\nHis eyewear of choices have always consisted of dark shaded lenses but the colour design could vary from black to brown or even clear frames and\u00a0are just as much synonymous with him as his music.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.selectspecs.com\/x-fashion-lifestyle\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/2017\/02\/Ray_Charles_1968-1-1.jpg\")
<\/a>He was born Ray Charles Robinson in 1930 , to a strict mother and father in Albany Georgia in the southern states in the U.S. during the worldwide economic depression. From an early age he had shown an interest in music but this would be tested because of the many challenges\u00a0growing up\u00a0 such as being black, poor and in a racially segregated\u00a0society. He witnessed the death of his sibling through drowning, the death of his father in his childhood and the defining moment in his life which was losing his sight at just seven years old.<\/p>\n
Despite his disability his mother was determined for Ray to become self-sufficient\u00a0by\u00a0making sure he did all of his household chores and by sending him to a special school for the blind in Florida where Ray would learn reading and writing in braille as well as learning\u00a0other instruments along with the piano such as the\u00a0Saxophone, Clarinet and the Organ but shortly after this his mother would die also when Ray was just 15, leaving him orphaned.<\/p>\n
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However this\u00a0only made him even determined to make a success of his life and by his late teens he was already touring with a band and learning his craft trying to copy Nat King Coles style before eventually developing his own style of Soul Music.<\/p>\n
Ray found fame in the early fifties with R’n’b hits such as “I got a woman” “Hit the road jack” and later on with crossover success with “I cant stop loving you” which were just three of a many top ten hit singles and albums both in the R’n’B and Pop charts. But with the money which came with success came an increasing addiction to drugs which at one point got so bad it\u00a0would later see him arrested and put in jail but\u00a0Ray showed the same determination he had shown all of his life\u00a0to get off drugs and remain clean.<\/p>\n After the chart successes of the fifties and sixties his popularly diminished during the seventies however by the\u00a0eighties he\u00a0was introduced to a new audience with his appearance\u00a0in the hit film the Blues Brothers in 1980, as well \u00a0as being a major contributor the USA for Africa song “We are the world” in 1985.<\/p>\n Throughout the\u00a0nineties and early 2000’s he\u00a0continued preforming to sold out\u00a0crowds (despite failing health), until his death\u00a0in 2004 at the age of 73 just before the release of the film “Ray”\u00a0which starred Jamie Foxx and whose critically acclaimed performance won him an Oscar at\u00a0the Academy Awards the following year and because of which helped\u00a0develop a new level of \u00a0interest in the music of Ray Charles. The winner of numerous accolades during his lifetime, Ray Charles was one of the very first artists to be inducted into the Rock and Roll hall of fame and has a star on the Hollywood <\/a>walk of fame.<\/p>\n These Persol <\/strong>glasses come in three different coloured\u00a0polarised lenses\u00a0such as Havana Crystal Green (below)<\/i>, Havana Crystal Brown and Black Crystal Grey\u00a0and which look very\u00a0similar to the ones Ray Charles wore in the featured image above.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/a>