books, . Sanjek, Russell, and David Sanjek. American Popular Music Business in the th Century. New York: Oxford University Press, . Sawyer, Charles. The Arrival of B. B. King. New York: Da Capo, . First published New York: Doubleday, . Shaw, Arnold. The World of Soul: Black America’s Contribution to the Pop Music Scene. New York: Cowles Book Co., . ———. Honkers and Shouters: The Golden Years of Rhythm and Blues. New York: Collier, . ———. The Rockin’ s. New York: Da Capo, . First published New York: Hawthorn Books, . BIBLIOGRAPHY 429
Smith, W. O. Sideman: The Long Gig of W. O. Smith. Nashville: Rutledge Hill Press, . Wade, Dorothy, and Justine Picardie. Music Man: Ahmet Ertegun, Atlantic Records, and the Triumph of Rock ’n’ Roll. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., . Wexler, Jerry, and David Ritz. Rhythm and the Blues: A Life in American Music. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, . Whitburn, Joel. Top Pop Albums –. Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin: Record Research Inc., . ———. Top Rhythm & Blues Singles –. Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin: Record Research Inc., . ———. Top Pop Singles –. Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin: Record Research Inc., n.d. White, Charles. The Life and Times of Little Richard. New York: Da Capo, . First published New York: Harmony Books, . White, George R. Bo Diddley: Living Legend. London: Castle Communications, . Wilder, Alec. American Popular Song: The Great Innovators –. New York and London: Ox- ford University Press, . Wolff, Daniel, with S. R. Crain, Clifton White, and G. David Tenenbaum. You Send Me: The Life and Times of Sam Cooke. New York: William Morrow, .
PERIODICALS
Downbeat, Rolling Stone, Living Blues, Jazz Magazine (Paris), Melody Maker (London), Variety, with special thanks to Billboard, whose issues, read week by week, provide an unfurling history of pop music’s facts and fads. Time, Life, People, Newsweek, Life, The Saturday Evening Post, The New Yorker, with special thanks to the magazines of Johnson Publications, Ebony, Sepia, Jet, and Tan. My eternal gratitude to the many excellent African-American newspapers that covered Ray Charles long before the white press found him newsworthy: the Atlanta Daily World, Cleveland Call and Post, New York Amsterdam News, New Orleans Louisiana Weekly, Dallas Express, Los An- geles California Eagle and Sentinel, Pittsburgh Courier, Norfolk, Va., Journal and Guide, Rich- mond, Va., Afro-American, Chicago Defender, Oklahoma City’s Black Dispatch, Houston Informer, Philadelphia Tribune, Detroit’s Michigan Chronicle, Kansas City Call, Newark New Jer- sey Afro American, and Washington, D.C., Afro-American—read, in large part, on microfilm at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.