Ray Charles

Learning to read music in Braille and play by ear helped me develop a damn good memory.

What is a soul? It’s like electricity – we don’t really know what it is, but it’s a force that can light a room.

Music’s been around a long time, and there’s going to be music long after Ray Charles is dead. I just want to make my mark, leave something musically good behind. If it’s a big record, that’s the frosting on the cake, but music’s the main meal.

I was born with music inside me. Music was one of my parts. Like my ribs, my kidneys, my liver, my heart. Like my blood. It was a force already within me when I arrived on the scene. It was a necessity for me-like food or water.

Music is my life, professionally, for nearly 60 years. To be recognized by the academy is still the highest honor.

I never wanted to be famous. I only wanted to be great.

Music is a gift and a burden I’ve had since I can remember who I was.

It doesn’t matter all that much. It’s just that when you’re playing, Stephane, you’ve got both Chaput and me backing you, but when I’m soloing I’ve only got one guitar behind me!

Play what you want and let the public pick up on what you doing even if it does take them 15, 20 years.

Jazz is one of the best things that you can find in your life, it can always be your friend.

Jazz stresses less on technical exhibitionism and much more on emotional content.

Whenever I fill out the job description I put ‘songwriter’, never ‘singer’ or ‘artist.’ Singers come and go.

I learned to play guitar on my lying back while I was bed-ridden. I only thought to record the songs because sometimes I would I couldn’t remember what I had just done. Eventually I started singing, because I thought if I sang it that would help to remember even more. But I wasn’t trying to sing. And then one day-this is really weird -I just wrote a song. It came out at a rapid rate and I recorded it and I listened back to it and was like ‘Wow, it’s a tune’.

Listening is more important than anything because that’s what music is. Somebody is playing something and you’re receiving it.

Count don’t do nothin’. But it sure sounds good.

Applause felt like approval and it became a drug that soothed the pain, but only temporarily.

If you think it, want it, dream it… then it’s real. You are what you feel.

I hate straight singing. I have to change a tune to my own way of doing it. That’s all I know

Sometimes when you start losing detail, whether it’s in music or in life, something as small as failing to be polite, you start to lose substance.

It seems like I always had to work harder than other people. Those nights when everybody else is asleep, and you sit in your room trying to play scales. I just wonder where I was when the talent was being given out, like George Benson, Kenny Burrell, Eric Clapton… oh, there’s many more! I wouldn’t want to be like them, you understand, but I’d like to be equal, if you will.

I’m always looking to create new avenues or new visions of music.