Rachael Worby, Founding Artistic and Music Director of MUSE/IQUE, is hosting the inspirational 2025 season “Make Some Noise: Music and Stories of American Defiance and Hope” which spotlights transformative American artists and thinkers who rejected norms and limitations to forge a new and better future, while teaching us that nothing is impossible. And what better way to kick it off than with According to Ray: Ray Charles’s Message to America honoring the multi-award-winning musical genius who influenced generations to follow their dreams?
Included are eleven songs from Ray’s life path from being born poor in the segregated south, learning to read music written in Braille at age 7, being orphaned at age 14, and then honing his skills over a lifetime in which he moved from city to city and played at local jazz clubs where he met amazingly brilliant artists who opened his ears to new musical genres. Blending elements of gospel, blues, boogie woogie, country and western, jazz, soul, and R&B, Charles went on to create songs uniquely his own, shaped by his vision of what music could be. As Worby shared, Ray was born into music “as part of my body, just like my blood. It was always a force within me.”
Along with the 28-member MUSE/IQUE orchestra conducted by Worby, singers include GRAMMY® winning soulful belter Brandon Victor Dixon commanding the stage as the voice and persona of Ray Charles and the DC6 Singers Collective, a Los Angeles-based ensemble with roots in a cappella, gospel, doo wop, and R&B, fusing styles as Ray did to transcend boundaries. Interestingly, the entire violin section performed while standing, something unusual for a concert orchestra. But certainly, doing so allowed the musicians to sway and bounce with the music, adding another element of Ray’s ability to inspire music to reach the depths of everyone’s heart and soul.
Ray Charles and Raylettes 1966
But what makes MUSE/IQUE concerts so special is Worby’s between-song discussions which demonstrate how music and history intersect, not only through music but also with great storytelling and visuals, bringing vivid images of history into focus through the music being shared. And along the way, I learned and remembered why in 1986, Charles was one of the first musicians inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, received a GRAMMY® for Lifetime Achievement in 1987, and won a dozen GRAMMY®s for his recordings. Among his numerous awards were the Presidential Medal for the Arts in 1993, and the Kennedy Center Honors in 1986.
Charles left us physically on June 10, 2004, shortly after completing Genius Loves Company, his album of duets with Willie Nelson, Norah Jones, Elton John, James Taylor, Natalie Cole, Bonnie Raitt, and others. It earned five Grammys for Charles and became the biggest-selling album of his career. But hits from all his albums were part of this entertaining tribute to a true legend.
Opening with “What’d I Say” which Ray Charles wrote, the audience was introduced to the talented soloists of the MUSE/IQUE orchestra and the amazing ability of singer Brandon Victor Dixon to inhabit the heart and soul of Ray. Entering from the audience, members of the DC6 Singers Collective joined him onstage to rock the house with extraordinary skill, all of which got the house rocking and ready for more of Ray’s soul-thumping music.
Ray at Carnegie Hall 1966
As a young boy, Ray was first exposed to gospel music while attending the local church with his mother who snag in the choir. After joining in while seated in a pew, Ray was invited to join the choir and became its star performer. One of the first songs he performed was “Take My Hand, Precious Lord” by Thomas A Dorsey, performed a cappella by belting soloists Aretha Scruggs and Loren Smith of DC Singers who perfectly channeled the mood of a Southern Baptist church revival meeting.
With gospel music deeply imbedded in his soul, Ray often visited the Red Wing Café in town where he listened to pianist Wylie Pittman play boogie woogie. The orchestra’s drummer, bass player, pianist, and singer Herman Jackson demonstrated that style of music with “Boogie Woogie Stomp” by Albert Ammons. Ray took the beat with him when he was sent to the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind where he learned to read music in Braille. His world was opened to understanding exactly where music lived in his soul and how he could express exactly what he was feeling through it. Examples of Braille were then shared on a large screen, explaining how 6 dots, raised or flat in different combinations, are used as language for the sight-impaired.
So incredible was Ray’s innate talent that he learned how to play piano by reading the score in Braille, using his left hand while playing the notes on his right – and then reversing the process to learn the left hand’s notes. Then the magic happened when he placed both hands on the keys.
As soon as he was old enough to go out on his own, Ray decided to live as far from Florida as he could. Consulting a Braille map, he decided to move to Seattle and soon discovered the music of Nat King Cole, specifically his hit “(Get Your Kicks On) Route 66” by Bobby Troup, which was performed as a tribute to Nat King Cole’s style by Dixon who walked through the audience while the DC6 singers accompanied him from onstage.
