August 22, 2005 @ 12:39 pm

Sheila Raye Charles: R&B Royalty

by: Alyssa Rashbaum

As she prepares to release her second album, Ray of Love, Sheila took a moment to talk to VIBE.com about her experience being produced by her father, growing up the daughter of an icon, being hit on by her then-unknown to her brother in a nightclub, and why she almost called Jamie Foxx “Daddy.”

Is there anything about your style that is similar to your father’s style?

If I could say that there’s anything similar, it’s the ability to move people with my music. I think that we both have been given a natural talent to express ourselves and be very open about our emotions and the feeling that we have, through our music.

I never went to one [of my father’s] concerts where I didn’t shed a tear or laugh. He was so excellent at being able to express what he was trying to convey through his music to the audience. I’ve been told I have that same ability.

You released your first album in honor of your father shortly after he passed away. What were you doing in your career before that?

I was working. Still singing and doing another day job type of thing in sales. I just felt that I had already started putting the steps together to get this album out before my father passed. After that, the demand for people to want to share in the love that they had for him made me step the process up a little bit faster.

Your father had you come into the studio at one point and he produced you. Is this the album he worked on?

That particular album is still in my father’s archive and you know what happens when you have such a huge personality such as my father pass. There’s all the estate stuff. It’s still kind of in that process. So meanwhile, while I have something great in the archives, I rewrote some of the stuff and did a wonderful tribute to him. I wrote a song for him that’s on this new album that’s coming out. I just had to move forward with it.

Tell me about that song called “Daddy.”

When my father passed, it was so dramatic for all of us kids. We were so emotional about it because of the secretiveness that happened during the process of my father being ill. We had some issues with some of the management that was there because we weren’t able to get close to our father in his immediate days before passing. So the song is about how hard it was for us, for myself, to see him pass the way he did and not be able to express truly how much he meant to me, and letting the world know it’s hard when you have someone that you love so much in your life and once they’re gone you realize how great they really are. And that’s pretty much what the song talks about, just how wonderful he was to me as a father. How great he was in my eyes. And just to let the world know that’s how he was as a father as well as an artist.

It sounds like you had a really close relationship with him.

This is how it was: when you were with my father, it was like the most intimate, the most intense relationship that you could have with a parent. And because my father was so greatly busy, we had to hold on to those times until the next time we saw each other. I was as close to my father as any of his other children. He just loved the music and the music world. Music was who he was. He always used to say when I was coming up that if he had a place where he’d want to go, he’d like to go on stage. That was who he was. Music was his life. And so of course in terms of an everyday father/daughter relationship, we didn’t have that. But he didn’t have that with any of his kids because he was always gone. But like I said, when we were together he was so intense about his love for his children that you were able to run to those moments through the year when you didn’t get to see him and carry it through and the love remained in a very wonderful place.

What was it like when you were actually working in the studio with him?

The first day, it was so funny cause my dad was getting a little frustrated with me. He was like, “Now, baby, you gotta understand…” and I was like “I know!” That’s twice as bad because I want to please my father, my daddy, and I want to please Ray Charles, the genius of music. And I was so nervous, my knees just buckled, and I thought I was going to faint. It was so funny and my band members were laughing at me and saying “ok, calm down, pull it together. Obviously he respects you.” My father was known, in the music business, for being a perfectionist and if you didn’t have the juice, you couldn’t play for Ray Charles. So obviously he felt that I had enough talent to bring into his presence. Anybody couldn’t just get in there.

So I started remembering that and going ok, I am good enough, I can make this happen. It was pretty nerve-racking but we got it done and I can’t wait to get that out of the archives and share that with the world, because I am definitely the only child he’s ever produced. And so I’m really excited about that.

Are you close with your siblings?

We are just now getting close. My oldest brothers, Ray Jr., Bobby and David, I’ve gotten really close with them. There’s a really funny story that Bobby and I were talking about when we got to do a kind of memorial to my dad on the first year of his passing. Ten of the kids got together.

Bobby and I were talking about when we first met. We were both out and it was 18 and up night at the nightclub, The Red Onion. And he came up and he was flirting with me and it was so funny. He asked me to dance with him. I looked at him when the lights came on and I said, “Do you have a brother named David?” David was my father’s road manager and he looked so much like David. And he goes “yep.” And I go “oh my God, you better move a little bit further back over there. I’m your sister.” And he’s like “Oh my God, you’ve got to be kidding me!”

