Ray Charles Asked for His Masters. In 1959.

Ray Charles Robinson was born on September 23, 1930, in Albany, Georgia, and raised in Greenville, Florida, in a family so poor that he said later they were at the bottom of the ladder looking up at everybody else. Glaucoma took his sight by the time he was seven. His mother sent him to a school for the blind, where he learned to read music in Braille and write arrangements in his head.

Everybody knows the genius part. This is a story about the business part, because the business part is the lesson.

By 1959 Ray Charles was the biggest star at Atlantic Records. What'd I Say had just gone gold. Atlantic had made him, and he was grateful. Then ABC-Paramount came calling, and Ray did something almost nobody in the music business did in 1959. He did not just ask for more money. He asked for the tapes.

The deal he signed that fall gave him a 50,000 dollar advance, one of the highest royalty rates in the industry, the right to produce his own records, and a path to owning his master recordings outright after five years. The masters are the original recordings, the thing every future sale, every movie placement, every reissue flows from. Frank Sinatra did not own his. A blind Black man from Albany, Georgia, negotiated for his, and got them.

Ownership is only worth something if you use it. In 1960 he recorded Georgia on My Mind, and Georgia later made it the state song. In 1962 he did the thing his own label thought was crazy: he recorded Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, a Black R&B star singing Hank Williams and Don Gibson with strings and a choir. It went to number one on the pop chart and stayed there for weeks. I Can't Stop Loving You sold millions.