While in Seattle and hanging out in local jazz clubs after performing his own shows nightly, Ray also met Cab Calloway singing the American Folk Song “St. James Infirmary” performed by belting soloists Erinn Horton, Nina Kasuya, and Loren Smith of DC Singers.
Ray then took his evolving style of music combining gospel, boogie woogie and the blues to New Orleans where he met Guitar Slim while Ray was performing as a session pianist at Specialty Records. Ray went on to organize the band on Guitar Slim’s hit “The Things That I Used to Do” which sold a million copies in 1954 – a previously unknown accomplishment! And it was the last time Ray participated on a record for which he did not get credit. Dixon performed the heartfelt ballad, first sitting next to conductor Worby on her podium.
Fully absorbing American music while living in New Orleans and working at Atlantic Records, Ray recorded “I Got a Woman” which he wrote with Renald Richard. Considered his first soul hit, the song launched Ray into the music industry as a true hit maker on his own. From there he moved to Los Angeles to see how far his career would take him. Living on Central Avenue at the Dunbar Hotel, Ray began hanging out in the local jazz clubs which attracted musicians from all over the city for late night jam sessions. That’s where he first heard Art Tatum and his backup singers The Cookies, who he recruited to record with him as The Raylettes. One of the original Raylettes, Cynthia Scott, shared via video how extraordinary it was for a small-town girl from Arkansas touring Europe with Ray and the Count Basie Orchestra.
While living in Los Angeles in 1954, Ray released his Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music album. But when his rendition of the country and western hit “I Can’t Stop Loving You” by Don Gibson was played on air, white promoters would not consider a black man as a C&W singer. So, they called the song’s genre “Rhythm and Blues.” Thus a new genre was born thanks to the talent of Ray Charles to combine music styles. (Of course, we’ve come a long way now, with Beyoncé winning two country-related awards at the 2025 GRAMMY Awards: Best Country Album for Cowboy Carter and Best Country Duo/Group Performance featuring Miley Cyrus, for “II Most Wanted”).
Worby then took us back to Seattle where Ray met Quincy Jones who became his lifelong friend, with Ray teaching Quincy how to write music in Braille for the sake of their collaborations. Their first hit together “Let the Good Times Roll” by Sam Theard and Fleecie Moore, was from Quincy’s produced album The Genius of Ray Charles, which was sung with such heartfelt depth that singer Dixon fell backwards onto the stage from where he was sitting at the song’s end – to a standing ovation!
When Quincy was hired to score the Oscar-winning film “In the Heat of the Night” whose title song was written by Quincy Jones Jr., Marilyn & Alan Bergman, he insisted that only Ray Charles could add the soulful longing of a true Southern black man’s struggle for acceptance and equality so necessary for the film. And of course, he was right.
The last two songs fully incorporated the overwhelming influence of Ray Charles’ music on the soul of the American People during times of great social unrest. When invited to perform his rendition of “Georgia on My Mind” by Hoagy Carmichael and Stuart Gorrell in the Georgia State Capitol, the state’s lawmakers adopted it at the state’s official song the following year. Dixon’s fun personality as well as his amazing ability to channel the singer’s aura added to the audience being drawn into the heartfelt message that there is no better place.
As the ultimate musical trailblazer, in 1972 Ray Charles did something even he’d never done before: he infused his work with an anthemic message of empathy at a time when America was torn apart by racial tension. From his album A Message from the People, his cornerstone reinterpretation of “America the Beautiful” by Katharine Lee Bates and Samuel A Ward expressed Ray’s own vision of America as his personal, patriotic hope for a brighter future for all Americans being treated equally. As the show’s rousing finale, it was performed as a sing-along with many in the audience joining in, a true sign of hope that we as a country will always remember that “united we stand, divided we fall.” And we certainly need to remember that message now, more than ever.
According to Ray: Ray Charles’s Message to America
MUSE/IQUE
in association with Center Theatre Group
Mark Taper Forum, 135 N Grand Ave.
remaining performances:
March 22 @ 2:30, March 23 @ 2:30 & 7:30
for tickets, visit MUSE/IQUE
The season continues with concerts Welcome to the Dream Factory (April 30, May 3-4) focusing on Hollywood and the immigrant composers who scored its major films; The UnAmericans (June 10-11, 15) reprising a 2024 favorite concert about the Hollywood Blacklist; Like It Like Harlem (August 8-10) with salsa, boogaloo, and the making of a new musical playground in New York City. The season concludes with Made in Memphis (September 12-14) about Stax, Soul and the black artists who started a sound revolution, and Have You Ever Heard of Etta James? which examines the guts and triumph of an American icon (October 14-15, 19). The season ends with Stand By Me: Season After Party in November 2025.
