Childhood. Ray was born on July 3, 1943. "Although born in Utah, I was raised in West Texas, where my father was a lawyer and my mother, an artist. I was the second of four children, and the family was fairly ordinary and very stable (even by 1950's standards). Both my mother and my older brother were classical pianists and I began studying piano at the age of 5 or 6."

"I remember being strongly affected at a very early age (2 or 3) by the music I heard at church. I was also influenced by the 'singing cowboy' movies I saw every Saturday (9 cents admission with a penny left over for gum): Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, the Sons of the Pioneers, and all that. When I was 11, I went to summer camp and discovered the ukulele, an instrument I felt immediately at home with."

Early training. Ray's classical training began very early with the piano. "When I turned 12, I asked my parents for a guitar (classical, of course) and shortly thereafter, I heard a recording of Adrés Segovia and was so moved (moved to tears in fact) that I knew what my life was going to be about."

Ray continues: "When I was a teenager, I wanted to be a great guitarist, a virtuoso, an impeccable soloist in other words; not because I wanted to be famous, but rather because the classical guitar seemed so beautiful to me that I couldn't stay away from it."

Though classical music was his first love, Ray, like everyone growing up in the Sixties, enjoyed rock and roll. "As a teenager in West Texas, I used to go to parties where the entertainment was Roy Orbison and his band. This was before Roy made it big." He also enjoyed and was musically influenced by another West Texas neighbor, Buddy Holly. Ray himself played rock and roll for a while (somewhere around the ages of 13-15), but did not pursue it, because he found classical music so much more interesting.

Training in Spain. At 18, Ray moved to Barcelona to study guitar with Eduardo Sainz de la Maza. "I studied classical guitar with Eduardo Sainz de la Maza in Barcelona for three years in the early 60's. I was 18 when I first went to Spain -- I had been through a year of college and was dissatisfied with my philosophy and psychology courses and had finally made up my mind about what I wanted to do. Eduardo was not merely a good teacher, he was a great teacher. I practiced 8 hours a day, saw him twice a week, and I covered a lot of ground in those three years. He was also a composer and I became increasingly interested in composition. I left Spain to return to the University of Texas in order to study composition and music theory." At age 21, Ray returned to Austin, where he spent the next three years studying composition at the University of Texas, and composing symphonic and chamber music, some of which was performed by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra.