Ray Charles Quotes

120 Ray Charles Quotes

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I can’t stop loving you.
Ray Charles

Do it right or don’t do it at all. That comes from my mom. If there’s something I want to do, I’m one of those people that won’t be satisfied until I get it done. If I’m trying to sing something and I can’t get it, I’m going to keep at it until I get where I want it.
Ray Charles

It was just a very country life, we lived in a small town with dirt streets. I had short pants and would walk around barefoot on those dusty streets. And from time to time, if someone had on the radio to a music station, you’d stop and listen to it…
Ray Charles

There was a jukebox that was in the little store that he [Mr Wylie Pitman – (Mr Pit)] owned. And people would come and put nickels in and play records, and of course I’d go and sit in the back – because I liked the music from that thing.
Ray Charles

[On Mr Pit] He was a boogie-woogie pianist. Of course he could play any type of music, but he was that type of pianist basically. That was his stock-in-trade – but he was a good one, a very good one.
Ray Charles

A least I thought so, I was impressed, it stopped me from playing out – it didn’t matter what I was doing, when I heard that, that was it for me. He was the guy who started showing me how to take one thing at a time, how to take one finger and do this, then how to take the other finger and do that. And it was so impressive for me, just to press a key and hear that sound. Then he showed me how to get little melodies – and of course at that age I was always trying to sing. He was a wonderful man, and really it would be hard to imagine what might have happened to me if he’d not been around.
Ray Charles

[On Mr Pit] As a youngster I would jump in the chair next to him and start banging on the piano keys while he was trying to practice. And he would say, ‘Oh no, son, you don’t play like that; you don’t hit the keys with all your fingers at one time. I’m going to show you how to play a little melody with one finger.’ He could have easily said, ‘Hey kid, don’t you see I’m practicing? Get away, don’t bother me.’ But instead he took the time to say, ‘No, you don’t do it that way.’ When Mr Pitman started playing, whatever I was doing I’d stop to go in and sit on that little stool chair he had there.
Ray Charles

[More on Mr Pit] He was the guy that was there to show me, he never stopped, even as I was losing my sight, and even after I lost my sight, he was always showing me things. Because he always knew more than I knew, he could always show me something. And right up to when he passed away, he was always showing me little things to help me on the piano.
Ray Charles

My first love was the music I heard in the community: blues, church gospel music, and country and western.
Ray Charles

The airwaves were running wild with hillbilly tunes from morning to night. They’d make them steel guitars cry and wine, and it really attracted me.
Ray Charles



I was around religious music, just like I was around the blues. Both had an effect on me.
Ray Charles

Gospel and the blues are really, if you break it down, almost the same thing.
Ray Charles

[On remembering an incident 40 years later] I can see it almost too vividly. It shines inside my head.
Ray Charles

[On his mother] She had knowledge all of her own; knowledge of human nature, plus plenty of common sense.
Ray Charles

It didn’t happen like one day I could see 100 miles and the next day I couldn’t see an inch. I guess I was too small to really care that much. I knew there were things I like do watch. I used to love to look at the sun. That’s a bad thing for my eyes, but I liked that. I used to love to look at the moon at night. I would go out in the backyard and stare at it. It just fascinated the hell out of me. And another thing that fascinated me that would scare most people is lightnin’. When I was a kid, I thought that was pretty. Anything like brightness, any kind of lights.
Ray Charles

In fact, it only took 10 days or so, and within a couple of months I was able to read storybooks like Living on John’s Farm and The White Rabbit. We called those primers. Didn’t seem like much of a chore.
Ray Charles

[On being left in the school boarding house as the only kid on the campus over Christmas due to a lack of money] I cried my little eyes out.
Ray Charles

When you study classical music as a child and you’re blind, what you do is you learn the songs. You study them and you learn to play them. Once you learn the songs through the Braille system, then you play them.
Ray Charles

Classical music is a great foundation for playing jazz.
Ray Charles

Every time I thought my teacher wasn’t listening, I played jazz.
Ray Charles



As a student, I was always playing music that somebody else wrote, and I got the idea in my mind that I would like to write music myself.
Ray Charles

To write something and then have musicians play it back to you, and you hear it and you hear your ideas, your thoughts – that was the most exciting thing to me.
Ray Charles

If you can read music, you can write it…
Ray Charles

Seems like every blind blues singer I’d heard about was playing the guitar.
Ray Charles

I can’t remember a single Saturday night when I didn’t listen to the Grand Ole Opry on the radio.
Ray Charles

In my early career I was a great fan, a great lover frankly, of Nat Cole, he was my idol… I mean I idolized the man.
Ray Charles

I tried my best, to sound like him [Nat Cole] and some people say I did a pretty good job.
Ray Charles

[On an early goal] To become a junior Nat Cole.
Ray Charles

[On his mother’s death] I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep – I was totally out of it. There’s no way to describe how I actually felt. I was truly a lost child.
Ray Charles

[More on his mother’s death] I couldn’t eat and I had to go to the hospital for about six days. They had to fee me through my veins because I never was able to cry, you know it hurt me so bad. And they kept sayin’ if I could just cry I would be all right, if I could just break down and cry, but I couldn’t, it was all up in my throat.
Ray Charles



I made up my mind to move to the biggest city in Florida – Jacksonville – and see what was cooking.
Ray Charles

I ate, slept, and drank everything Nat ‘King’ Cole. I wanted to be like him because he played the piano and sang and put all those tasty little things behind his singing… I practiced day and night to sound like Nat Cole. In the days when I was coming up, I had a lot of feeling for the songs of Nat Cole because he did what I wanted to do, and that was to play and sing at the same time.
Ray Charles

I was a real fan of Louis Jordan, that’s all I can tell you.
Ray Charles

I like people whose music did something for me.
Ray Charles

We’re always gonna sing the blues…
Ray Charles

[On his first really big break in the music business] Man, I was so glad. I didn’t ask him how much money I was gonna get. I didn’t care. I would have done it for nothin’.
Ray Charles

There was nothing about any advance or money up front. All the man said to me was that he was gonna record me, and we’d have a hit. I didn’t even ask about the terms.
Ray Charles

If I find a woman doing a lot of drinking, I don’t complain… I just split.
Ray Charles

I just said to myself, ‘Hey, if I’m gonna make it in this world and be accepted, I had better be accepted the way I sound,’ so I dropped all the imitations and stuff. Completely.
Ray Charles

If you can play the blues, man, you can do this.
Ray Charles



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