Artist · chart history · #44 in indie & aaa artist polls
Ray Charles
Solo artist Albany United States soul musician, singer and songwriter
Ray Charles is an artist from Albany. Ray Charles has 36 chart appearances on 19 radio countdowns from 7 stations on RockLists, spanning 2001–2026. The most successful song on radio countdowns is “Georgia On My Mind”, which appears on 14 lists with a best position of #22. The station that charted Ray Charles most often is WXPN (Philadelphia, PA), with 13 appearances.
Ray Charles, born in 1930, lost his sight as a child, and the dark glasses became as much a part of the picture as the piano. Sitting at that keyboard, the man his peers called "The Genius" (his friends called him "Brother Ray") took blues, jazz, rhythm and blues and gospel and fused them into something new during the '50s at Atlantic Records: soul music, with "What'd I Say" in 1959 as a rafter-rattling example.
Then he crossed every line he could find. Moving to ABC, he became one of the first black musicians handed artistic control by a major label, and he used it. The Genius Hits the Road gave him "Georgia On My Mind", the first of his 3 number-one hits on the Billboard Hot 100, and the Modern Sounds albums brought country music and rhythm and blues into the same room; Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music went to the top of the Billboard 200 in 1962. He counted Nat King Cole as his chief influence, with Art Tatum, Louis Jordan and Charles Brown close behind, and kept a lifelong friendship with Quincy Jones.
The honors piled up: 17 Grammy Awards, the Kennedy Center Honors, the National Medal of Arts, the Polar Music Prize, and a place among the very first inductees of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986. He died in 2004, and the Country Music Hall of Fame took him in in 2022.
Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.
Songs by Ray Charles on radio countdowns
| # | Song | Strength | Lists | Best | #1s | Peak year |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Georgia On My Mind | 14 | #22 | – | – | |
| 2 | What'd I Say | 11 | #22 | – | – | |
| 3 | Hit the Road Jack | 4 | #44 | – | – | |
| 4 | America The Beautiful | 2 | #408 | – | – | |
| 5 | Let's Go Get Stoned | 1 | #155 | – | – | |
| 6 | Unchain My Heart | 1 | #321 | – | – | |
| 7 | I Gotta Woman (aka "I've Got a Woman") | 1 | #593 | – | – | |
| 8 | I Got a Woman | 1 | #380 | – | – |
Albums with charting songs
Where each song was first released, from MusicBrainz.
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