Ray Charles

Man and MusicBy Michael Lydon

Routledge

Copyright © 2004 Michael Lydon
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780415970433

Chapter One

I was born with music inside me.
Like my ribs, my liver, my kidneys,
my heart. Like my blood.

Ray Charles

Greenville
1930-1937

For a hundred miles west of the Atlantic coast,the land of northern Florida lies flat as a floor covered by a thick rug ofgray-green vegetation. In fertile fields, venerable live oaks, bearded bySpanish moss, bend grandly to earth. Bright green palmettos bunch cheerfullyaround slender brown trunks in the piney woods, and creepers tangle everythingin flowered variety and profusion. East of the Suwannee River, the land ismarshy; lakes and ponds and lazy creeks abound. West of the Suwannee, the landstarts a gradual rise, and the old east-west road, U.S. 90, begins to undulateto the rhythm of mountains eroding into plain, a rhythm that accelerates slowlyinto rolling hills and pastured valleys over the sixty miles to Tallahassee.Atop the first real hill in the rhythm stands the Madison County courthouse.The six windows of its silver cupola survey the territory in all directionslike six bright eyes.

In 1776 that territory was a wilderness. Then white settlers brought slavesto fell the virgin forests and to plant cotton and tobacco, wresting the landfrom the Indians and the Spanish, until in 1821 Spain ceded the whole peninsulato the new United States of America. Sandy Ford, at a ford on the AucillaRiver, was the first settlement to spring up in Madison County's westernreaches. The second was Station Five, the fifth stop from Tallahassee on theFlorida Central and Western Railway.

In 1876 an ambitious settler, Elijah James Hays, bought a huge tract of landsurrounding Station Five and began using the station to market his plantation'slivestock, cotton, tobacco, and timber. Hays owned a general store, abrickyard, and a turpentine still; he sold his cotton direct to W. W. Gordon,exporters in Savannah. Hays' enterprise drew tradesmen and their families, andthe railroad village prospered as Sandy Ford declined. By 1887 the town'sLadies Aid Society had decided that Station Five needed a more genteel name.Mrs. Morgan, a native of Greenville, South Carolina, suggested that Greenvillesounded nice and refined. Their husbands spit skeptically at the notion that anew name would change rough-and-ready Station Five, but the ladies prevailedand Greenville the town became.

Greenville grew with the infant century. In 1912, the town passed a"milestone," as a local history put it: an ordinance forbidding hogs to roamthe streets. World War I and the booming twenties provided eager markets forall the lumber, cotton, and cattle Greenville could bring to rail, and othermilestones followed: the first electric power company in 1923, the first highschool graduation in 1926, and the first town well, 195 feet deep, dug in 1927.

Busy North Grand Street, Greenville's main drag, along the east-west railroadtrack, was still unpaved as the 1930s began. On the station side, portersloaded trains from stacks of freight brought in by mule wagons and gasolinetrucks. Ladies and children stepped off passenger coaches, back from a week'svacation with relatives on the Atlantic coast. On the store side, planters inbroad-brimmed hats signed bills with clerks in the shaded interior of Mr. Hays'Bank of Greenville, talking among themselves about the price of cotton and thetroubles on Wall Street. In the warehouses, farmers with cotton to sellbargained for harnesses and nails, canvas and candles, while their wivesshopped for sundries at Reams' department store. White teenagers spooned atKing's pharmacy, dawdling over their Cokes, and little colored boys, barefootand in ripped overalls, hung on hitching posts and watched the world go by.

Hot humid summer gripped Greenville in September 1930. Through the still aircame the puffing of trains, the screech of tenders trundling to and fromwarehouse depots. Smoke rose from the Prince Veneer and Southern Lumber mills,where sweating black men, stripped to the waist, wrapped iron chains aroundtheir wrists to tug raw trunks to the screaming blades that sliced tall yellowpine into board feet of lumber and skinned short white pine into orange-cratestrips. Greenville's business district extended a few blocks north of NorthGrand through drab streets lined with barbershops and cafes, a blacksmith andstables, to the Andrews Hotel, the biggest building in town. Behind itsawninged windows the Porkchop Gang, rural politicians and their landownercronies, met over bourbon and cigars to plot control of the state legislature,a discreet fifty miles west in Tallahassee. To the south of North Grand, theland rose in a slight hill, where stood the big white Baptist church and thehouses of the town's leading white families, unpretentious frame dwellings onstreets canopied by spreading oaks.

West of town, North Grand soon wore down to a double wagon track, andsongbirds and buzzing bugs drowned out the sawmills. Wild morning glorieswrapped green vines and blue trumpets over sagging fence posts. Rickety shacksperched on tiny lots squeezed between forests and farms. Across from the bigwooden New Zion Baptist Church, a nameless smaller road turned south across therailroad tracks and past a second wooden church, the modest New ShilohMissionary Baptist. A half-mile farther a cluster of small houses and shacksstood under tall pines and oaks, a black quarter everybody called Jellyroll.

The name, rightly, had a raffish air. Colored folk who had lived inGreenville for years lived in Blackbottom, the black quarter in town watchedover by the white folks on top of the hill. Jellyroll was out from under whiteeyes, a sandy clearing in the woods where transient workers had thrown uptar-paper shacks when work held through more than one season. Nobody had livedin Jellyroll long, nobody knew where the others had come from or might go next.The men and women of Jellyroll were by and large greenhorns from theplantations, drawn by the promise of cash for menial labor. Living close toGreenville felt more like town than the sharecropper cabins they had left, butJellyroll was still country. On Sunday the people prayed hard, all week theyworked hard, and Saturday night they found a bit of the free and easy at Mr.Pit's Red Wing Cafe.

Wiley Pitman was a jovial brown-skinned man, fat, with a wide grin, and knownfar beyond Jellyroll as a fine piano player. With his wife, Miz Georgia, heowned the Red Wing, a wooden plank building facing the road from North Grand.The cafe doubled as a small general store where Miz Georgia sold kerosene andmatches, flour and salt, cold beer and pig's-foot sandwiches. A few tablesfilled the middle of the floor, and against one wall stood a jukebox and apiano. Out back stood a boardinghouse where Mr. Pit had rooms for thewatermelon pickers who overflowed the place in summertime, and rooms, as onelongtime resident put it, "for...