📍Greenville, FL 32331, USA
1932 – 1945“I was born Ray Charles Robinson in Albany, Georgia, in September 1930, but when I was a baby my mother, Aretha, brought me home to Greenville, a tiny, poor farming town in the piney woods of north Florida. We lived in a little wooden house with no electricity or running water, and my mother, who did laundry and odd jobs, raised my younger brother George and me with the help of Mary Jane Robinson, who was like a second mother. We were on the very bottom of the ladder, but my mother taught me pride and independence. Just down the road was the Red Wing Café, run by a man named Wiley Pitman, who had a piano and a jukebox. When I was about three, he saw me banging on the keys and, instead of shooing me away, he sat me on the bench and taught me to play boogie-woogie. I spent every hour I could there. When I was five, my little brother drowned in a washtub in our yard, and soon after, my eyesight began to fail. By seven I was blind. My mother made me learn to do everything for myself, and she sent me to the Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind in St Augustine, where I learned to read Braille music and play classical piano. I came home to Greenville for holidays until my mother died when I was fifteen, and then I set out to play music for a living. I mixed gospel, blues and jazz into soul music, with songs like I Got a Woman and What'd I Say. My childhood home in Greenville has been restored, and a statue of me sits at a piano in the town park.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today