PLATTSBURGH, N.Y. — Sheila Raye Charles, the daughter of singer-songwriter Ray Charles, is currently touring the country on her ‘Raye of Hope for Recovery Crusade.’ 

Charles travels both nationally and internationally in an initiative to address and educate about the impact of drug abuse and addiction, as well as her own relationship with Jesus Christ. 

One of the stops along her tour is in Plattsburgh for an annual Gospel festival. 

Though she and her husband will soon move to Vermont, she is content with the blessings on her life and loving on the people she meets while touring.

“It’s been what we were called to do,” said Charles, who just completed a sweep through Texas.

Sheila Raye Charles is the middle child of Ray Charles’ twelve children, born to Sandra Jean Betts. Ray Charles’ six sons and six daughters were born to 10 different women.

Born in Los Angeles, California she grew up between the West Coast and Cambridge, Ohio.

“Where my mother was born and raised,” she said.

Her parents’ meeting was a whirlwind courtship. The musical legend met the 19-year-old Ohio State University student in Cleveland, Ohio.

He was her first and last love.

Their daughter described her parents’ relationship as crazy, dysfunctional and never the white-picket-fence dream. 

“It was very confusing times,” Charles said. “My father came to see my mother and didn’t see me. It was very hard. Every little girl wants their father. The moments I had with him I treasured.”

At the age of 12, she was the youngest student accepted at the Maurice Allard Academy, a private performing arts school in Hollywood. 

“That was a monumental moment for me,” Charles said. “That’s when I first reunited with my father as well. Before that, we just had a phone relationship. Enough is enough. I want a relationship with my father.” 

When she went out to California, she had visions of walking hand-in-hand on the beach with her father.

“My father was one of the most famous people in the world, and I had to make an appointment,” Charles said.

“It sent a message. It wasn’t my father’s intention to hurt me. He never had a real father figure in his life.”

She got the opportunity to record with her father in 1986, who had forbade any of his 12 children to go into the industry where he was dubbed “The Genius of Soul.” 

“I was the only child he produced and recorded,” Charles said.

“He saw the talent and invited me to record. Nothing happened with it. That sent me on a spiral.”

Later, when she was on the road with The DeBarges, Jonathan Akry, Prince’s engineer, heard her perform and invited her to record at Paisley Park in Minneapolis.

Charles didn’t leave for more than two decades.

“The music industry back in those days was so cruel and so hard. It was a dog-eat-dog world. You never really see artists coming together like you see today. You saw it very rarely. Whoever was at the top of the chart, everyone was fighting to get there,” Charles said.

Charles did share one thing with her father: drug addiction. His drug of choice was heroin, hers crack cocaine.

“During my time in Minnesota, I went through some of the darkest times in my life,” Charles said. 

During that time she spent 22 years on crack cocaine, lost custody of her five children and spent three sentences in federal prison. 

She said she was sprawled on a concrete floor in a federal prison, when she called out to Jesus.

“I didn’t believe there was a way out,” Charles said. “My Lord and my Savior, my God, stepped in and did what I could not do for myself.”

She developed a relationship with God, not religion. The pain, darkness and shame lifted from her.

 “I grew up thinking the only people God would love was good people,” she said.

“That was the teaching that if you were a sinner, God could not love you. That is not true. God said in your weakness, my power is made perfect. You have a savior in times when you have fallen who will pick you back up. That’s what Christ came for.”

In 2003, she was released from Federal Prison Camp in Bryan, Texas.

“For the first time in 11 years, I was going back to try to talk to these women,” said Charles of her recent visit back to the camp.

“To go back to the place where the Lord told me I was going to be where I am today and more, to go back and share my story with those women how God changed my life in that prison, this is the most important message I have in my ministry.”

Robin Caudell, a reporter at The Press Republican, of Plattsburgh, New York, contributed to this story.