COMING UP : SHE WAS THE CLASSIC MISTRESS OF THE MAN BEHIND A WORLD FAMOUS FASHION HOUSE...

I'll give you a clue... think luggage, purses, belts, shoes, accessories, all well made.

ARE YOU "KEPT? DO YOU ALSO WORK FOR INCOME? : MISSY ASKS YOU!

Do you work full time?  Part time?  Have your own business?  How much do you earn? How much a month is spent on you to Keep you?   Not that it's all about money.


Missy

GRAND PIANO

THE RAY CHARLES VIDEO MUSEUM - THE RAELETTES

RAY CHARLES VIDEO MUSEUM

The web site is quite an amazing effort! 

This photo is from the collection of Joel Dufour though I did find

the same photo elsewhere listed as under public domain.

Margie Hendrix is at the bottom.

AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN and MAN SHARING : IS IT MORE ACCEPTABLE than in the "WHITE" COMMUNITY?

How to phrase that question?
One of my friends says to call her BLACK, that "African-American" is passé.  But then there are Black people (or "people of color") all over the world and I'm one of those people who thinks everyone is a person of color and that no one is really White or Black if you look at the color wheel.  I guess I'm asking this question of or about women who consider themselves to be part of the Black community here in the United States since our history includes slavery (though frankly that would for me include Nkechi Amare Diallo, commonly known by her previous name Rachel Anne Dolezal, the now controversial American former civil rights activist and former African studies instructor. ... because I think our self identification is most important.  I'm going berserker on Doctor Phil for calling her a "race faker!"  Why doesn't anyone call our most famous transgender person Bruce/ a "gender faker?"  And as far as I'm concerned if she was doing a good job, she should never have been fired from the NAACP!)
But to get to the question, a friend of mine who is no doubt White but for a great great great great grandmother long ago in slave days, which she found out about doing genealogy, says that African American women have long been more used to man sharing.  She says there just are not enough African American men to go around.
This friend of mine has preferred Black men since high school even though that got her into all sorts of trouble with her parents. She not only thinks they are more physically attractive but that they are more respectful to her as a woman.  Everyone has the right to their own experience and what to make of it.  My friend has made an effort for her children to meet their half siblings and the other women in her ex's lives and has though personal study and experience learned a great deal about African art and culture. She also has a number of African American women friends.
My friend points out that proof of this is that many Black men have children with multiple women and that the women are just more generous in spirit to each other. 
Hmmm...


So now that you know where I'm coming from, what do you think?

RAY the BIOPIC - JAMIE FOXX wins OSCAR for BEST ACTOR

It's TRUE! Jamie Foxx does embody Ray Charles Robinson AKA Ray Charles. The story isn't exactly a bio-pic but it does first reveal that the young Ray Charles accepted being managed by an assertive woman who had him live with her and expected sexual satisfaction as part of the bargain. He doesn't seem to like that arrangement too much. When it comes to the Raelettes it shows his involvement with one other before MARGIE HENDRICKS; any woman who became sexual with Ray Charles had lots of competition. Ray tells them up front that the bargain is that he is not going to leave his (second) wife, "B", and his family.  But he is starting families elsewhere.  So when Margie becomes pregnant, she begs him to consider leaving his wife and being a family with her.  After all she's "MRS. RAY CHARLES ON THE ROAD."  Eventually, Margie decides to go solo and think of herself, but she's also acquired a heroin habit just like Ray, who will later say he had nothing to do with starting her up. Then he gets the call that Margie is dead.  She has overdosed.  He breaks down and cries.  This is when "B" offers to send money monthly for the care of the baby.  Ray is surprised she has known all along about Margie and the baby.  But she is surprised when he tells her he's been doing so all along.  This reveal moves high much she as a wife will accept of her husband, wise as she has been about a working musician on the road.



As the wife, "B" has most of the goodies.  First, she is publically acknowledged as his wife and mother of his children - his official family.  She gets to live in the massive and expensive home he buys them in Los Angeles, and since he also buys an office building for business, we can figure he's going to be around Los Angeles and her a bit more often.
Of course, the film doesn't focus on the romances of Ray Charles. It focuses on his hard upbringing, his childhood blindness, and the way he kept his promise to his mother than he will never become a charity case.  He is also credited with the then controversial move to combine gospel and soul.

