Nothing but the blind truth

When sounds hit longtime musician Vinny St. Marten’s eardrums, his brain turns them into colors and images. St. Marten was born with glaucoma, and lost his eyesight at age 7. That only enhanced his ability to visualize music.

“Visually, I have to see the story in my head,” he explained. “By understanding the story, I can then connect the words to the sound. I don’t have the distraction of eyesight, and for me it’s a blessing.”

St. Marten, 71, who formed his first musical group at age 13, starred in a performance called Soul of the Century: A Ray Charles Tribute Featuring Vinny St. Marten and the Seeing Eye Dog Band, at the Glen Cove Public Library on Feb. 12. Along with Ray Charles, his musical influences include Little Richard, James Brown and Big Joe Turner.

St. Marten is a lifelong resident of Glen Cove, and the youngest in a family of 16 children. He heard Ray Charles’s music for the first time when he was 11, and met him at Bell Sounds Studios in New York City in 1962.

“Every place that I have played and every venue where I have performed, Ray Charles has always been a part of the program,” St. Marten said. “I’m not pretending to be him. The Ray Charles show is my personal tribute to my musical hero.”

Elysa Sunshine, St. Marten’s friend and bandmate for 43 years, explained that a club owner he used to work with insisted that he create a tribute show following the release of the biopic “Ray” in 2004. They did their first tribute performance around 10 years ago.

“We didn’t create it to be like a jukebox presentation where we just played song after song,” Sunshine said. “We put it together like a show, where we spoke to the audience and we mixed between slow and fast songs. There’s an art to this.”

As a child, St. Marten played on pots, pans and anything he could get his hands on. His musical upbringing was influenced by his childhood experiences with race and prejudice. Growing up white during the Civil Rights era, he was taught to hate people of color. “I didn’t know any better,” he said. “I was a little blind kid listening to people say, ‘We hate black people.’ That’s the way I grew up.”

A classmate of St. Marten’s named Roy, who was black, helped him get around to his classes at Glen Cove High School. St. Marten had no idea that Roy was black until other friends told him. By that point, the two had become close friends, so race didn’t matter.

“My thinking started to change about all the stuff I heard throughout my life,” St. Marten said. “If I had my eyesight in those days, I wouldn’t have allowed myself to be friends with a black kid. That’s the gift of blindness.”

One of St. Marten’s best friends, a boy named Walter, had been born with a disfigured face. St. Marten was one of the only kids in his neighborhood who played with him. Walter even taught him to play stickball. After telling St. Marten to swing when he heard the ball bounce off the concrete, Walter would bounce the ball toward him. St. Marten was aware of the names that other kids called Walter, but that never affected their friendship.

“Walter was my soulmate,” he recalled. “Both Roy and Walter taught me so much about hate and prejudice, and that was because of my blindness.”

St. Marten has collected all of his life experiences in a live show called “The Blind Truth,” directed by playwright Fred Stroppel, in which he tells a theatrical story about a blind man who loves music. Squares of foam, placed strategically around the stage, allow St. Martin to safely walk around and interact with the audience. He believed that it was necessary to share his life story with as many people as possible, he said, because he saw it as something positive.

“I was compelled to look at my life and go over every painful step to realize that all these experiences, both good and bad, were collected in a mental basket,” St. Marten said. “I looked at all of those experiences as a puzzle of my life and what Jesus wanted for my life.”

St. Marten has performed around the world, in clubs and concert halls and at colleges. He has been married three times, and has five children and six grandchildren.

To this day, he still views his blindness as a gift. “I have never had one negative thought about being blind,” he said. “I was too busy following my dreams and living my life through music.”