Marxism & Science: The Genius of Soul

by Gaetana Caldwell-Smith

Taylor Hackford’s biographical film “Ray” gives us an engaging story of the life of the late Ray Charles, up to 1965. Ray Charles Robinson was born in 1930 in segregated Florida. Totally blind (by age seven), he nevertheless had achieved fame by the 1950s. His legend continues to this day.

Due to his distinctive voice, musicianship, business smarts, and his genius, Charles created popular hits incorporating many musical genres. A large number of his arrangements reached the top of the charts and stayed there.

Ray Charles is played by Jamie Foxx, who appears to have channeled Charles’s soul even before the musician’s death in June. Foxx, a pianist himself, captures Charles’s swinging gait, facial expressions, and head movements, while knocking out tunes on the piano and lip-synching Charles’s songs. Right away, you feel that it’s Ray up there on the screen. In interviews, Foxx has said that he wore prosthetics over his eyes during rehearsals and filming to feel what it’s like to be blind.

Scenes of Charles’s musical evolution are broken up by flashbacks of his boyhood. One scene has Ray standing on a dirt road, in front of a club, in the ramshackle town he lived in with his mother and younger brother. Ray hears an old piano man’s boogie-woogie music and sneaks in. The old man ends up teaching him to play.

Later, a traumatic scene shows Ray, when he was six, witnessing his little brother’s drowning in a washtub. Charles’s career began in the Jim Crow South of the 1950s, where he played piano in a trio, in small clubs, on the “chitlin’ circuit,” which Hackford recreates perfectly. Here, Ray sings like his idol, Nat Cole, before he eventually finds his own voice. Years later, when his records hit the charts, he formed a bigger band, featuring back-up singers, the Raelettes, and fills larger venues in the North. During this time, he wrote, arranged and played signature tunes like “I Got a Woman,” the soulful rendering of “Georgia,” and the country-western hit, “Born to Lose.”

At the end of one concert, Ray, who was obviously high, is told to play another 20 minutes to fulfill his contract. Going by the puzzled glances of his band and the Raelettes, it appears he made up, on the spot, the audience-response hit, “What’d I Say.”

Hackford’s film shows people trying to take advantage of Ray. But Ray Charles was smart. He insisted on maintaining control not only of his career, but his money. After recording many hits at the upstart Atlantic studios, Ray then switched to the much larger ABC Paramount label, and later got ABC to agree that he could retain ownership of his masters.

Ray never forgot things his mother (a fiery Sharon Warren) had taught him when he was going blind. His mother was determined that her son would be self-reliant and never see himself as a “cripple.” He learned to orient himself by the timbre and resonance of the tiniest sound.

Ray was shooting heroin during his most creative period. Soon, he began displaying the physical manifestations of the addict. He was arrested twice for drugs, but the charges were dropped. His strong, supportive wife, Della Bea (Kerry Washington), knew of his habit and his womanizing. He finally kicked the habit after “Bea” called him a “cripple behind drugs,” and after hearing that his “road wife,” Marjorie Hendricks, one of the original Raelettes, had OD’d. Ray Charles was a friend of Martin Luther King and donated funds to the civil rights movement. However, the film contains a scene of a civil rights protest in Georgia that was apparently fabricated for dramatic purposes.

As he gets off a bus in the scene, Ray is met by demonstrators, who shout that he is booked into a segregated theater. The white promoter who is escorting Ray through the crowd snarls, “Don’t listen to the niggers.” Ray stops, frees himself from the man’s grip, and tells the band members to get back on the bus.

According to Ray’s own bio, however, that is not quite the way it happened. Charles wrote that the promoter informed him that he’d be playing to a segregated audience: Blacks in the balcony and whites downstairs. Ray insisted it be the other way around. The promoter wouldn’t agree; Ray refused to play. He was sued and banned from playing in Georgia. In 1979, the governor lifted the ban, welcomed him back, and made Charles’s “Georgia” the state song.

Before his death, Ray Charles listened to a narration of an early cut of the film, heard Foxx’s work, and pronounced it “good.” “Ray” has rekindled interest in Ray Charles’s music, not only for current fans but for a whole new generation as well.

This article first appeared in the November 2004 issue of Socialist Action newspaper.