MARCI SOTO DISCOVERED RAY HAD A HAREM LATE INTO THEIR YEARS LONG RELATIONSHIP

RAY CHARLES' had a harem, but Marci loved him first and found out second.
RIVERFRONTTIMES - MARCI SOTO on MEMOIR RAY and ME by Aimee Levitt


EXCERPT:
One August night in 1968, Charles announced on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson that he would be playing at the Cocoanut Grove nightclub in Los Angeles all week. Soto was living in New Orleans then. Her husband, Henry Soto, had turned out to be an alcoholic gangster with an abusive streak. As far as she was concerned, the marriage was over, though the divorce wouldn't come through for five more years. And now she knew exactly how to find the man she considered the love of her life. What did she have to lose? Within minutes, she had Joe Adams, Charles' manager, on the line and told him she wanted to speak to Ray.
"Will I do?" Adams asked.
"No, I'm sorry," she told him. "You sound very nice, but there are no substitutes for Ray."
When Adams asked her to send him a full-length photo of herself, it never occurred to her to ask why a blind man would need to know what she looked like. But it must have pleased somebody, because two weeks later, Charles himself called her up and invited her to meet him the following afternoon at his room in the Fontainebleau Hotel.

DECLARATION FOR MISTRESSES - Man Sharing

"I decide.  If I man share knowingly that is my decision."

A bit of a meditation on MAN SHARING.

Back in high school, young women were so determined to declared themselves one man women, and young men were so determined to have a "girlfriend," that having a ring on your finger from him was not only important, it was fairly easy to get.  All he needed was a generous allowance or a job at the Drive Through Burger Stand. Then off to the jewelry store in the mall he went.

These rings were called "going steady" rings or even "pre-engagement" rings, and people took the status they inferred fairly seriously.  These rings, by my way of thinking, were also, "We're having sex but we're serious" rings.  Without one, you might just be sleeping around.  It just wasn't in our experience or our surroundings, with everyone's parents married, to think past the "good girl / bad girl" dichotomy, which was very much in place as if it were - the 1950's - even if that was long ago.  Nobody wanted to be thought of as a bad girl.  Good girls had rings.

Yet, it seemed to me that, just as seriously, certain girls - OK - CHEERLEADERS - did a lot of "giving back" of rings to declare themselves free and ready for - another young man - another ring!

So, just about graduation and prom time, there was a young man from another school who asked me to the prom and I said no.  I had spent some time with him hanging out at his house playing Scrabble and at my house watching TV - with our parents in the next room - and yet he had started rumors about me, claiming we'd had sex.  What a jerk! 
So I said no to the prom and he then went and asked another young woman from my school.  She was acting a bit haughty about it but I didn't care.

Proms seemed to me to be from out of the past.  I just wanted to graduate and never turn back.

But, to go ahead with my story here, off to the prom she went, and from what I heard he wasn't a perfect gentleman and she regretted it.  And soon it emerged that this young man had not only gone to our prom, but the prom as his school, and the prom at yet a third school!  With three different dates. How he ever met three young women to even ask or how he ever even afforded to go, who knows. 

All three young women, sans rings, were upset and angry. They had some romantic notion of what a prom date meant. And they had unintentionally shared a man, if only for a short time.

A few years ago a woman who had been a hippie, which I was never, told me about her man sharing experience in the 1960's while she was in college.  She, and two other women found out they were all having sex with the same man, who was playing them all as if they were the Only One.  This was pre legal abortion, they all had contraception, but he did not and it could have gone wrong for any or all of them.  So they decided they would play him.

One by one they called him and told him they need to Talk.  Then each woman told the man that, shockingly, she was pregnant and that she had not been with anyone else.  It was mean but they thought it was hilarious when he quit college and joined the army.  One can imagine what one unintended pregnancy might mean to a college student - but three? This woman was laughing about it years later. Now since they were all hippies I imagined they would be into the "Free Love" of man sharing, but they were not.

So now it's 2017 and there are women who knowingly and willingly man share.  Some of these women move in and have a Triad, others are Secret Mistresses, some are Ex Wives who don't want to live with their ex husbands any more but still, sometimes they feel as close as they once always were and still have sex even though they know he has Other Women. There are just endless varieties of reasons why but women do man share -  including the real or perceived lack of men in the vicinity though it seems to me that on-line dating may have helped - and it's not always out of desperation. 

There's so much talk about man sharing.  I hear senior citizen women do it a lot.  They all do lunch with a certain man.  No one involved is trying to be Exclusive. 
Is Exclusive only for people who want to be Traditional and Get Married and Have Children?

