Ray Charles’s first Number One rhythm & blues recording, “I’ve Got a Woman” (recorded in 1954), is an obviously secular song based on gospel models, performed by Charles in a manner clearly related to gospel vocal stylings. Although black gospel music had been a long-term influence on aspects of secular “race” records and rhythm & blues, arguably nobody before Charles had brought the sacred and secular idioms into such a direct and intimate relationship; by the time of “Hallelujah I Love Her So” (Number Five R&B, 1956) he was expressing the connection in the song’s very title! Needless to say, some people were scandalized by this. The final portion of “What’d I Say,” in which Charles shouts and groans in call and response with a female chorus to produce music that simultaneously evokes a wild Southern Baptist service and the sounds of a very earthly sexual ecstasy, was banned on many radio stations in spite of the record’s status as a national hit.
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.