So we went to my dad’s office the next day and we were like “Dad, we can’t have this! You’ve got to introduce your kids! We’ll be marrying our brother or our sister!” It was kind of scary and I think it made him a little nervous and he let out one of those nervous laughs he has. Eventually we all got together but the thing about it is that was really… we laugh at it still. I mean Bobby was like “Eew, what if we would have kissed or something?!” But it was so funny.

Those are the kind of stories that are real-life things that happened and now we’re getting closer. My older sister Renee and I are really really close. And we’re all starting to come together. The world wanted us to feud. If you read the tabloids, we’re fighting like hell against each other. And that’s just not so. We’re of course all trying to get to know each other. It’s not like we’re best friends because we don’t know each other. We met each other for the first time last year at my father’s funeral. And so we all share one common bond and that’s that we loved our father very very much. And that’s all we know. We don’t have control of what grown people do. As his children, we feel like we have to stick together.

Are they all scattered across the country in terms of where they live?

They’re spread across the world. I have two in France. I have one in Detroit. I think six of them are all in California. I have one in Germany I think. We’re kind of spread out. And I’m here in Minnesota.

What was their reaction in terms of how supportive your father was of your music career specifically?

Everybody is super supportive and my younger sister Robyn who wants to sing too just wants me to mentor. She just thinks I’m the most fabulous thing walking on the planet and she says oh, big sis, support me, help me, teach me so I can be like you. And that’s the ultimate compliment to me. And of course, I’ll do everything that I can to help and just as my father did, hopefully the world will allow me to pave the way for the next generation to come up to share in my father’s legacy.

Your father once told one of your sisters to keep her day job. Why do you think he wouldn’t encourage her to hone her skills if she wanted to sing?

If there’s one thing that my father knew, probably above and beyond most people in the business, not just because he was a blind person but because he was a black blind man growing up in an era where the music business only had spot for African-American people and that was to use them to capitalize on whatever they could get from them. My father had a very hard time in the music business and went through a very tough time, even more so than what they depicted in the movie. Even from the stories he told us, I mean, my father had to go through a lot of pain and suffering. He was told himself to keep selling pencils on the corner. So he found that the music industry was very cruel. It still is to this day and he just didn’t want any of us kids to go through that type of pain, especially someone he felt didn’t have enough talent to really continue in the business. I think his blunt honesty might have stung for a little bit but in his mind, in the long run, it was going to save her much more pain than her trying to do something that she wasn’t able to do.

He put the rest of them through college provided they weren’t involved in music.

My father and the whole family, we thrived on education. I think because it was so hard for him to acquire that growing up in the situation he was in the Deep South, going through that type of situation being blind. The education for African-Americans wasn’t the same as it is today. My father really really wanted all of us kids to get as much education as we wanted or needed. He paid for our education as long as we were sincere about getting the education.

What did you think of the film Ray? Did you think it was an accurate portrayal?

I think there was a lot that was accurate and it’s just like anything else in film or TV – there might be a few things that were added or subtracted for whatever reason. As a whole, yes, it was right on. I was shocked at how deeply they went into his drug use because that was always something my father never talked to us kids about. It was kind of like he wanted to protect us from that story or maybe he just felt so bad about that period in his life. He said he wasn’t ashamed of it, but you could never get him to talk about it.

What did you think of Jamie Foxx’s portrayal of your father?

Myself and my sister said we didn’t know whether to call him dad or to call him Jamie. It’s scary. I’m telling you, it was so amazing, just the way he did his eyebrows, the way he had the little lisp on his tongue, he could get that whine in his voice when he talked. I was just amazed. He deserved five Oscars for that one. It would shock me if he ever did another role that would compare to that one of my father because it was the exact image of my dad.

The public viewing was held in a huge venue, the Staples Center. How did you feel about that?

First of all, and I don’t want to make too much of a comment on it, but as a child, do you want to see your father on public display or out like a piece of art? It was like they were revealing something that was a [archeological] discovery. And I understand that the world wants to see my father. But if he could have gotten up and kicked the person’s butt that made that happen, he would have done it because my father was super private. And he would have wanted the world to remember him with that big smile on his face behind that piano and on that stage, making the world a better place. Not the way he was portrayed in that casket. That would not have been his wish.

Do you, in your career, feel a responsibility to carry on the tradition of music? Do you feel pressured?

Of course there’s pressure. The pressure is more what I put on myself to try to strive to be as good of an artist as my father. I don’t know if that will ever happen. I don’t know if there will ever be any artist that will ever be as good as my father was. He was so great in so many ways, that my main thing is to concentrate on bringing joy, happiness, and a little blessing to someone’s life through my music. If I can do that then I have accomplished what my father paved the way for me to do.