Ray Charles: Man and Music

They flew out of the South and into the Northeast. Most nights, once at cruising altitude, pilot Tom McGarrity switched the Martin to autopilot, a device that picked up radio beams from beacons across the country.

When the plane stayed on course, the beams hummed in sync, but when it strayed, the beams went out of sync, creating the “wah-wah” familiar to anyone who’s tuned guitar or violin strings. Autopilot set allowable limits to the wah-wah, and nudged the plane back on course whenever it approached them. The device, however, had a manual override, and many nights, as they flew to the dawn, Ray, revved up after the gigs and unable to sleep, told Tom to kill the autopilot, he’d do it himself.

As the gang quit their card games, yawned, curled up under blankets, and fell asleep, Ray sat in the cockpit, headphones over his ears, listening to the hum of the beam tones, easing the stick right or left at the first whisper of a wah-wah.

Fatigue and the day’s drugs left him spent but mellow.

High above the clouds, the day’s hassles, the concert and the crowds…[his wife] Della and the kids, [his mistress] Mae and her threats, [his ex-mistress] Sandra Jean and her lawyers, all dropped far, far away. Ray let himself slip into a realm of pure sound, quietly proud that 25 people trusted him to guide them safely in the big plane, blind through the night.

Excerpted fromRay Charles: Man and Music, by Michael Lydon, © 2004. Reprinted with permission from Routledge.