Ray Charles And The Florida Playboys, A Short Adventure

Ray Charles loved to reminisce about his earliest endeavors in country music. Shortly after his seventreenth birthday, in 1947, he landed a gig with the Florida Playboys. In Michael Lydon's biography, Ray Charles - Man And Music, the story is that "[o]ne audition convinced the Playboys that RC could play country music with a genuine flavor, and they hired him, no questions asked about race. For several months he gigged with the band, playing current country hits like Kentucky Waltz in white honky-tonks in and around Tampa, learning to yodel, and singing Waiting For You as his featured number. [...]. RC's interlude with the Playboys, though brief, planted a seed in Ray Charles' music that would lie dormant for a decade before sprouting. Yet this important event has left barely a trace in any but Charles' own memory. Gossie McKee and Manzy Harris [...] nor Ray remembered any names. [...]. The histories of some bands, however, are written on the wind, and the other Playboys may have forgotten the nights with RC [...]."
Of course, it were not the Playboys who were crucial for Charles' love for country music. That came from listening to the radio, especially to WSM's Grand Ole Opry shows, ever since he was a toddler.

The Florida Playboys, not too long after Ray left. This photo, with guest
Hank Williams, was made at WJHP.

Up until recently, all efforts to corroborate Ray's vague memories with contemporary sources have failed (including mine, miserably). But in 2013 Marshal Rowland, a former steel guitar player and an owner of radio stations in Georgia and Florida, published his memoirs, Fertilizer 'tween my toes, a true story about a country boy finding his success and happiness in country music and owning radio stations.*
Rowland remembers how he was a fan of "Tiny Grier and the Florida Playboys on the radio on a station [WJHP] out of Jacksonville. [...] They came on [live] twelve thirty every day". After finishing highschool, he decided to contact Grier. "The band had hired a young black fellow named Ray Charles [...]. He had tried out and played with them for a few days and then abruptly left. About the same time he left, two others, PeeWee Jenkins and Cliff Austin, also left. [Grier] told me he needed musicians to keep his band going and the radio program alive and well."
"A few days" is a better match with Ray's early career timeline than the "several months"-reconstruction by Lydon. Obviously, his adventures with the Playboys were limited to a part of October 1947.

In this interview Ray shared a few more memories.

The daily Playboys radio show on Jacksonville's WJHP is a new detail in Brother Ray's Playboys legend. It's highly probable that Ray participated in at least a few of these broadcasts.
Rowland described the show's format as it was during his membership of the band: "In a typical thirty-minute program, usually the leader Sleepy Gibbs would sing two or three songs and Marvin Phillips, Tiny Griers son-in-law, would also sing two or three songs. The steel-guitar player and the fiddle player, Luther Moore, would each play one or two numbers [...]".

*Many thanks to Joël Dufour for sharing this information.

RC Robinson's Early Years - On WFOY Radio (1945 - 1946)

When RC (as he was nicknamed at the time) attended school at the Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind in St. Augustine, he performed on WFOY radio in St. Augustine ('the oldest station in the United States' oldest city'), possibly already in 1944, almost surely in 1945 and 1946.
He became the school's premier musician. On Fridays, the South Campus Literary Society held assemblies where Charles would play piano and sing popular songs. On Halloween and Washington's birthday, the Colored Department of the school had socials where Charles would play. It was here that he established RC Robinson and the Shop Boys and sang his own arrangement of Jingle Bell Boogie.

This photo has been used in several documentaries (this is a still
from The Genius of Soul), but I don't know if it's authentic.
 If the woman is Aretha, Ray's mother, the picture must be from circa 1944.

Henry and Alice Johnson, who owned a store in the Frenchtown section of Tallahassee, took Charles in. He worked the register in the Bryants' store under the direction of Lucille Bryant, their daughter. He loved Tallahassee and often used the drug store delivery boy's motorbike to run up and down hills using the exhaust sound of a friend's bike to guide him. Charles found Tallahassee musically exciting too, and he sat in with the Florida A&M University student band. He played with Henry Washington, Joe Ellison, Charley Brantley,  the Adderley brothers, Nat and Cannonball, and began playing gigs with Lawyer Smith and his Band in 1943 at the Red Bird Club and DeLuxe Clubs in Frenchtown, and at roadhouses around Tallahassee, as well as at the Governor's Ball.
After his mother died in 1945, Charles didn't return to school. He lived in Jacksonville with a couple who were friends of his mother. For over a year, he played the piano for bands at the Ritz Theatre in LaVilla, earning $4 a night. Then he moved to Orlando, and later Tampa, where he played with a southern band called The Florida Playboys. This is where he began his habit of always wearing sunglasses that were made by designer Billy Stickles [at least, that's how one of the the stories about his first shades goes; BS].

