29 July 2008
Ray Charles and Soul Music
Ray Charles provided the bridge from R&B to the later “soul” music
(The following is excerpted from the U.S. Department of State publication, American Popular Music.)
Even as Berry Gordy’s Motown recordings defined one stream of 1960s popular music, another hugely talented artist was defining the path that would lead to the “soul” music that appeared later that decade. Ray Charles was a constant presence on the rhythm & blues charts during the 1950s, but major crossover success eluded him until 1959. Charles was never interested in being typecast as a rock ’n’ roller, and he never consciously addressed his recordings to the teen market. As soon as he established himself as a mass-market artist with the blues-based and gospel-drenched “What’d I Say,” in 1959, he sought new worlds to conquer; his next record was a highly individual cover of Hank Snow’s 1950 hit “I’m Movin’ On,” one of the biggest country records of all time. Within a year, Charles had achieved his first Number One pop hit with his version of the old Tin Pan Alley standard “Georgia on My Mind.”
Charles was not the first artist to assay many different genres of American popular music, and he was only one of many to achieve crossover success. What is it then that made his career so distinctive, that made him such a universally admired pop musician – by audiences, critics, and other musicians – that the appellation “genius” has clung to his name for decades?
Part of it is the astounding range of talents Charles cultivated. He was a fine song-writer, having written many of his early rhythm & blues hits, including classics of the genre like “I’ve Got a Woman” and “Hallelujah I Love Her So.” He was a highly skilled arranger, as well as an exceptionally fine keyboard player who was fluent in jazz as well as mainstream pop idioms. And above all he was an outstanding vocalist, with a timbre so distinctive as to be instantly recognizable and an expressive intensity that, once heard, is difficult to forget. But this still is not the whole story. Charles’s most characteristic recordings are not only distinguished, individual statements but also unique and encompassing statements about American popular music style.
Although the term “soul music” would not enter the common vocabulary until the later 1960s, it is clearly soul music that Ray Charles was pioneering in his gospel-blues synthesis of the 1950s. He is now widely acknowledged as the first important soul artist, and his work proved an incalculable influence on James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield, Otis Redding, Sly Stone, and innumerable others. When Charles went on to record Tin Pan Alley and country material in the 1960s, far from leaving his soul stylings behind, he brought them along to help him forge new, wider-ranging, and arguably even braver combinations of styles.
[This article is excerpted from American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MP3 by Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman, published by Oxford University Press, copyright (2003, 2007), and offered in an abridged edition by the Bureau of International Information Programs.]
