Five years ago, when he was still working the lounges, second-billed to such as Mongo Santamaria, Flip Wilson had an album out that had this skit about Christopher Columbus. Columbus is telling Queen Isabella about his wanting to journey off to a new land, "to discover America."

"America?!" the queen exclaims, in a high, throaty black voice. "You goin' to America? You gonna find Ray Charles?"

Ray Charles is one of the great ones, a genius, as he's been called for some 13 years, or, as Sinatra put it, "the only genius in the business." He is the major influence on dozens of blues, jazz, R&B, pop, and rock & roll musicians. Joe Cocker idolized him, from faraway England, to the point of imitation. So did Billy Preston, who would show up at Ray's doorstep in L.A. to audition. Aretha Franklin called him "the Right Reverend," and Georgia legislator Julian Bond picked up the beat, in a poem called "The Bishop of Atlanta: Ray Charles," finishing:

Throbbing from the gutter
On Saturday night
Silver offering only
The Right Reverend's back in town
Don't it make you feel all right?

Ray Charles' 26 years in the business are represented by some 40 albums. He got his first gold record with "What'd I Say" for Atlantic Records in the summer of 1959, seven years after he'd joined that label. Charles then switched to ABC and began a streak with "Georgia on My Mind," "Ruby," and "Hit the Road Jack." He topped them all with a country & western album that gave him a three-million-selling single, "I Can't Stop Loving You," along with criticism from fans who didn't want to hear the Genius kicking shit. Others, like Gladys Knight, listened: "Ray Charles," she said, "hipped a lot of the black people to country & western bands...we was kind of listening before, but he made it even more down-to-earth where you could dig it." And Quincy Jones, long-time friend and arranger with Charles, appreciated his pioneer sense of eclecticism: "Ray Charles was responsible," he said, "for us opening our ears to all kinds of music."

Born September 23rd, 1930, in Albany, Georgia, Ray first jumped onto a piano bench, for fun, at age five in Greensville, Florida, where his parents had moved into what he remembered as a "shotgun house" — "If you stood on the porch and shot a gun you'd go right through it." Over the next two years, he lost his sight (he had been stricken with glaucoma, doctors determined years later); his parents, Bailey and Araetha, were laborers who couldn't afford medical help. "When I woke up in the mornings," Charles recalled, "I'd have to pry my eyes open." Blinded, he learned to work to help out, washing clothes, scrubbing floors, even chopping wood, until he went to blind school in Orlando, Florida. He studied music there he'd begun to pick out tunes on a neighbor's piano by age seven --and by 15 was writing arrangements for big bands he heard in his imagination. Then his mother died, following his father by five years, and Charles left school to go to work, playing in combos around Georgia and Florida. He was "crawling," he said, until he split to Seattle and got a record contract from Swingtime, a small label. He cut "Confession Blues," then had his first success, "Baby, Let Me Hold Your Hand," done in the style of one of his main influences, as Johnny Otis put it, "It was a wonderful thing, but he definitely was aping Charles Brown." Ray would soon develop his own fusion of blues, jazz and gospel, touring with Lowell Fulson, then forming a backup group for Ruth Brown in New York. He returned to Seattle and formed the Maxim Trio, worked at the Rocking Chair club and on local TV, and found himself signed to Atlantic Records when Swingtime sold his contract. First sessions were done with studio musicians (and, one time, with a pickup band including a Mexican-dominated horn section at a radio studio in New Orleans). At Atlantic, Ray began to write arrangements and compose his own great songs, blended gospel with a rocking R&B sound, formed a septet, cut "I Got a Woman," and moved into the first of many heights.

And all the time, he was on junk. He'd been using heroin since 1948, when he was 18, and he'd been busted before, around 1956, but it had all been kept hushed. Then, in 1965, Charles was arrested in Boston, reportedly in possession of a planeload of heroin, and entered a hospital in Lynwood, California. According to published stories, he spent three months undergoing medical and psychiatric help, followed by a year off. He saw a Viennese psychoanalyst regularly.