He decided to leave Florida for Seattle in 1947, forming the McSon trio (after guitarist, Gosady McGee, and Robinson), and soon started recording for the Down Beat label as the Maxim Trio with McKee and bassist Milton Garrett, achieving his first hit with Confession Blues in 1949. He joined Swing Time Records and under his own name (Ray Charles, to avoid being confused with boxer Sugar Ray Robinson) recorded two more hits, Baby, Let Me Hold Your Hand in 1951 and Kissa Me Baby in 1952. The following year, Ahmet Ertegun bought the Swing Time contract, and signed him to Atlantic Records.
Main source: here.

Ray Charles Contemplating Hillbilly Music In A 1959 Interview

This is quite an interesting, bluntly honest, interview with Ray Charles, from Billboard, 2 February 1959 (written by Ben Grevatt). The transcript:
"If I don't feel what I'm doing on a record, then I'd rather forget it. If an artist feels the song he's doing then he can do a great performance. The trouble is that a lot of singers do just what somebody else tells them to do on a recording session. They never feel it. So they don't make a good record." The great blues artist Ray Charles, was talking with us from Atlanta, GA, where he was doing a one-nighter.

"I guess you might say I'm influenced by gospel material. I love a good gospel song if it's really soulful. And if you love something, then it's bound to rub off on you a little. I'm a religious man. I don't go to church very often but if I can get up on a Sunday morning after playing a date and there's a Baptist church nearby, I go every chance I get. About the only records I buy myself are gospel records. I think Mahalia is the greatest and I like the Dixie Hummingbirds and the Harmonizing Four. But even in that field, just because they are singing gospel songs doesn't automatically make them good. From the blues and gospel songs to the classics there is good and bad. It has to be a fine song and the artist has to feel it or it's no good.
"It used to hurt me when rhythm and blues was considered bad music. It's unfair to call anything all bad. But rhythm and blues was scandalized. Then along came people like Elvis Presley, Pat Boone and Little Richard and they called it rock and roll and it was all right. To me when they got a couple of guitars together with a backbeat, that's rock and roll or rockabilly. Rhythm and blues is genuine, down-to-earth Negro music. Joe Turner is a real great rhythm and blues singer. Fats Domino used to be too, but they changed him around and tried to make him pop. That's nothing against Fats because he's a good friend of mine.
"There's good in every music like I said. Before anybody criticizes any kind of music, they ought to listen to it more. You don't make up your mind on just one or two hearings. I think a lot of the hillbilly music is wonderful stuff. When I was a kid in Greenville, Fla, I used to play piano in a hillbilly band. I liked it. I think I could do a good job with the right hillbilly song today. If you really have the ability, that's what counts. One of the best guitar men in this business is Chet Atkins and he's in the hillbilly field in Nashville.
"I think record companies often ruin good artists with songs that don't fit them. Nat Cole is great on his sweet stuff but I think they make a mistake when they try to record him in rock and roll. Harry Belafonte recorded my song "Hallelujah, I Love Her So," and man, I was very grateful and honored, but I don't really think that song fits him. His field is calypso and folk songs. If you ask me about Presley, I say it's hard to say what you think of a man who sells a million records. I guess you can't argue with the public. With the pop artists, well I can say that Jo Stafford just sings like nobody's business and there's nobody greater than Frank Sinatra.
"When you speak of the blues, well that's something else again. Of the white singers, there are very few who can really sing the blues. I heard a little girl, what was her name, Jo Ann Campbell, I think. She swings pretty nice. And there's another girl singer. I think her name is Connie Francis. She's got a real fine feel. She can do it. She has a little soul in her voice.
"I'd say the problem with any artist is very simple. If all artists would do what is really right for them and would feel within themselves what they are doing, they would stay up there longer. A new star is born every day, but it's always a question how long he will shine. But a true artist will be around for a long time."

Also read this post.