American soul singer · 1945–2004Ray Charles

The man who put gospel structure under secular words and called the result something nobody had a name for yet. Born in Albany, Georgia in 1930 and raised in Greenville, Florida, Ray Charles Robinson lost his sight before he was seven and learned to read, write and arrange music in Braille at the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind. He dropped the surname to avoid being confused with a boxer. By 1954, with I Got a Woman, he was building records on the architecture of church music and filling them with entirely worldly business — a combination that made some listeners deeply uncomfortable and turned out to be the foundation of soul.

The Atlantic years produced What'd I Say, improvised on stage to fill twelve minutes he had no material for. The ABC years produced Georgia on My Mind, Hit the Road Jack, Unchain My Heart, and an album of country songs sung by a Black R&B star at the height of the segregation era that outsold everything else he ever made. He was among the first inductees to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986 and entered the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2022, which is a fair summary of how little the categories ever held him. He died on June 10, 2004, at seventy-three.