Important and Intelligent

On a hillside above Franklin, North Carolina, a boy is told he will one day see the whole of God’s beautiful world — and he sets out to find it.

Kannapolis, North Carolina, October 2009. Inside the hall where the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame inducts its newest class, a room full of the state’s music royalty rises to its feet for a quiet, elegant man of eighty-two. More than sixty years in the record business sit behind that ovation, and for a moment the applause seems to gather all of it into a single sound. Almost no one in the room knows the whole story. Before the night is over, he will stand among the legends he spent a lifetime serving. It starts seventy years earlier, on a hillside.

The Hillside

In the summer of 1939, on a hillside above Franklin, North Carolina, a twelve-year-old boy looked out over valleys of dogwood and wildflower, listening for the sound of Sunday: gospel choirs, carried on the family radio. His name was Eddie Ray, one of eight children in a house loud with love — a house where the radio was always tuned to something, and where this particular boy was always the one sitting closest to it. His brothers and sisters teased him for it: always leaning closer to the set, tapping his foot, working out every word of every song until he had it cold, note for note. They had a name for him: the music man.

That morning, his mother climbed the hill to fetch him for breakfast. She stood beside him a while, looking out over everything he had ever known — the valleys, the wildflowers, the whole small and enormous world of Franklin — and told her son that one day he would leave this place. He would see the whole of God’s beautiful world. For a boy who had never once left the county, it sounded less like comfort than like a plan.

Cane River Valley

The hillside was not the only place shaping him. Just as often, young Eddie sat at his grandfather’s fireplace, roasting peanuts, listening. Matthew Ray had stood on an auction block as a boy in the Cane River Valley — enslaved, praying only that he would not be separated from his twin brother and sister. When the man who held them died, it was that man’s widow who went back to the same auction and bought the three children herself, so the family would not be scattered. Matthew Ray grew up to carry the mail by mule through frozen mountain winters, and to help lay the first brick of the county courthouse. By the fireside, in the warmth and the smell of roasting peanuts, he told all of it to a grandson who never tired of hearing it — the whole unlikely story of how the Rays came to stand on their own land.

It was out of that inheritance — the auction block behind him, the courthouse brick and the hillside ahead of him — that his mother, Grace, gave her son the words he would carry for the rest of his life:

You are important and intelligent, and you do not have to follow the crowd. But you must be nice to everyone, and respect their right to act as they choose.

His mother, Grace, to him, as a boy

It was, in its way, the same lesson the family had already been living for two generations: that a person’s worth was not anyone else’s to grant or take away.

Years later, Eddie would give a name to the way a life gets made. A tapestry, he called it — every person, every kindness, every hardship, a thread. On that hillside, in that house, at that fireplace, the first threads were already being laid, long before he had a word for what they would become.

Laurinburg

Then came the first of the odds he would spend the next sixty years beating. Franklin had no high school that would admit a Black child. So at sixteen, Eddie Ray stood at the bus stop outside the drugstore with a stack of books tied in twine and shook his father’s hand. It’s those extra few things you do that make you stand out, his father, Andrew Ray, told him — a lesson his son carried onto the bus that day and never once set down.

He worked the shade-tobacco fields of Connecticut to pay his way — long days under the cheesecloth tents growers strung up to soften the sun on the leaf — and saved what he could. Then he finished high school at the Laurinburg Institute, still in North Carolina but a world away from the hillside: a school built, in its way, to do what Franklin would not. It was the start of a pattern that would define the next sixty years of his life: when a door shut in his face, he found the field, the school, the train, the next door — whatever it took to keep moving toward the life his mother had promised him. It was the first door he had opened for himself. It would not be the last.

Fort Bragg

From Laurinburg, Eddie Ray tested into the Army Specialized Training Program — the Army’s elite track toward officer training — and it carried him to Howard University to study military science, geopolitics, and foreign languages, the education of a soldier being readied to lead other soldiers. Training then sent him to Fort Bragg, its barracks and drill fields spread across the North Carolina sandhills — back in the very state that had refused, only a few years before, to give him a high school. The Army never asked whether North Carolina would teach him. It only asked whether he could learn — and he could.

He was barely eighteen when an Army doctor, examining his eyes, found cataracts he had never known were there. The door to Officer Candidate School closed that same day. “Such a shame,” the doctor told him. “You would have made such a good officer.” It was the kind of door that, for another young man, might have stayed closed for good. Eddie Ray did not stop moving. He simply turned toward whatever door was next. The Army had given him geopolitics, foreign languages, and a hard lesson in how quickly a plan could change. He would need all three again before he was done.

A Train West

He chose his next city on the unlikeliest of cues: a Schlitz beer advertisement, the one about the beer that made Milwaukee famous. Providence, he liked to say afterward, was already at work. In Milwaukee he found the doorway to his life’s work: a stock boy’s job at Decca Records, hauling and shipping Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” out of the warehouse by the boxload, crate after crate, as if the whole country wanted a copy for itself. Some mornings, on his way in, he treated himself to a cup of coffee at the Hotel Schroeder, the grand hotel he passed on the street — thirty-five cents a cup, savored slowly, with a private promise that he would be back one day, on better terms.

Movieclips, via YouTube

Then, on a freezing November morning, he saw a magazine photograph of sunny California, and he knew. He took what little he had saved and boarded a train west, with almost nothing in his pocket and everything his mother had ever given him. The train ran for days through a country still catching its breath after the war, out across plains and deserts he had never seen in his life, mountains unlike his own mountains, until the land finally opened onto the Pacific light he had only known from a magazine page.

On December 21 — his nineteenth birthday — he wakes up in Los Angeles, in a hotel room on Fifth Street: broke, alone, and exactly where he is meant to be. The music man is on his way.