Ray Charles Robinson Biography Essay

Ray Charles Robinson, known to many as Ray Charles “The Great” was born on September 23, 1930 in a small town of Albany, Georgia. He was a pianist, songwriter, and singer. Ray’s mother was a sharecropper and his father was a mechanic, when Ray was little they moved to Greenville, Florida. In Mr. Charles early years of life he was a witness of his little brother drowning to death. In some type of way, Charles began to lose his eyesight right after the death of his little brother. By the age of seven years old, he was blind; his mother put him in a state-sponsored school called the Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind in St. Augustine, Florida. That school taught him to write and arrange music with Braille, and read. Charles learned how to play piano, sax, organ, trumpet, and clarinet. He was just an all-around music mogul.

Charles was born in a time when visual impairment and being blind was less common in the US. Southern African Americans was not giving the opportunity to have health care because of the Jim Crow laws and practices. People thought that Ray Charles was born blind but he just slowly started to lose his sight at a certain age. Ray’s mother had no patience for sympathy but his hometown Greenville, Florida pitied him a lot. Charles remember that, “When I got to feeling sorry for myself, she’d get tough and say, ‘You’re blind, you ain’t dumb; you lost your sight, not your mind.’ And she’d make me. . .see I could do almost anything anyone else could do.” Ray Charles right eye was removed due to him being in pain in the year of 1937. Unbelievably Ray Charles refused to use the red/white cane to get around like other blind or visually impaired people. In 1986, incorporated the Robinson Foundation for Hearing Disorders after experiencing chronic troubles leading to temporary hearing