Ray Charles

Singer Ray Charles had just about every bad break a man could have, but he didn’t let them turn him into  sad, grouchy  man. He was delightful and filled with laughter on the day I got to interview him.

I turned on my tape recorder and started asking questions. My first was, “If God came to you today and said,  ‘I took away your sight, but gave you a voice now enjoyed by millions around the world. Would you like to have the sight back in exchange for the voice?’ What would your answer be?”

“Oh, that would be easy,” laughed Ray. “I’d tell him that I’m not interested in sight at this late date. I’ve enjoyed what I do for forty years now, and I wouldn’t trade my voice just to be able to see again.”

He told me about his screaming helplessness in watching his 6-year-old brother drown, and how he went blind  from a minor eye infection just because his mother couldn’t afford the medicine which would have saved his sight, and that he wasn’t even old enough to shave when his mother died and he was packed off to a school for the blind and deaf.

“Don’t you consider yourself an unlucky man?” I asked.

“No. Not at all.  I’m blind, but I can do anything anyone else can do — I just have to figure out how to do things in a different way. I accepted my blindness, put it aside, and went on to enjoy life. Anyone who dwells on a handicap is giving up on their life.  I might have done that, but my mother kept reminding me time and again that I was blind, not stupid.  She’d say, ‘You lost your sight, not your brain.’”

Ray glowed as he told me about an old man named Wiley Pittman.

“Wiley was a neighbor. He had a big, old piano in his living room, and when  I was only 3-years-old I used to walk into his house and crawl up on the piano bench and start pounding away.  Instead of shooing me out of his house he sat down and started to teach me about music and the piano. By the time I went blind he had already taught me the basics. If it hadn’t been for that gentle, sharing old man I might never have been able to find my way into the world of music.”

I asked how he managed to maintain his health while spending most of his time on stage or in an airplane.

“I just learned to listen to my body. Your body knows what it wants and needs, and you just have to learn to pay attention to what it’s telling you. I make a habit of listening to my body and we get along just fine.

“Some folks jump out of bed in the morning  at full speed. But my body doesn’t like to hurry. It says ‘Hey. What’s the rush? Slow down and listen to the world for a while. There’s plenty of time for rushing later on.”

He has the same attitude about food. “When the bod tells me it’s hungry, I sit down and eat.  That can be at any time of the day or night. I don’t follow a schedule. I just listen to my body.  When it whispers, ‘Okay. That’s enough’,  I quit eating, regardless of how much food is still on the plate.

“I sleep the same way. I never go to bed just because it is 10 o’clock at night. I keep moving and enjoying things until the body says, ‘Time for some rest.’ That’s when I go to bed. And I sleep until my body yawns and says,  ‘That’s enough. Let’s get up and do something.’  Sometimes that’s after 10 hours of sleep, and on other occassions it’s after only twenty minutes or so.” 

I asked about an exercise plan, and that really brought a laugh. “Man,” he said, “Haven’t you seen me play the piano? ” said the man who swerved, whirled and was in almost constant motion while performing.

I asked if foreign audiences were different than Americans.

“Yes,” he said. “The folks overseas seem a bit more attentive. Here in America I usually hear a slight bit of noise all the time.  There’s foot shuffling, papers rustling, coughs, etc. But the first time I played in  Europe I was frightened by the silence. They were so quiet during my songs that I thought they might be holding their breath.  But there’s one big exception over there. The Italians!  They let you know what they think of your song right away. They yell, clap, stomp their feet and sing right along with me. I thought I’d been caught in  a stampede.”

I ended our interview saying that Ray Charles sounded like a happy man .

“Yes, indeed, ” he smiled. “God didn’t rob me — He blessed me.”

Fight Forth