Ray Charles was born Ray Charles Robinson in Albany, Georgia, on September 23, 1930, and raised by his mother, Retha Williams, in Greenville, Florida. At the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind in St. Augustine, where he studied from 1937 to 1945, he learned to read and write music in Braille and studied piano, clarinet and composition. His listening encompassed church gospel, blues, classical music, jazz and country; as a teenager he played with the Florida Playboys, an all-white country band, an early sign of where his interests would lead.
His Atlantic recordings of the 1950s helped shape soul music through their combination of gospel style and secular lyrics. In late 1959, ABC-Paramount offered one of the highest royalty rates of the time, creative license to produce his own records and ownership of his master recordings, terms that gave him control few artists had. In 1962, Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, recorded that February, brought songs by country writers to new listeners, topping the Billboard album chart for fourteen weeks, with "I Can't Stop Loving You" leading both the pop and R&B charts that summer.
In the mid-1960s, a drug-possession arrest led him into treatment, and he came back to the touring and recording life he kept up for the rest of his career.
Charles continued collaborating across genres. Billy Sherrill produced Friendship in 1984, a number one album pairing him with country performers including Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard and George Jones; the duet "Seven Spanish Angels" with Nelson became a number one country single. Charles died in 2004.
