Emily+Frank


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Emily Frank Ms. Lobel ELA C Block 26 May 2008

Ray Charles

One summer, a woman named Aretha Robinson made her son, Ray, a blind child, cut some firewood. Neighbors stopped and stared. They were admonished by this cruelty. How could she make her small blind son work so brutally? Aretha Robinson answered confidently. She said, “‘He’s blind, but he ain’t stupid. He’s lost his sight, but he ain’t lost his mind’” (Turk 24). Ray Charles Robinson grew up in a poor, segregated town in Florida called Greenville. He went fully blind at age seven from glaucoma, a disease in which increasing pressure in the eyeballs results in loss of sight. One of his last, most vivid sights was of his younger brother George drowning in a rinse pool when Ray was only five. Ray lived with his “Mama”, who believed in him greatly. She was his birth mother but the family also spent a lot of time with “Mother”, Ray’s father’s first wife. The family was poor. As a child, Ray went to church. He enjoyed the hymns there; that was his first real taste of music overall. He also enjoyed local blues musicians’ music very much. Ray was taught to play piano by a store owner and close friend of Ray’s, Wylie Pitman, or “Mr. Pit”. Several afternoons followed the day Ray first came into Mr. Pit’s store and was amused by the café piano. On these afternoons, Mr. Pit gave piano lessons to an excited Ray. This was the beginning of Ray Charles’s dreams and career. When Ray was a teenager, Aretha sent him to the state's blind peoples' school in St. Augustine. He learned to read music in Braille there. He also studied instruments and all the different genres of music at that time. While Ray attended this school, Aretha passed away. She was his inspiration; Ray would not give up on music for his own and his mother’s sakes. Ray got some small opportunities to perform in local social places like bars and clubs. At the age of seventeen, Ray signed a Swingtime Records record deal. He recorded many songs and became a successful seller. Later he switched record labels a few times but remained an extreme success the whole time through. Blindness was never an issue for Ray Charles. It never put anything in the way of his dreams or anything he did. Ray refused to depend on a seeing-eye dog or a cane. Instead he used his obvious love of sound and sharp hearing to get along with his life and work. Of course it would be harder to play instruments without sight but Ray managed to feel his way around the piano without much difficulty. He mostly memorized his music or read it occasionally in Braille. Ray Charles’s determination and high spirits won him the accomplishment of many popular hit songs and albums. He existed in a musical category that was all its own as he did not have one specific genre. He recorded blues, jazz, gospel, country, and western music. Even after his untimely death at age 73 of liver failure, Ray Charles and his music continue to delight and inspire us today. RAY CHARLES September 23, 1930 – June 10, 2004

Works Cited

__Knowing Ray Charles: Introduction To The Man’s Life__. EMOL. 6 June 2009. < [] > __Ray Charles__. 25 May 2009. Wikipedia the Free Encyclopedia. 25 May 2009. 

__Ray Charles Biography__. 21 May 2009. The Biography Channel Website. 25 May 2009. 

Turk, Ruth. __Ray Charles__. Minneapolis: Lerner Publications Company, 1996.

NOTE TO MS LOBEL - I did my paper on Microsoft Word then copied and pasted it here. When I did that, the MLA format messed up and I can't fix it so I will hand in a printed copy from Word on Monday. Sorry... Emily