Page 93 – LIFE

Ray Charles: Photos of a Musical Genius On Stage and Off

February 10, 2022August 25, 2014 by

In July 1966, LIFE magazine published a story in which Frank Sinatra called Ray Charles “the only genius in our business.” Whether or not he was the only genius in show business is debatable; but there’s no getting around the fact that the genius Ray Charles was one of the most influential American musicians in history. A prodigious pianist, soulful songwriter and vocalist of astonishing range and power, Charles transformed the pop-culture landscape with his melding of gospel, blues and R&B music during the 1950s.

In 1966, Charles’s career was on the rebound after a forced hiatus in rehab the previous year for his longtime heroin addiction. (He’d been arrested for possession for the third time in 1965, and agreed to rehab in order to avoid jail time.) After getting clean he reemerged with hits like “I Don’t Need No Doctor,” “Crying Time” and other songs in various genres, including blues-inflected country, that revealed his powers as an entertainer to be not merely undiminished, but perhaps stronger than ever.

LIFE photographer Bill Ray spent a solid month with Charles during this pivotal time in the singer’s career, chronicling performances at celebrated venues like Carnegie Hall as well as hanging out with the legend in the studio, backstage at concerts and on the road and in the air between shows. Here, LIFE.com presents a selection of Ray’s photos many of which never ran in LIFE magazine that reveal a Ray Charles most of us have never seen.

“I was amazed at how he was able to exercise so much control over so many aspects of his life,” Bill Ray said. “The music, the travel, his love life which was definitely complicated. He could sometimes seem cool, calculating, even ruthless in his dealings with people, but part of that was a way to make sure he wasn’t being cheated, or taken advantage of. To me, at least, he was always very warm, very welcoming. And when he got behind that piano and began to sing wow! It was just impossible not to be moved by music that powerful.”

Ray Charles in the driveway of his rambling Los Angeles home with his wife Della and sons Robert, 5, David, 7, and Ray Jr. 11. ‘I don’t need to see them to know what they look like,’ he says. ‘I know my wife is pretty, and I think my sons are pretty good boys.'” Ray and Della divorced in 1977.

Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Ray Charles with his son, David, 1966.

Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Ray Charles at home in Los Angeles, 1966.

Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Ray Charles and his sons on his tour bus, 1966.

Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Ray Charles and his sons goof around on his tour bus, 1966.

Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Ray Charles 1966

Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

In the early morning at Los Angeles airport, Charles waits and his manager, Joe Adams, prepared to board his plane for a flight to New York.

Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

From his 50-seat private plane, Ray talked to someone at the control tower. He liked to sit up in the co-pilot’s seat and knew so much about the operation of the plane that, in an emergency, he could have taken over. As Charles said: ‘That would really be flying blind, baby.'”

Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

To light his cigarette, Charles feels the flame to guide it.”

Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Ray Charles 1966

Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Ray Charles’s tour bus, 1966.

Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Charles played chess on a board with special niches. The white pieces were smaller than the black.

Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Ray Charles’s tour bus, 1966.

Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Charles’s chauffeur, Vernon Troupe, led him to the piano in the Los Angeles studio where Charles recorded for his own company, named Tangerine after his favorite fruit.

Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Ray Charles and the Raelettes, 1966.

Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Ray Charles and orchestra, 1966.

Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Ray Charles in the studio, 1966.

Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Ray Charles resting before a show, 1966.

Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Ray Charles 1966

Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Ray Charles before a show, 1966.

Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Ray Charles before a show, 1966

Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Ray Charles backstage talking with Eric Burdon and the Animals, 1966.

Bill Ray/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Ray Charles at Carnegie Hall, New York City, 1966.

Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Ray Charles at Carnegie Hall, 1966.

Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Keedoozle, We Hardly Knew Ye: Remembering America’s First Automated Grocery

December 9, 2020August 25, 2014 by

In 1937, a Memphis, Tenn., grocer and innovator named Clarence Saunders introduced a bold new concept in shopping for food: History’s first fully automated grocery store. It was called Keedoozle. (See the explanation of the unusual moniker below.) In 1948, photographer Francis Miller traveled to Memphis in order to document the third incarnation of Saunders’s technological phenomenon.

