Ray Charles has the distinction of being both a national treasure and an international phenomenon. He started out from nowhere; years later finds him a global entity.
Hundreds of thousands of fingers have hit typewriter and word processor keyboards telling and retelling his story because it is uniquely American, an exemplar of what we like to think is the best in us and of our way of life.
The Ray Charles story is full of paradoxes, part and parcel of the American Dream.
Rags to riches. Triumph overcoming tragedy. Light transcending darkness.
The name Ray Charles is on a Star on Hollywood Boulevard's Walk of Fame. His bronze bust is enshrined in the Playboy Hall of Fame. There is the bronze medallion cast and presented to him by the French Republic on behalf of its people. There are the Halls of Fame: Rhythm & Blues, Jazz, Rock & Roll. There are the many gold records and the 12 Grammys...
There is the blackness and the blindness. There was the extreme poverty; there was the segregated South into which he was born.
His awareness of racial injustice was not limited to the home front: The same years he fought the war against racial injustice in the American South found in Charles a growing awareness of racial injustice abroad, particularly the notorious policy of apartheid in South Africa.
Modest to the point of mum about his humanitarian and charitable activities, Ray Charles makes an exception for the State of Israel and world Jewry.
Among the many, the world leader Charles has most enjoyed meeting is David Ben-Gurion, with whom he had a conversation of many hours during a concert tour of Israel not long before Ben-Gurion's death.
And the award among the hundreds he claims to have touched him the most is the Beverly Hills Lodge of B'nai Brith's tribute to its "Man of the Year" in 1976.
"Even though I'm not Jewish," he explains," and even though I'm stingy with my bread, Israel is one of the few causes I feel good about supporting.
"Blacks and Jews are hooked up and bound together by a common history of persecution. . .
"If someone besides a black ever sings the real gut bucket blues, it'll be a Jew. We both know what it's like to be someone else's footstool."
But it all comes back to music, so inseparable from Ray Charles.
He keeps rolling along, doing what he does uniquely and wondrously well.
Ray Charles is a national treasure and a global phenomenon for this reason:
He is music; he is himself; he is a master of his soul.