I thought of all of this as I thought about Ray Charles and his women.

You have to DECIDE.  Is it what you want to do with your life for now, for always?

C 2017 Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot

RAY CHARLES on SUPPORTING WOMEN and CHILDREN

From his memoir BROTHER RAY:

"I always made it plain that I'd support the children.  I never denied being the father.  My friends told me the babies looked like I'd spit 'em out. And besides, what man - married or single - really knows?

On the other hand, I didn't believe in supporting the child and also setting up the mama in some luxurious crib with a Mercedes and two or three mink coats. No sir, that aint me.  She wouldn't starve and neither would the baby, but I didn't figure she was entitled to a life time of jewels and caviar." * on e-book 1801-1806

NOTES: RAY CHARLES was sued for paternity more than once. One woman in New York took him to court and he rented an apartment for her and their daughter on 97th and Central Park West and when he transferred all his business to Los Angeles, she transferred the suit to LA.  He lost.  Another woman in Ohio sued him for paternity, who also had a daughter with him.  This lady moved to LA.  His wife didn't make him "budge" even with all the embarrassment.  "I can't be blackmailed," he said.  Ray Charles thought that both women came to regret it.  "I pay what the court ordered and not a dime more."  He thought that they would end up with more by not making a fuss, that he was always there for emergencies. on e-book 1805-1820


Missy here: When another Mistress realizes how her man has been with other women and finds herself pregnant, well, is it any wonder why she might choose an abortion?

PLAYING THE KEYBOARD

RAY CHARLES THE MOST CREATIVE MUSICAL GIANT OF THIS GENERATION and the _++++RAELETTES SPE

The Raeletts were backup singers who toured with Ray Charles. 

I believe that Margie Hendrix closest to the bottom edge of the poster.  There was some change outs of Raeletts personell over time.  As the only mistress of Ray Charles revealed in the bio-pic Ray, until I began researching I believed he had one wife and one mistress.

RAY CHARLES and the RAELETTES - MARGIE HENDRIX and SEX ON THE ROAD TOURS

The early 1960's girl group Raelettes -Ray Charles' Touring Group. Margie Hendrix is the second from the left, and the featured singer. 

Margie wasn't the first or last background singer to be involved with her boss, the star of the show, and probably won't be the last.
Excerpts from Ray Charles own memoir BROTHER RAY read on Overdrive e-book:

"So I didn't - and don't - have a policy against hanky-panky among the girls and boys in the band.  How could I, as much as I loved to f-uck?  I'd look like a fool and I'd be a hypocrite.  The guys were adults and so were the women...  1279 -1280

HE SAYS HE DID HAVE SEX WITH RAELETTES.

"But I've never insisted that any woman sleep with me.  When sex happens between me and one of the Raelettes it happens naturally. It doesn't concern her pay or her music.  I never allow those two currents - lovemaking and music - to cross each other.
I'd never want to make love to a woman thinking the only reason she agrees is because I'm her boss. ... I have to feel she wants me as much as I want her...  1287-1288
I also have another personal sex policy.  If a girl's with another guy in the band, I leave her alone.  I don't want my cats thinking that I'm interfering with their business or their love life... 1289-1290

Finally everyone starts pairing off and the band gets hip to who belongs to who." 1293-1294

MARGIE HENDRIX in THE COOKIES

HEP CAT FOURTH OF JULY

RAY CHARLES LIKED TO CALL OTHER MEN "CATS"

so I thought this vintage image might be fun for the Fourth of July.

KING OF SOUL RAY CHARLES : TWO KNOWN MISTRESSES : MARGI HENDRIX and MARCIE SOTO

 

Ahhh Ray... We'll give you credit for two known Mistresses, MARGIE HENDRIX and MARCI SOTO...

Ray Charles was the blind Black American musician and singer with the megawatt smile who got called a genius and The King of Soul though he crossed over into other genres of music including, controversially, gospel.

MARGIE HENDRIX was in the Cookies, a girl group,

which was hired by Ray Charles to be his Raeletts, background singers.

A joke that went around was that Ray only hired women who "Let" him.

There were so many women in RAY CHARLES life, it's difficult to know but there may have been more Mistresses, and I don't mean those women who rolled through his life for a few minutes, hours, days, weeks... I mean those who had more of a relationship with this twice married man, who was reportedly stingy with the mothers but supported his many children.  He was married for twenty years to his second wife who he called "B." She may not have wanted him to bring the road home but she shared him a lot.

