Ray Charles's childhood — Greenville, Florida

Ray Charles Robinson was born on September 23, 1930, in Albany, Georgia, but grew up in Greenville, Florida — a small town in Madison County in the north Florida panhandle, close to the Georgia border. His family moved there shortly after his birth; his father left early and his mother Aretha raised him in poverty. He began losing his sight around the age of four, from glaucoma, and was completely blind by age seven. His mother, determined he would not be pitied or coddled, sent him to the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind in St. Augustine — a decision that shaped his life entirely.

Greenville itself is a tiny community — fewer than a thousand people — in the flat pine-and-farm landscape of north Florida. The surrounding territory, the poverty of his childhood, and the specific culture of the African-American South in the 1930s are present in his music in the same way that geography is always present in music: as a foundation rather than a subject. He left Florida as a teenager, spent time in Seattle and then Los Angeles and New York building his career, and never substantially returned to the world of his childhood.

The town acknowledges his birthplace connection. What Greenville gave him, beyond its landscape, was the early musical immersion of the Black church and the discovery at the Florida School that blindness did not preclude a musical life — indeed, the school's music instruction gave him the formal foundation on which everything else was built.