If someone ask me who was the greatest songwriter, singer, composer and musical genus of nineteenth, and twentieth century, my answer would most definitely be the late great, blind and gifted: The legendary master of all Mr. Ray Charles.

Before 1962, I had no interest in American music, though I listened to the music of Brook Benton, Nat king Cole, Matthew Robin, and The Drifters, Lewis Armstrong.

However, when I heard The late great Ray Charles in 1962 singing a song in which the chorus said "I had a lot of money when I started out, but I an't worth nothing right now........." I knew right then that the person I was listening to had something special.

I identified his genus and knew right then there was none greater, and perhaps none greater to come within that era!

I'd never heard a singing voice as the voice of Ray Charles before.

Of course I had listen to people with great tenor voices in the calypso world. As a matter of fact I was fascinated with the voice of Francisco Slinger, (The Mighty Sparrow), Nonetheless, when I heard Ray Charles, I thought for a moment his voice could not possible be a natural human voice.

Then one morning I was awaken to a song been played on ABS Radio: That was one of the best Rock- N- Roll songs I've heard him sang.

He performed that song in a move in the 1960s. We may recall the song "hey little girl with the red dress on, she can dance all night long: hey, hey, hey,............"

After hearing that song I became a fan of Ray Charles, and by continuously listing to his music, I developed a liking for Black American music, especially the music of the 1950s, to the late 1970s.

I must admit, that there are some black American music that I do not like: I would not listen to Rap music even if I was paid to do so. And the reason I do not like rap, is because of the profanities they contain.

Nonetheless, Calypso, and Reggae shall remain my most liked music.

The following is the biography of the late Ray Charles:

(FET). In 1966 Thomas Thompson wrote in his profile of Ray Charles for Life:

"...his niche is difficult to define. The best blues singer around? Of course, but don't stop there. He is also an unparalled singer of jazz, of gospel, of country and western.

"He has drawn from each of these musical streams and made a river which he alone can navigate."

His music is still marked by the unpredictability that is the genius of consummate artistry.

He is master of his soul, musically and personally.

To this day he selects and produces his own recording material with utter disregard for trends. He doesn't find the time nor necessity to write as much as he once did, but what he gleans, "from the attic of my mind, " either old or new, is inevitably suprising, unique, "right."

In the past decade he has taken on George Gershwin ("Porgy and Bess"), Rodgers and Hammerstein ("Some Enchanted Evening," "Oh What a Beautiful Morning") and "America the Beautiful" -- all with resounding, if unexpected, success.

Despite his intense reticence to expose the personal portion of his life to public scrutiny, Ray Charles is as outspoken about his opinions on matters of global interest as he is about matters of music.

As a Southern Black, segregation was Ray Charles' dubious birthright. But racial tension and friction were not a part of his early rural years. At St. Augustine's the rules of segregation were strictly adhered to, both for the deaf and the blind children, a fact that even young Ray Charles found ironic.

"I knew being blind was suddenly an aid. I never learned to stop at the skin. If I looked at a man or a woman, I wanted to see inside. Being distracted by shading or coloring is stupid. It gets in the way. It's something I just can't see."

It is music, Ray Charles' single driving force, that catapulted a poor, black, blind, orphaned teenager from there to here.

"I was born with music inside me. That's the only explanation I know of..." he remarks in his autobiography.

"Music was one of my parts... Like my blood. It was a force already with me when I arrived on the scene. It was a necessity for me - like food or water."

"Music is nothing separate from me. It is me... You'd have to remove the music surgically."

Ray Charles Robinson was not born blind, only poor.

The first child of Aretha and Baily Robinson was born in Albany, GA, on September 23, 1930.

He hit the road early, at about three months, when the Robinsons moved across the border to Greenville, FL. It was the height of the Depression years. And the Robinsons had started out poor.

"you hear folks talking about being poor," Charles recounts. "Even compared to other blacks. . . we were on the bottom of the ladder looking up at everyone else. Nothing below us except the ground."

It took three years, starting when Ray Charles was four, for the country boy who loved to look at the blazing sun at its height, the boy who loved to try to catch lightning, the boy who loved to strike matches to see their fierce, brief glare, to travel the path from light to darkness.

But Ray Charles has almost seven years of sight memory - colors, the things of the backwoods country, and the face of the most important person in his life: his mother, Aretha Robinson.