TIME magazine, meanwhile, reported on the groundbreaking operation thusly:

Memphis had waited a long time for the Keedoozle, Clarence Saunders’ electrically operated grocery. He first announced it twelve years ago. Twice he had opened up, only to close when wires got crossed and customers got the wrong goods.

Last week, confident that he had ironed out his Keedoozle’s kinks, Saunders staged another grand opening. Customers thought it was worth waiting for. They liked the pinball-type lights that danced when they inserted the keys in the merchandise slots. Better still, they liked Saunders’ prices, 10% to 15% cheaper than competitors’.

Shopping at the Keedoozle is not as complicated as it sounds. Customers inspect the wares, each item in a separate glass-enclosed case, then insert a key in a slot under the items they wish to buy. Electric impulses cause perforations to be cut in ticker tape attached to the face of the keys. The customers take the tape to the cashier, who inserts it in a translator machine. That sets off more electric impulses which not only start the goods sliding down a conveyor belt, but at the same time add up the bill.

Keedoozle means “key does all.” It was coined by Saunders’ fertile brain the same brain that thought up Piggly Wiggly. . . . Now a white-haired 67, Clarence Saunders is sure that he has hit the jackpot again. Keedoozle‘s lavor-saving, he says, will enable him to make [more than 7 percent] on his turnover without adding more than a 3¢ markup to the cost of any goods. Says Saunders, who will sell Keedoozle franchises in other cities: “It can’t miss. It’s the biggest thing I’ve ever had.”

At least, that’s how it was all supposed to go down, in theory. Saunders tried the Keedoozle concept three times, but failed each time because the circuits couldn’t handle the traffic during peak hours. Customers regularly got mixed-up orders. In addition, the conveyer-belt system wasn’t fast enough or efficient enough when there was high demand. Keedoozle closed its doors for good in 1949.

LIFE Looks Back: Keedoozle, the Automatic Grocery Store

Francis Miller The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Clarence Saunders

Francis Miller The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Keedoozle, Automatic Grocery Store, 1948

Francis Miller The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Stonehenge: Mystery and Majesty in an Old Color Photo

January 16, 2020August 20, 2014 by

Calling Stonehenge a “monument,” as most books and tourist guides do, is a bit like calling the Grand Canyon a hole in the ground. Both descriptions are, from a literal standpoint, accurate, but neither manages to encompass the fascination they instill.

Was Stonehenge a place of worship? Probably. A kind of massive, three-dimensional calendar? Maybe. A pilgrimage site for the sick? Perhaps. A beacon for extraterrestrials?

A beacon for extraterrestrials? Anyone?

What one can say with certainty about Stonehenge, the Grand Canyon, Egypt’s pyramids, Machu Picchu, the Brooklyn Bridge and other natural and human-made wonders is that, in their presence, the imagination is likely to stir. We’re in awe before them, even when we know—as with Stonehenge, Machu Picchu, Chichen Itza—that we’re gazing on a mere shadow of what was once a far more extensive, elaborate and vibrant complex.

But that, too, is part of the profound allure of these places: having fallen into ruin, they still possess a genuine grandeur.

[Buy the LIFE book, Wonders of the World]

Here, thousands of years after its first stones were erected on England’s Salisbury Plain, LIFE pays tribute with a single photograph to the structure itself, and to the long-vanished people who envisioned and built Stonehenge. One of many pictures LIFE’s Dmitri Kessel made on assignment in England in 1955, this photo manages to capture what feels like an utterly contemporary scene the picture might have been made moments ago while also somehow evincing the mystery and majesty of a departed world.

Stonehenge, photographed in 1955.

Dmitri Kessel/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Vacation’s End: Classic Photos of Late-Summer Cape Cod

June 12, 2023August 15, 2014 by

In early September 1946, LIFE magazine published a cover story that, in words and especially in pictures, perfectly captured the unique, sweet, melancholy feel of summer vacation’s end. That the article focused, as LIFE put it, on “the first postwar summer vacation” of the 1940s somehow added if only in retrospect a quiet intensity to the story. All these years later, the pictures and the story itself remind us of just how fleeting the peaceful, hot days and long, cool nights of late summer really are.

