Some songs are about a place. A few songs become the place. When Ray Charles sang “Georgia on My Mind,” he turned a love song into a love letter to an entire state, and Georgia never stopped singing it back.
Albany beginnings
Ray Charles Robinson was born in Albany, Georgia, in September 1930. His family moved to Greenville, Florida, when he was still a baby, and by the age of seven he had lost his sight. He learned to read music in braille at the Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind, and he could play piano, organ, saxophone, and clarinet before he was out of his teens.
He took everything he heard growing up in the South, gospel, blues, jazz, and country, and blended it into something new. By the late 1950s, hits like “I Got a Woman” and “What’d I Say” had earned him the name people still use today: the Genius.
Photo: Maurice Seymour for the William Morris Agency, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
A song becomes his signature
“Georgia on My Mind” was written by Hoagy Carmichael and Stuart Gorrell back in 1930, the same year Ray was born. When Ray recorded it in 1960, he slowed it down, wrapped it in strings, and sang it like he was missing home. It went to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and won him a Grammy. Plenty of artists had sung it before, but after Ray, it belonged to him.
1979: the state song
In 1979, Ray Charles stood before the Georgia General Assembly and performed “Georgia on My Mind.” That spring, Georgia made it the official state song. For a man born in Albany, it was a homecoming nobody who was there ever forgot.
Photo: Ken Lund, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Photo: formulanone from Huntsville, United States, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
How Georgia honors its Genius
Ray kept making music into the 80s and beyond, and in 2004, the year he died, he released a final album of duets that went on to sweep the Grammys, while the movie Ray introduced him to a whole new audience. In Albany, the riverfront Ray Charles Plaza features a bronze statue of Ray seated at a grand piano, surrounded by music, right where the Flint River runs through the town where his story began.
The next time “Georgia on My Mind” comes on, turn it up a little. It is the sound of the whole state singing along.
Want the full history? Read more about Ray Charles in the New Georgia Encyclopedia.
Hear Ray Charles and all your Continuous Georgia Classics on 95.9 FM in Athens and Northeast Georgia, in the TGC Radio app, or just say “Alexa, play TGC Radio.”
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Featured image credit: Alan Light, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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