Florida School for the Deaf and Blind — St. Augustine

The Florida School for the Deaf and Blind at 207 North San Marco Avenue in St. Augustine is where Ray Charles received his formal education and his formal musical training from the age of seven, when his mother enrolled him following his complete loss of sight. He attended from around 1937 to 1945 — nine years at a state boarding school for disabled children — and during that time learned to read and write music in Braille, studied classical piano, learned several instruments, and absorbed the formal foundations of music theory that would underpin everything he subsequently made by ear and by instinct.

Charles has described the school as the place where he was treated as capable rather than as a charity case — where his disability was accommodated rather than used to define his limits. He was not being trained for a career in music; he was receiving the standard curriculum of a state school, with music as one component. The quality of the instruction, and his own prodigious aptitude, produced a musician who could read and write and arrange at a level that his subsequent work in genres — jazz, blues, country, soul, gospel — required but never announced.

He left the school in 1945 after his mother died, determined to support himself as a musician. He was fifteen. The Florida School for the Deaf and Blind continues to operate at the St. Augustine campus where Charles attended, serving students from across Florida. It explicitly acknowledges Charles's time there as a central piece of its institutional history. The campus on San Marco Avenue is a working school; tours are available in connection with the Ray Charles heritage.