As LIFE put it in that long-ago article:

William and Carol Foster [of Nashua, N.H.], with their sons Karl, 9, and Michael, 4, have spent the summer at Cotuit on Cape Cod, enjoying the lazy and wonderful pastimes of sailing, swimming, digging clams and loafing. Now they and their summer neighbors are going home. Boats will be hauled out of the water to lie forlornly in the tall beach grass. Cottages will be boarded up. The clam bar and dance pavilion will be deserted. The golf course, the tidal pool and the lonely sea beach will again revert to the rabbits, the fiddler crabs and the sandpipers.

Labor Day is here. A month ago it seemed hazy and remote, separated from the present by an endless succession of golden summer days. Now, suddenly, these days are changed and gone. The mornings are still the same. It is still hot and fragrant in the cranberry bogs, hot on the white shell roads, hot on the beaches and in the village streets, with everywhere the strong smell of pine, bay leaves and salt water. It is the afternoons and nights that are different. It gets dark early, and cold. Heavy fogs often roll in from Martha’s Vineyard and the late swim is a shivery business, made enjoyable only by the quick warmth of the picnic fire. In the evenings, going to the movies, the fog is wet in the streets. All night long the in the harbor rings a steady accompaniment to the remote blasts from the lightship out in the Sound.

These are sad and disturbing days. Everything is being seen for the last time, everything done for the last time. The last clam is eaten. The last bag is packed, the cottage door locked. . . . Down on the steamboat wharf at Woods Hole the last passenger gets off the Nantucket boat and joins the crowd of departing vacationists from the Cape, pushing to board the train. . . . Walking across the station platform, they catch a last glimpse of the white gulls turning in the sun and nets drying in the fishing boats, take a last deep breath of salt air before they are swallowed up in the incalculable stuffiness of the Pullman. Another summer on the Cape is gone.

Finally, note that most of the Cornell Capa photos in the gallery above never ran in LIFE. A dozen or so photos at the end of the gallery are those that appeared in the magazine in 1946.

Cape Cod Vacation 1946

Cornell Capa The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Ali vs. Liston II: The ‘Phantom Punch’ Title Bout, May 25, 1965

February 27, 2020August 10, 2014 by

When Muhammad Ali floored Sonny Liston in their title-bout rematch in Lewiston, Maine, on May 25, 1965, a legend was born. Or, perhaps more accurately, a legendary boxing controversy was born. Ali (the former Cassius Clay, who had taken his now-famous Muslim name after defeating Liston in their first title bout in 1964) knocked out Liston with a first-round right hand to the head that, all these years later, is still known as the “phantom punch.”

In fact, an awful lot of people who were at the fight never saw, or later claimed they never saw, the punch that floored Liston. Others, including Sports Illustrated‘s Tex Maule, were adamant that the punch was hardly a phantom, but instead was a perfectly timed blow that legitimately rocked the former champ.

In the years after the fight, various theories have been floated in order to explain what some fight fans simply can’t or don’t want to accept namely, that Ali beat Liston, period.

But Liston was in debt to the Mafia and threw the fight to pay it off, some have said, among other theories. All fascinating enough. Yet sportswriters such as Maule, Lou Eisen and others are just as sure that the punch in question was enough to rattle the older and out-of-shape Liston.

In his cover story in the June 7, 1965, issue of SI, Maule wrote that “the knockout punch itself was thrown with the amazing speed that differentiates Clay [as he was still called then by most in the media] from any other heavyweight. He leaned away from one of Liston’s ponderous, pawing left jabs, planted his left foot solidly and whipped his right hand over Liston’s left arm and into the side of Liston’s jaw. The blow had so much force it lifted Liston’s left foot, upon which most of his weight was resting, well off the canvas.”

“He knocked out big Sonny Liston,” the magazine asserted elsewhere in the same issue, “with a punch so marvelously fast that almost no one believed in it but it was hard and true.”

