This week SOTD is featuring songs about Tampa Bay. WMNF Song of the Day exists to promote new, live, and local music. Every weekday, SOTD brings you a new song and information about upcoming events. You can help WMNF by contributing to the WMNF Summer Fund Drive.
The WMNF Song of the Day for June 8, is “St. Pete Florida Blues” by Ray Charles.
Ray Charles’s rise to musical immortality is often told as a national story, but his ties to Tampa Bay/St. Petersburg area are a vital chapter in that narrative. Officially commended by the city of St. Petersburg, the city now observes Ray Charles Day each February 1st, honoring a local flavor whose life and career were shaped in the Sunshine State. In 1990 the University of South Florida awarded him an honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts.
Charles’s mother traveled to Georgia for his birth and then returned to Greenville, in the Florida Panhandle, where he was raised. He was not born blind but by age seven he had lost his sight to juvenile glaucoma. His mother then enrolled him at the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind in St. Augustine, where his musical talents were first recognized and cultivated.
Charles spent three years living in the St. Pete area and became a regular fixture at the Manhattan Casino on 22nd Street South, an area locally known as “the Deuces.” There he played with local groups including the Florida Playboys, the Mansi Harris Orchestra, and Charles Brantley and the Honeydrippers.
Charles’s wrote “St. Pete Florida Blues” inspired by a woman from a prominent Tampa family whom he loved. Her parents disapproved of their daughter dating a touring musician and the young couple at one point ran off to Miami. They later returned north and rented an apartment in West Tampa. In 1961, Charles performed that song for an integrated crowd of some 2,000 at St. Pete’s Campbell Park (now a St. Pete Regional Skatepark), a historically African American community venue. A reporter covering the event remarked that it was among the first times a performer had helped erase the boundary between black and white audiences there.
The Official Ray Charles website: https://raycharles.com/