I was 14 years old when Ray [Charles] came to town from Florida. He wanted to get away from Florida and he asked a friend of his — because he had sight until he was seven — to take a string from Florida and get him as far away from Florida as he could get and boy, Lord knows, that’s Seattle! If you go any further you’re in Alaska and Russia! So Ray showed up, and he was, at 16 years old, and he was like — God! You know! He had an apartment, he had a record player, he had a girlfriend, two or three suits. When I first met him, you know, he’d invite me over to his place. I couldn’t believe it. He was fixing his record player. He’d shock himself because there were glass tubes in the back of the record player then, and the radio. And, I used to just sit around and say, “I can’t believe you’re 16 and you’ve got all this stuff going,” because he was like he was 30 then. He was like a brilliant old dude, you know. He knew how to arrange and everything. And he used to — taught me how to arrange in Braille, and the notes. He taught me what the notes were because he understood. He said, “A dotted eighth, a sixteenth, that’s a quarter note,” and so forth. And, I’d just struggle with it and just plowed through it.