 

When Ray Charles died he left 12 known living children.  Those were the acknowledged.  Four of those were in marriage, the rest extramarital. (When his memoir "Brother Ray" was published in 1978 he admitted to 9.)  Each child reportedly got a half million in trust, and then reportedly the rest of his estate of about 100 million, went to his foundation RAY CHARLES FOUNDATION ORG . 
 

Ray admitted in his memoir that he co-wrote that he never used contraception himself.

 

When I watched the biopic RAY, for which actor JAMIE FOXX received the best actor Oscar back in 2005 for embodying Ray for film, a terrific film I just rewatched, one Mistress was revealed, MARGIE HENDRIX.  At the time I didn't realize that when it came to Ray, where there's smoke (an extramarital relationship) there was fire (lots of sex, some relationships.)  Of course films usually have to pack a lot in for a two hour sit, so every woman Ray had couldn't be included. Overall you got the impression he only liked Black women.

But I got the point. In the film his long time second wife, "B", is seen telling him she was no fool who appreciated that he was a traveling, working musician but not to bring the road into the family and home she was trying to create and keep for them. "B" rarely saw him, as he had promised his mother as a child that, though he became blind, he would never be a charity case, and the man was always traveling, always working.  "B" had three children with him, and lived with the children first in Dallas and then Los Angeles.

So let's start with MARGIE HENDRIX, pictured above in an album she was on, also known as Margie Hendricks, who became the featured singer of the Raelettes. I have to tell you that in that memoir, there are few women mentioned by name as mothers of his children, but Margie had one son with Ray, and when she finally left him to go out on her own, she left the child to be raised by her sister. Ray Charles was a long time heroin addict without apology and eventually Margie died of a heroin overdose, but he swore he was not the one who turned her onto the drug that using was her own doing.

You may be familiar with his performances, Ray typically suited up at the piano rocking time as many blind musicians do. The song I know as Ray Charles' is his version with the Raelettes of "Hit the Road Jack."  I've thought of that song as a woman's empowerment song but no longer.

 

Can't beat a memoir in which Ray Charles explains his attitudes and values when it comes to women and children with a co-author who updated after its 1978 publication, in 1992, 2003, 2004. 

Now, about MARCI SOTO. 

In his memoir Brother Ray, Ray Charles makes no mention of his long time mistress MARCI SOTO, as you can see on the cover of her memoir, a white woman. So she eventually wrote her own memoir about the thirty years she counted him in her life, with some time off.  Marci Soto, the mother of two daughters already, didn't bring a child into this world with Ray but did have an abortion without mentioning the pregnancy to him. Her place was home to him some of the time and he liked to hang out there, playing dad a bit to her children, in an ordinary, middle class white family atmosphere, and I do wish the film had revealed that.  One wonders how a person juggles all that work and travel with long term relationships, but a traveling man often has some good reasons and excuses for where he is and with who.

After a while, Marci thought it only fair that Ray Charles, known to be cheap,

 buy her a house. She helped herself to the cash money he carried with him during one of his visits.

 

SAINT LOUIS POST DISPATCH : KIRKWOOD WOMAN (MARCI SOTO) AFFAIR WITH RAY CHARLES

 

Marci did some interviews about their relationship when promoting her book. Until the book she was like most mistresses quiet about her life. She said that when she saw him wasting away with the liver cancer that killed him on television, she called him, devastated, and wondering if he was alone.  He said he would call to talk to her but never did before he died. 

EXCERPTED from the article linked to above...
It took Soto six years to write Ray & Me. She relied heavily on the 40 cassette tapes of conversations with Charles she'd recorded over the years. (He knew she was recording, she says, but he didn't care, just like he didn't care that she took pictures of him in his boxers.) Originally, she worked with a ghostwriter, but after they failed to interest any publishers in the project, Soto decided to finish on her own. "It was therapeutic," she says, "a way to get through Ray's death. I wanted to show people the Ray I knew, not the Ray in the movie."

 

This month I'll excerpt some telling parts of Ray's memoir about his attitude towards sex on the road, contraception, and women, and maybe by the end of the month, you'll have formed your own opinion.  Was he any different than, say, Mick Jagger?

 

C 2017 Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot All Rights Reserved

Note June 2021 Some photos have been removed and replaced.