- Together with Julia Rinker Miller, sang the theme song of the television series Three's Company (1976) ("Come and Knock on Our Door").
- Director of The Ray Charles Singers.
- Born Charles Raymond Offenberg in Chicago on September 13, 1918, Charles won a radio singing contest at 13 and had his own 15-minute program by 16. He went on to study at Chicago Musical College and Central YMCA College. He moved to New York in 1942 and began working in radio. Although he had been calling himself Ray Charles (an inversion of the name of a famous silent movie idol, Charles Ray) since high school, he did not legally change his name until 1944.
- Composer, conductor, songwriter and arranger, and the director of the Ray Charles Singers. He joined ASCAP in 1954, and has made many records.
- Ray Charles was best known for his long association with Perry Como, the smooth baritone who hosted a popular variety show on NBC in the 1950s and '60s. Charles and his singers not only backed Como on the show and 31 albums but accompanied him on tour. It was Como who introduced the group on the program as the Ray Charles Singers, and the name stuck. The Ray Charles Singers recorded more than 30 albums for the Essex, MGM, Decca and Command labels. They made the top 100 about a dozen times between 1955 and 1970 with such hits as "Love Me With All Your Heart" and "Al-Di-La." Charles' choral style raised hackles in the studio when he began recording in the 1950s. The sound engineer told Charles that the group's soft, whispering tones would be obliterated by surface noise on the record. "I told him that was his problem," Charles said in Joseph Lanza's book "Elevator Music; A Surreal History of Muzak, Easy-Listening, and Other Mood-song" (2004). "My whole theory of singing," he said in the book, "is that you were singing to someone no more than two feet away, like a lover".
- Former "Perry Como Kraft Music Hall Show" television program producer Nick Vanoff moved his production team to Hollywood in mid 1963 to produce, (video-taped 'banked' in color at NBC-Burbank, August 1963, airing in the Spring, 15 February 1964), the CBS TV color special "The Bing Crosby Special" hosted by Crosby, featuring musical guest performers Dean Martin, Rosemary Clooney, Bob Hope, Kathryn Grant, Peter Gennaro and Frank Sinatra). Nick Vanoff brought Ray Charles with him. ABC Television canceled their Saturday Night variety "Jerry Lewis Show" in December of 1963, replacing the Saturday night hour variety show with "The Hollywood Palace" -- which was ABC's prestigious answer to CBS' Sunday night's "The Ed Sullivan Show." Ray Charles remained on the West Coast with Vanoff's production team producing the "Hollywood Palace" series from 1963 through to the end of the series, canceled by ABC TV in January 1971. Ray Charles musical contributions included special arrangements, choral transcriptions and special new music during the seven years the variety show was in production.
- Ray Charles' name often caused confusion despite obvious differences from the black, blind soul singer. Once during the Reagan administration, the white Charles was invited to join the line of Kennedy Center Honors guests allowed to meet the president. When Reagan was handed a card with Charles' name on it, he did a double-take and quipped, "I didn't know you came in two colors." In a 1986 Muppets special, which featured the black Charles in archival footage, the music credits make a teasing reference to the identity confusion, calling the choral director-composer "The Other Ray Charles." Charles met the other Ray on a TV assignment and persuaded him to sing "America the Beautiful" on the Glenn Campbell show, more than a decade before the soul icon's stirring rendition of the song at the 1984 Republican National Convention.
- During his stint on the Perry Como show, which aired from 1949 to 1963, he was asked to set the names of all 50 states to music. The result was "Fifty Nifty United States," which has been memorized by several generations of school children. (A number of on-line sources provide the lyrics along with an image of the wrong Ray Charles.) Charles also led his Ray Charles Singers in many TV commercials for products including Lipton Tea, Lucky Strike and Chesterfield cigarettes, and Cover Girl cosmetics.
- In 1971, Charles won EMMYs for music and lyrics for two television shows, "The First Nine Months Are the Hardest" and "The Funny Side." Charles wound up singing the "Three's Company" theme song (with Julia Rinker Miller) by accident. He was asked to teach the tune ("Come and knock on our door, We've been waiting for you...") to the show's stars -- John Ritter, Suzanne Somers and Joyce De Witt -- but their efforts after an hour's practice were not promising. Asked by the producers how the trio was doing, Charles was tactful. "I said, 'I'm not sure,'" he recalled in 2008. "They said, 'Well, we are. We like the way you sing it.' And that's how I got it.".
- During a career that spanned radio, television, films and records, Ray Charles was known for his ability to create melodies and meld voices in an intimate, easy-listening style that was well-suited to television musical revues of the 1950s, '60s and '70s. Charles arranged and composed music for such television shows as "Your Hit Parade," "Perry Coma's Kraft Music Show," "Sha-Na-Na," "The Hollywood Palace," "The Glenn Cambell Goodtime Hour" and "The Muppett Show," and worked with Sid Caesar, Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald, Julie Andrews, Tony Bennett and other musical star-personalities. Known as an authority on American popular music, Ray Charles also was a consultant for "The Kennedy Center Honors" for 31 years.
- Ray was cremated. His ashes were sprinkled into the Los Angeles River by his children.
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