Definition
Ray Charles Robinson (September 23, 1930 – June 10, 2004), known professionally as Ray Charles, was an American singer, pianist, and bandleader born in Albany, Georgia and raised in Greenville, Florida. Blind from age seven, he trained at the Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind in St. Augustine and migrated west as a teenage musician — through Jacksonville, Seattle, and finally Los Angeles — recording for Atlantic Records from 1952 and Tangerine Records from 1962.
His fusion of gospel, blues, jazz, and country produced a body of work — I Got a Woman (1954), What'd I Say (1959), Georgia on My Mind (1960), Hit the Road Jack (1961), Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music (1962) — that is often credited as a foundational influence on soul music and modern American popular music more broadly.
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Charles's early life was hard in ways that shaped both his career and his biography. His father left the household when Ray was young; he saw his brother George drown in a washtub at age five; he began losing his sight at age five and was fully blind by seven, likely from juvenile glaucoma. His mother Aretha sent him to the segregated state school for blind and deaf children in St. Augustine, where he trained classically (Beethoven, Chopin) and learned to compose and arrange in Braille. She died when he was 15; his father had died two years earlier.
The migration began at 17. Charles took the money he had saved, a Greyhound to Jacksonville (the segregated Florida city where Wilkerson's George Starling also worked), and then — choosing the most distant city he could find on a map — Seattle. The boomtown wartime economy had created a Black-populated club circuit on Jackson Street that absorbed him. He recorded his first national hit, "Confession Blues," in Seattle in 1949 at age 18. Quincy Jones, then 14, met him there and became a lifelong collaborator.
The move to Los Angeles followed in 1950. By the time Robert Foster set up his Inglewood surgical practice in the late 1950s, Charles was one of the city's most prominent Black entertainers — an Atlantic Records star, soon to be a Tangerine Records owner, and a fixture of the Black professional and entertainment community that the migration had assembled in Los Angeles. The two men's careers — physician and musician — exemplify the Black middle class the migration's western leg built.
Charles continued to record, tour, and produce until his death in 2004. The arc — rural Georgia birth, Florida youth, Seattle launch, Los Angeles base, global career — is the Great Migration written into a single biography.