Maule also noted that “about 30 seconds before the end, [Ali] hit Liston with another strong right that may have started Sonny’s downfall.” A picture of that earlier punch was the cover photo for the June 7 issue of Sports Illustrated. George Silk took that photo. The rest of the pictures in this gallery, none of which ran in LIFE magazine, are by Silk’s colleague, John Dominis. In Silk’s picture, Dominis (wearing a dark blue shirt) can be seen resting his own camera on the canvas, just to the right of the ring post.

Muhammad Ali, before his fight with Sonny Liston, Lewiston, Maine, May 25, 1965.

John Dominis; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Ali vs. Liston, 1965

John Dominis; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Ali dodging a left jab from Liston.

John Dominis; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Ali landing a right cross on Liston.

George Silk; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Ali vs. Liston, 1965

John Dominis; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Muhammad Ali, after the fight, Lewiston, Maine, May 25, 1965.

John Dominis; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski: Rare Photos, London, 1968

January 24, 2022August 9, 2014 by

On the night of Aug. 9, 1969, in Los Angeles, four members of Charles Manson’s “family” savagely murdered 26-year-old actress and Roman Polanski’s wife Sharon Tate; her friend and former lover, Jay Sebring; Polish writer Wojciech Frykowski; coffee-empire heiress Abigail Folger; and 18-year-old Steven Parent, who was visiting the Polanski-Tate house in Benedict Canyon that evening to try and sell a clock radio to the property’s caretaker, and was shot to death by Manson follower Tex Watson. (A married couple in Los Feliz, Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, were murdered by Manson family members the next night.)

The grisly details of the Manson murders and their nightmarish aftermath the circus-like trials, the enduring fascination Manson and his band of sociopaths hold for countless people, and so on are well-known. Most people with even a passing knowledge of the slaughter are aware, for example, that Tate, eight and a half months pregnant, begged her killers to spare her unborn child. Instead, she was stabbed to death while pleading with her murderers, after which Manson follower Susan Atkins dipped a towel in Tate’s blood and used it to write “PIG” on the front door of the house. All of the other victims of the Manson followers’ depravity suffered equally horrifying deaths.

For more than a few people, the Sixties came to a bloody end during those two summer nights in ’69.

Here, LIFE.com recalls the living, vibrant Sharon Tate with a series of photos of her, Polanski and their friends, made by LIFE’s Bill Ray in Swinging London in 1968.

“When I look back,” Bill Ray recently told LIFE.com, “what I remember is that [writer] Tommy Thompson and I worked hard every day during that assignment, and every night we were out partying with Sharon and Roman. Jay Sebring was there. Brian Jones soon to be dead himself, drowned in his pool was there. Mia Farrow and Harold Pinter. Oh, it was a great time to be in London.”

Asked about working with Tate, Ray said he “thought she was a dream. Really, just wonderful. In fact, years later, that whole time spent with her and Roman sort of feels like a dream sequence from a movie Sharon was always beautiful, and she was never fussy. She didn’t care what angle I was shooting from, never demanded that I get this side or that side of her. Ingrid Bergman, when I photographed her around that same time, had a similar ease about her. She and Sharon had this incredible, natural beauty, and they didn’t worry about the wind blowing their hair around or looking less than perfect. And that, of course, just made them that much more appealing.”

As for Polanski, Ray recalls not only that he and Tate appeared to be deeply, genuinely in love, but that the filmmaker’s intensity and his dark humor were innate aspects of his talent, inseparable from his life experiences. Polanski, after all, had suffered more terrors as a boy in Nazi-occupied Poland (his mother was killed in Auschwitz; his father survived Mauthausen; Polanski himself, often on his own, was in constant peril) than most people witness in their entire lives. But in London, with his gorgeous wife by his side, close friends nearby and two acknowledged cinematic classics, Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby, to his name, Polanski was a charming, if often introspective, subject.

All these years later, Ray’s pictures of Tate, Polanski and their friends in 1968 London feel like portraits of a lost world, while the knowledge we have of the horrors to come adds a dark, foreboding edge to what, at the time, must have felt like an era of endless light.