Ray Charles

Ray Charles Robinson — blind from glaucoma by seven, orphaned at fifteen, schooled in classical piano and Florida roadhouse blues alike — spent his early career as a skilled imitator of Nat King Cole. The breakthrough came when he stopped separating his Saturday and Sunday inheritances: “I Got a Woman” (1954) set secular desire to the structure and fervor of a gospel song, complete with church piano and a congregation’s call and response from the band (Guralnick 1986).

Preachers called it sacrilege; the public called it irresistible. Through “Hallelujah I Love Her So,” “Drown in My Own Tears” and the ecstatic “What’d I Say” (1959), Charles built the template of soul — the gospel voice loosed on the world — that Sam Cooke, James Brown and Aretha Franklin would each take somewhere new.

Then he widened the frame again: Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music (1962), a Black soul singer claiming the hillbilly songbook at the height of the civil rights struggle, topped the pop charts for months. It was this site’s whole thesis pressed onto one LP: blues, gospel and country are siblings, and Ray Charles addressed them as family.