The first three years of my life I lived in an Italian neighborhood so that I really don’t remember much about those years – on Oak Street in Westerly. Then we moved to Pawcatuck, Connecticut – sometimes I call it Stonington, Connecticut, they’re connected, you know. I was three years old, my grandparents bought a farm in Connecticut, an 80 acre farm, and they had the whole deal, the cows, pigs, chickens, you know, selling milk and all that, but I was a little bit too young to remember those days, but those 80 acres got broken down into sublot divisions for family.
As I grew up, my aunt lived there, my uncle lived here – we didn’t have to drive to anything, picnics or whatever, it was a wonderful kind of way to grow up, the farmhouse being the focal point of the property – the red farm house on the hill where we had Sunday School and we all sang. It was a nice way to grow up and, musically speaking, as I was a kid. My two uncles on my mother’s side played guitar and bass and my brother played piano and my father was a vocal coach and piano teacher in the school systems. My mother sang jazz and they would rehearse at my home. When I was going to bed, I’d hear a band rehearsing down in the basement and it was my family band playing jazz tunes of the day – General Business I guess you’d call them. I could slip down during the week because they left their instruments set up down there and there’d be a big string bass, a piano and guitar and I would fiddle around with that stuff. In the 1940s, Ray’s uncles on his mother’s side, Tony Genese (top left) and Frank Genese (lower right), performed with a popular Country & Western band, The Roving Ramblers, associated with the Eddie Zack organization. So, my whole life I just played around with those instruments and heard my father give lessons.
That was also his studio where they rehearsed. I be sitting in there – he’d be babysitting me – and through osmosis picked up on his teachings of the voice which was great. And I’d see my brother – my brother was in the band. We play at the Knickerbocker in Westerly to this day, another place I grew up musically when I got a little older. Music, music, music everywhere! My father said he sang to me in the womb! That’s how early I was listening to the voice and all! I have a cassette tape of her singing there with her two brothers.
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