Ray Charles Robinson was seven years old when his younger brother George drowned in a washtub in the backyard of their home in Greenville, Florida. He was there. He saw it happen. He was too small and too young to prevent it and the specific horror of watching and being unable to stop what was happening lived in him for the rest of his life as the defining trauma of a childhood that had other traumas but none as immediate and none as permanent.
He began losing his sight around the same time — a process that was gradual and then complete, leaving him entirely blind by the age of seven. His mother, Aretha Robinson — who features in his autobiography as one of the most significant and complicated figures of his interior life — was fierce in her insistence that he not be treated as limited. She taught him to do things that blind children were not expected to do. She taught him to navigate the world with the independence of someone who had not been told his disability was a reason for dependency.
She died when he was fifteen. He was at boarding school in Florida. He received the news from a letter. He was alone when he read it.
By the time he was fifteen years old Ray Charles had lost his brother, his sight, and his mother. He had also found music — had been finding music since before any of the losses, had been sitting at the piano in the juke joint near his home since he was four years old and absorbing everything that came out of it. Music was not an escape from what had happened. It was the place where what had happened could be held without destroying him.
He became Ray Charles. He became one of the most celebrated musicians in the history of American music. He performed for forty years in venues that grew from juke joints in the Deep South to concert halls in every country in the world. He received awards and honorary degrees and the specific cultural canonization that American music reserves for its greatest practitioners.
Every night before he walked onto the stage he went somewhere alone and he cried.
The person he told — a musician who toured with him for years and who has given a single careful account of the conversation — describes it happening in a specific way. Not a breakdown. Not grief unmanaged. Something deliberate. Something that Ray Charles did intentionally as a preparation for performance. He said that before he could give the music to the audience he had to go back to the place the music came from. That the place the music came from was not a comfortable place. That you could not access the truth of it without going back into the room where the truth lived.
He went back every night. For forty years.
He went back to the yard in Greenville. To the boarding school and the letter. To his mother’s face. To his brother George who drowned in a washtub on a summer morning. He went back to all of it, deliberately, because the music that came out of those losses was the only worthy thing those losses had produced and to perform it without honoring where it came from was a dishonesty he was not willing to commit.
Then he walked out onto the stage and gave the audience everything that the going-back had made available.
The people in the audience received warmth and joy and the specific quality of Ray Charles’s genius — the humor and the swing and the voice that could do things no other voice could do. They received the performance.
What they did not see was the twenty minutes before it. The room. The man alone with the losses. The going-back.
Forty years. Every night. He never stopped going back because he knew what happened to the music if he did.
It became performance rather than truth.
He was not willing to give the audience performance.
He gave them truth every night for forty years. At the cost of going back every night for forty years to the place the truth came from.
That is what Ray Charles was. That is what the music was.
That is what it cost him to give it to you.