The house, at the corner of Eugene and Myrtle streets in South Dallas, looks better than it did last time I drove past, a little less than a year ago. It's sealed up now, its white-framed windows and bright-white doors closed tight. It's been repainted slate blue. Neighbors says workers come by every so often to check on the place, mow the lawn.

The house, a legend's residence when he was still a mere mortal, is empty. Has been for years.

"It's been vacant the whole time I've owned it," said Mark Ellis, who closed on 2642 Eugene St. just before New Year's 2017. "It's a shell."

Ellis told me Thursday he bought the house to repair then rent, one of many properties he owns in South Dallas. "My part-time hobby business," he said. Ellis picked up this one for almost nothing — "not much over $10,000," he said, "a steal." The Dallas Central Appraisal District says that's about right: The house is worth about $14,000; the land, slightly less than half that.

When be bought the bungalow on Eugene, Ellis had no idea Ray Charles had once lived there — yes, Ray Charles, that Ray Charles.

Charles lived there from around 1955 to '58. He lived there as he was assembling his band, finding his sound, flirting with fame, ascending the charts. Ellis found out only later, from a colleague, that 2642 Eugene was where Charles lived with wife Della Beatrice Howard and their first child, Ray Jr. "Our little house on 2642 Eugene Street," Charles called it.

"And I thought, 'How neat,'" Ellis said. "And then I thought, 'What's the right way to handle it?'"

I've been to the house many times — taken friends during tours, stopped by when in the neighborhood. But till this week I'd never looked to see who owned the house tucked away on a South Dallas corner, across from a bright-orange food mart one block off Malcolm X Boulevard. DCAD records show it has changed hands no less than six times in the last 20 years — just another disposable commodity in a neighborhood whose rich, deep history is forever imperiled. I called Ellis because he was last on the long list.

Ray Charles, around the time he lived in South Dallas (Hulton Archive / Getty Images)

"After I realized it was Ray Charles' house, I wanted to reserve it for some special treatment," Ellis told me. "I haven't figured out what I want to do."

Charles' old house is not a Dallas landmark. But that is not surprising. It is the exhausting lament: This city has turned a deaf ear to its rich musical heritage.

Ray Charles has been on my mind of late: Following Aretha Franklin's death two weeks ago, video of her and Charles' 15-minute performance of "Spirit in the Dark," captured at the Fillmore West in 1971, burned through my Twitter feed. That sent me back to my Aretha Franklin boxed sets; and then, because I've never been able to avoid rabbit holes, the Ray Charles collection Genius & Soul, whose thick book of remember-whens talks about his days in Dallas.

He lived first in the Green Acres Court motel off Ross Avenue, which was erased only last year. In Brother Ray, his autobiography, Charles said he moved to Dallas because "I knew the town and I dug it." He played the Empire Ballroom on Hall Street, around the corner from the Green Acres, and later jammed with the jazzers at the American Woodman Hall half a mile down old Oakland Avenue.

Here he assembled a band of hard-bop jazzers, among them tenor sax great David "Fathead" Newman — because "hard-core jazz musicians can play anything," Charles told biographer and Dallas native David Ritz in the Genius & Soul liner notes. Charles' time in Dallas defined everything that came next — songs like "I've Got a Woman," "What I'd Say Parts I & II" and "Come Back Baby." Aretha Franklin said the latter "was the most soulful thing I had ever heard," outside of her own father's voice in church.

"Ray Charles's stay in Dallas was seminal to his early career," said Ritz, the Thomas Jefferson High School graduate who collaborated with Charles on 1978's Brother Ray. "It was there where he cultivated many of the musicians and much of the music that would shape his career. 'Because Dallas didn't have the hurry-up stress of New York or L.A.,' he once said, 'I could kick back and figure out what I wanted to play and how I wanted to play it.'"

Ellis said he's hoping to find old photos of 2642 Eugene so he can make it "time-period correct." He said he might one day consider having it declared a local landmark. Or a museum.

"That would be a good idea — fix it up, put a fence around it."

That's Michael Wofford talking. He's 65. Grew up on Eugene, four houses down from where Ray Charles lived. I ran into him Friday morning. Wofford was sitting across the street, waiting for the food mart to open. He said people come by all the time, in tour buses and on bicycles, taking pictures of the house where Ray Charles found his voice.

"It's just sitting there, going in the ground," Wofford said, shaking his head. "Put some of his old pictures in there, let people come, walk through it. You tell that guy, he can go ahead on and turn it into something like that. It would be appreciated. It really would be."