Ray Charles

(Ray Charles)

  A hero to me is a person that doesn't give up but keeps trying even if you have special problems and that person is Ray Charles. He was blind and still kept on going in life.  He was born on September 23, 1930 and passed away June 10, 2004. He was one of the best American musicians.  He was one of the first African Americans to be signed by a mainstream record company. He loved to play gospel, jazz blues, rhythm and blues and country.

  Ray was number two on the November 2008 list of "100 Greatest Singers of all Time". He was the son of a sharecropper named Aretha Robinson.They were a Christian family and attended  New Shiloh Baptist Church.The whole family lived in Albany, Georgia but then moved to a very poor neighborhood.  That's where Charles witnessed his four year old brother drown in a bath tub and will always have a guilt for the rest of his life.

Ray started to lose his eye sight when he was five years old. When he got to seven years old he was completely blind.  He went to a school named Florida School for the deaf and blind in St Augustine in 1937-1945 where he found his amazing talent for music.  Later on when he became ten years old, his father died and his mom died five years later. When he was 15 years old he didn't return to school.  He lived with his mom's friend and had a little job where he would play the piano for a band called Ritz Theatre and made himself four dollars a night.  Later on he starred to get more known by people and started to get more money.  He then made his own songs and sang them.  He had a very hard life but he still managed to keep going on with his life.  That shows you, never to give up.