Soon there will be no more stories like this one: stories about the grandchildren of slaves, raised amid southern red-dirt poverty, shaped by the music of the church and the juke-joint, then turning northward and giving voice to a new kind of sound that changed the world. The life of Ray Charles was just such a story, with the added twist of infantile glaucoma that rendered him sightless from the age of six. By reinforcing the independence and self-reliance that underpinned his life’s work, a handicap was transformed into a gift that enabled him, unlike so many of those who shared the journey, to reach his destination and enjoy the fruits of arrival.
”Always remember your promise to me,” Charles’s mother tells him in the opening words of Taylor Hackford’s biopic Ray (opening on February 11). ”Never let nothing or nobody turn you into a cripple.” Upon this instruction would hang a career — the product of pride, persistence and a refusal to be owned or exploited — that made Ray Charlesone of the most influential musicians of the 20th century.
Charles’s mother, Aretha Williams, was an orphan and still a teenager when she bore him in 1930. After she died at age 31, her words continued to ring in her son’s head. Long before his death last year, Charles had arrived at the show business pinnacle symbolised by concerts at the White House and a mantelpiece full of Grammy awards.
His later audience came to see Charles in the way that they viewed Louis Armstrong — as an ingratiating veteran entertainer who played up to the stereotype of their imaginations. Charles hid his permanently closed eyes behind the black-framed shades that became a trademark — ”a symbol of his mystery, an emblem of some secret pain”, as his record producer Jerry Wexler would observe — and rocked on the piano stool with awkward movements hinting at the transcendent abandon of the sanctified church, although, in his case, the ecstasy was of a purely secular origin.
Hackford’s film acknowledges the Hollywood version of Charles in its closing credits, listing the honours that came his way in the later years. Otherwise, to his credit, the director will have nothing to do with it. He concentrates on the younger Ray Charles, the one who fought his way out of the segregated south and through the undergrowth of post-war popular music, insisted on remaining the master of his own destiny (and owner of his own copyrights) and became, for a decade, a dominant presence among his contemporaries. In a pre-production process that lasted 15 years, Charles helped Hackford (the maker of The Devil’s Advocate and An Officer and a Gentleman) to identify the actor, Jamie Foxx, who portrays him between the ages of 16 and 36, and to recreate pivotal scenes from his life.
Such a project, effectively endorsed by its subject, runs the risk of presenting a neutered, uncontentious view. Sure enough, we get the blind man who could ride a motorbike, co-pilot a plane (his own executive jet) and pick up the beat of a hummingbird’s wings. We get the performer who confronted segregation and faced down corporate suits. But the complexities of Charles’s character are exposed in Ray, and there are episodes that present him in a less than saintly light.
”When faced with dependence one way, independence another, Ray Charles will, with rare consistency, choose independence,” his biographer Michael Lydon wrote in 1997, considering the implications of Charles’s decision at the age of 16, stranded in a strange town without friends or contacts, to embark on a career as a professional musician. ”Again and again he would move away from people and places previously known, cut himself out of webs of the past when they threaten his freedom in the future. Independence became, in time, an ingrained habit of the man, an element of his makeup that some found grouchy, others cold-blooded. The darkness he lived in revealed one plain fact: humans live and die one by one, all ultimately alone. With the passing years he became more and more determined to reap what advantage he could from facing that truth without flinching.”
Unflinching is indeed the best word to describe the portrayal of Charles’s off-stage existence, which includes the depiction of a 17-year heroin habit (from tentative first taste, through a potentially career-wrecking arrest, to a successful bout of cold turkey) and of the many relationships coexisting with his long-running second marriage. Hackford’s film begins amusingly enough, with the teenager scamming a bus ride from Florida to Seattle by pretending that his blindness is the result of a war wound, but there is no attempt to gloss over his ruthlessness in matters of business or the sometimes unhappy consequences of his carnal appetites.
Omissions and distortions inevitably result from Hackford’s need to streamline a complex story first told in 1978 in Brother Ray, Charles’s own (excellent) ghosted autobiography, and expanded 20 years later in Lydon’s well-researched portrait, Ray Charles: Man and Music. There is no mention of his first wife, Linda, who followed him from Tampa to Seattle in 1949 and with whom he had a daughter a few months later. Linda moved back to Florida the following year but, like all the women who bore his 12 children, she continued to receive his financial support.
We do not see his failed audition, at the age of 17, for the famous bandleader Lucky Millinder. ”Ain’t good enough, kid,” Millinder told him, jolting the piano-playing prodigy out of his small-town complacency. ”What Lucky did to me was make me stop kidding myself,” Charlesreflected many years later. ”I learned you aren’t good just because people around you say you’re good. While there is plenty of screen time for Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler of Atlantic Records, who nurtured his originality and produced what many believe to be his finest recordings, there is none for Herb Abramson, Ertegun’s partner when Charles was signed to the label. It was Abramson, not Wexler, who went to a Harlem hotel to shake hands with the new signing in the spring of 1952.
The scene in which Charles joins the Florida Playboys, an otherwise all-white country-and-western band, after convincing them that he has grown up listening to broadcasts from the Grand Ole Opry, contains an exchange that is given no authority in either book: ”One hint of trouble and your blind nigger is out of here,” a reluctant band member tells his fellows. And when, approaching the apogee of his fame, he exchanges one business manager for another, we are given Charles’s own disputed version, in which the employee is fired for misappropriating funds.
But, as well as glorious music and a magnificent visual treatment, Ray does provide a rich sense of how Charles< absorbed music from all sources, and of how it felt to be present at the various stages of his career, from his membership of the gigging band of the blues guitarist Lowell Fulson to the lavish recording sessions at which he created Modern Sounds in Country and Western — the 1962 album with which he controversially obliterated the frontier between black and white music and built a bridge to the wider audience that would stay with him for the rest of his life. Using remastered versions of the original music tracks, and with Charles's own collaboration, Hackford spares no effort to recreate the sound of the music.
Above all, however, the factor that lifts Ray high above Lady Sings the Blues (Diana Ross as Billie Holiday), Bird (Forrest Whitaker as Charlie Parker) and even the estimable What’s Love Got to Do With It (Angela Bassett as Tina Turner) is Jamie Foxx, a former stand-up comic who made a strong impression in Collateral, Michael Mann’s recent Los Angeles thriller.
You could barely slide a cigarette paper between Foxx’s portrayal of Charles and the real man. The tilt of the big, square head, the idiosyncratic body language, the gimpy gait and the extraordinary range of speaking voices are reproduced in a virtuoso performance that brings to life the image established by Lee Friedlander’s many famous photographs of the singer in his prime.
It helps, too, that Foxx has played the piano since infancy, led the band in his gospel church at home in Texas and attended college on a music scholarship. When the camera pans down to the keyboard and closes in on his fingers, the music is real.