The Genius who stitched gospel, blues and country into soul

Ray Charles Robinson was born on 23 September 1930 in Albany, Georgia, and his musical curiosity started at the age of three in the Red Wing Cafe, where Wylie Pitman played boogie woogie on an old upright piano and then taught the boy to play. He and his mother were always welcome there, and lived in the cafe when money was short. As a child he lost his sight, possibly to glaucoma, and he wore dark glasses for the rest of his life.

Contemporaries called him The Genius, though among friends he preferred to be known as Brother Ray. He cited Nat King Cole as his main influence, along with Art Tatum, Louis Jordan and Charles Brown. In the 1950s, at Atlantic Records, he pioneered soul by combining blues, jazz, rhythm and blues and gospel. Frank Sinatra called him the only true genius in show business, though Charles himself downplayed the idea.

Moving to ABC Records in the 1960s, he became one of the first black musicians to be granted artistic control by a mainstream record company, and he used it to bring country, rhythm and blues, and pop together. “Georgia on My Mind” was the first of his three number ones on the Billboard Hot 100, and the 1962 album Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music was his first to top the Billboard 200.

The count of his successes is striking: 61 singles on the US R&B chart, 33 on the Hot 100 and eight on the country chart, plus 17 Grammy Awards, five of them posthumously. He was among the first inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986, and later received the Kennedy Center Honors, the National Medal of Arts and the Polar Music Prize. Billy Joel went so far as to say that Charles was more important than Elvis Presley. A friendship with Quincy Jones lasted a lifetime. He died on 10 June 2004.