Hundreds of thousands of fingers have hit typewriter and word processor keyboards telling and retelling his story because it is uniquely American, an example of what we like to think is the best in us and of our way of life.

The Ray Charles story is full of paradoxes, part and parcel of the American Dream.Rags to riches. Triumph overcoming tragedy. Light transcending darkness.

The name Ray Charles is on a Star on Hollywood Boulevard's Walk of Fame. His bronze bust is enshrined in the Playboy Hall of Fame. There is the bronze medallion cast and presented to him by the French Republic on behalf of its people. There are the Halls of Fame: Rhythm & Blues, Jazz, Rock & Roll. There are the many gold records and the 12 Grammys.

There is the blackness and the blindness. There was the extreme poverty; there was the segregated South into which he was born. 

It is music, Ray Charles' single driving force, that catapulted a poor, black, blind, orphaned teenager from there to here.

"I was born with music inside me. That's the only explanation I know of..." he remarks in his autobiography.

"Music was one of my parts... Like my blood. It was a force already with me when I arrived on the scene. It was a necessity for me - like food or water."

"Music is nothing separate from me. It is me... You'd have to remove the music surgically." Ray Charles Robinson was not born blind, only poor.

But Ray Charles has almost seven years of sight memory - colors, the things of the backwoods country, and the face of the most important person in his life: his mother, Aretha Robinson. St. Augustine's was the Florida state school for the deaf and blind. Ray Charles was accepted as a charity student.

He learned to read Braille and to type. He became a skilled basket weaver. He was allowed to develop his great gift of music.

He discovered mathematics and its correlation to music. He learned to compose and arrange music in his head, telling out the parts, one by one.

He began to build himself a solo act, imitating Nat "King" Cole. When he knew it was time to head on, he asked a friend to find him the farthest point from Florida on a map of the continental U.S.

Seattle, WA. For Ray Charles, the turning point.

In Seattle he became a minor celebrity in local clubs. There he met an even younger musician, Quincy Jones, whom he took under his wing, marking the beginning of an inter-twining of two musical lifetimes...

These were also the years that brought Charles the first band of his own, his first big hit record, "I Got A Woman."

By the early 1960's Ray Charles had accomplished his dream. He'd come of age musically. He had become a great musician, posting musical milestones along his route.

He'd made it to Carnegie Hall. The hit records ("Georgia," "Born to Lose") successively kept climbing to the top of the charts. He'd made his first triumphant European concert tour in 1960 (a feat which, except for 1965, he's repeated at least once a year ever since).

"He has drawn from each of these musical streams and made a river which he alone can navigate. His music is still marked by the unpredictability that is the genius of consummate artistry.

He is master of his soul, musically and personally.

Ray Charles is a national treasure and a global phenomenon for this reason:

He is music; he is himself; he is a master of his soul.
 

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