Before he was a superstar, Ray Charles was a working pianist trying to survive. He came up in Florida and Georgia, learned to read music in Braille at a school for the blind in St. Augustine, and started gigging as a teenager after both his parents died. Early on, he modeled himself closely on Nat King Cole — smooth, polished, radio-friendly. You can hear it on his earliest recordings, and it's good, but it's not yet him. The real Ray Charles arrives somewhere in the early 1950s, when he starts letting the church in.

What he did with gospel and the blues was genuinely controversial at the time. Taking the fervor and the call-and-response structure of African American church music and putting secular — often explicitly romantic — lyrics over it struck a lot of people as sacrilegious. He didn't care. Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music (1962) is probably the clearest example of his approach in practice: he heard country music as another form of the same American sadness he'd been singing about all along, and the record sounds completely natural, not like a stunt. It sold enormously and baffled critics who couldn't figure out what category to put it in.

As a pianist, Charles doesn't get enough credit. He had a rolling, blues-drenched left hand and a way of comping behind his own voice that was completely integrated — the piano and the singing were one instrument. His Atlantic Records period in the mid-to-late 1950s, records like The Great Ray Charles (1957) and the live recordings from that era, show him at his most purely jazz-oriented. The band was tight, the arrangements were loose enough to breathe, and he was playing with real fire. If you only know the hits, start here.

He worked with some serious musicians over the years — Quincy Jones arranged for him early on, and the relationship mattered to both of them. His touring bands were known as hard-working, disciplined outfits, because Charles demanded it. He was notoriously strict about punctuality and preparation, which makes sense when you consider how much was happening on stage at once: the full orchestra, the Raelettes, and him holding it all together from the piano bench.

The honest thing to say about Ray Charles is that his jazz output, while real and genuinely good, is only one part of a much bigger picture. He never stayed in any lane long enough to become a jazz artist in the way that Miles Davis or John Coltrane were jazz artists — he wanted the charts, the country audience, the pop crowd. That ambition sometimes frustrated jazz purists, but it's also what made him so interesting. He was, at bottom, a singer who happened to play piano brilliantly, and he understood that a song's job was to reach people. He got very good at that.