The precise origins of rock’n’roll may be lost in a fog of competing claims, but few single incidents in the early history of modern popular music seem more significant than the night in November 1954 when Ray Charles and his band entered the studio of a college radio station in Atlanta, Georgia, to record a song called I Got a Woman.
In a single stroke Charles, who died on Thursday at the age of 73, had found the key to a blend of blues and gospel music whose power remains undimmed half a century later.
In that record, released a month later and in the charts by the new year, Charles fused the ecstatic call-and-response patterns of black gospel music with the raw sexuality of the blues. It was a combustible mixture which drew criticism from older African Americans, who resented the mingling of sacred forms with distinctly secular content but got an enthusiastic response from younger listeners, thrilled to encounter what seemed by a long way the most uninhibited music they had ever heard.
Charles had found a new way of making people dance, using the handclapping backbeat of gospel to create an urgent sound that swept America and laid the foundations for the arrival of soul music. Berry Gordy’s Motown artists, including Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, were indelibly marked by Charles’s innovations, as were Otis Redding and Rufus Thomas at Stax Records in Memphis.
Countless artists, black and white, were the recipients of Charles’s direct influence over the next 10 years. At the top of a very partial list would be Aretha Franklin, Bobby Bland and Al Green, followed at a distance by such young British singers of the 1960s as Georgie Fame, Van Morrison, Eric Burdon, Steve Winwood and Joe Cocker, most of whom tried — with varying degrees of success — to emulate a voice that could modulate from a gentle growl to a spirit-possessed scream.
Without question Charles was among the most significant of the leading influences on the generation of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, who, even when they were not engaged in direct imitation, implicitly understood and exploited the possibilities opened up by his pioneering success in fusing apparently diverse contemporary idioms.
Born Ray Charles Robinson on September 23 1930 to Aretha and Baily Robinson in Albany, Georgia, he grew up in Greenville, Florida.
From the age of about five his eyesight rapidly deteriorated, probably caused by juvenile glaucoma. By the time total blindness overcame him he was already showing signs of musical talent.
He was on the road before he had left his teens, dropping his surname in deference to the boxing champion Sugar Ray Robinson and leading a trio which copied the stylings of the popular singer and pianist Nat ”King” Cole, who had already discovered that a compromise with popular tastes would provide a better living than jazz, a form at which Charles was also adept but which was already losing its grip on audiences.
By the end of the 1940s Charles was moving around the United States and increasing the proportion of blues in his music, gradually evolving a neat, punchy style which placed his voice and piano in the setting of a small band. His early records, for small labels, gave only the barest hint of his potential, but by the time Ahmet Ertegun, the son of a Turkish diplomat, signed him to Atlantic Records in 1953, Charles was ready to unveil the style that made him famous.
With sympathetic production assistance from Ertegun and his lieutenant Jerry Wexler, Charles was soon making such outstanding records as Lonely Avenue, Mess Around, Greenbacks and It Should Have Been Me. From the late 1950s to the early 1970s his string of hit records lengthened and his audience gradually widening as black popular music took control of the mainstream.
With What’d I Say Pts 1 and 2, based on the 12-bar blues and an indelibly rousing electric piano riff, he raised the temperature of the gospel-driven style a couple of notches in 1959; an album called The Genius Sings the Blues demonstrated the range available within his self-created idiom.
Leaving the independent Atlantic label to sign with a major company, he recorded Georgia, a song written by Hoagy Carmichael 30 years earlier. It provided the first sign of his desire to broaden his audience still further, and it took the charts by storm in 1960. A year later Hit the Road, Jack returned to the gospel-blues style and gave Charles and his backing singers, the Raeletts, a worldwide hit.
In 1962 he released an album titled Modern Sounds in Country and Western, which produced one of his biggest successes in the form of I Can’t Stop Lovin’ You, a Nashville ballad that sounded intolerably glutinous to some of his earlier fans but earned him a new following.
At the peak of his success he expanded his band to 16 pieces, built his own recording studio and office block in Hollywood. After an arrest in 1964 on a charge of possessing heroin, for which he received a suspended sentence and agreed to undergo treatment, Charles settled in to a gentle creative decline.
He continued to tour the world, playing what he thought his well-heeled, middle-of-the-road audience wanted to hear and sometimes sharing the bill with artists who owed their careers to the inspiration that produced I Got a Woman and What’d I Say. – Guardian Unlimited Â