Roderick M. Thomas Jr.
American Popular Music
October 25, 2013

Personal Selection Paper I decided to do my paper on Ray Charles because he is a staple in music history. He was always a very influential person in music and revolutionized music by mixing the sound of gospel with blues. Personally, my favorite song to listen to preformed by Ray Charles is “Hit the Road Jack”, which is a part of the blues genre written by Percy Mayfield. The reason I enjoy this song is because it explains a story of a woman who is fed up with a good-for-nothing man who tries to get her back but she does not fall for his deception. I enjoy songs that explain a situation that is going on or a song that is telling a story. You can really get into it with the song when you listen because you get wrapped up in what is happening. Ray Charles Robinson was born September 23, 1930 in Albany, Georgia. He was born to the parents of Aretha (Williams) Robinson, a sharecropper, and Bailey Robinson who was a railroad repairman, a handyman and mechanic. When he was still a baby, his family moved to a poor black community on the west side of Greenville, Florida. He became interested in music at young age when he was at Mr. Wiley Pit’s Red Wing Café. He would watch Pit play the piano while he was the café. Mr. Pit would often watch Ray and Ray’s little brother, George. Ray started to lose his sight at the age of five and became completely blind by the age of seven from glaucoma. From then he began attending Florida School for the Deaf and Blind from 1937 to 1945. Here at school, he began to develop his musical talent. He left school in 1946 when his mother died and moved to Jacksonville, Florida to live with two of his mother’s friends. There he began his music career where he played the piano for bands at the Ritz Theatre in LaVilla for over a year for $4 a night. In 1951, he joined Swing Time records where he took the name of Ray Charles. The following year, Swing Time collapsed and he signed to Atlantic Records. Ray Charles married six times with twelve children by nine different women. On November 14, 1961, Charles was arrested for narcotics in an Indiana hotel room. The detectives found heroin, marijuana and other items. The charges were dropped because of the way the evidence was obtained. Ray stated that he had been a drug addict since the age of 16. By 1964, he was caught again and arrested for possession of marijuana and heroin. After this he released a line of songs using drug references in the title and lyrics such as, “Let’s Go Get Stoned”. On June 10, 2004, he died due to liver failure in his home in Beverly Hills, California. Blues is a musical form and a music genre that came from African-American communities mostly from the "Deep South" of the United States around the end of the 19th century that came from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants. World War II is when blues changed from acoustic to electric blues and the opening of blues music to a variety of people, especially white listeners. In the 1960s and 1970s, a form called blues-rock came about. Ray Charles fits into this genre because many of songs had to do with lost love and hard times as do many blues songs do contain these characteristics. The popular Ray Charles song, “Hit the Road Jack” was composed by Percy Mayfield in 1960 when it was recorded by singer, song-writer, and pianist, Ray Charles. It is in the Allegro tempo. The instrumentals of this song include a piano, trumpet, drums, and background singers. The vocals included a duo with him and another female throughout the song. The form was AABA with a verse chorus form. The stage presence involved Ray Charles sitting at the piano preforming with a band behind him and his duet singer next to him as if they are in an argument.