Ingredients in a Recipe for Soul

Ingredients in a Recipe for Soul is a studio album by Ray Charles, released in September 1963 on ABC-Paramount Records and produced by Sid Feller, a return to the soul and gospel territory of Charles's Atlantic period after the two country-and-western volumes, with material that draws on the Baptist hymn and spiritual tradition alongside secular material, organized around the metaphor of cooking as spiritual practice. Charles did not write the majority of the tracks; the album includes 'Busted' (Harlan Howard, the same song appearing simultaneously on Johnny Cash's Blood, Sweat and Tears), 'That Lucky Old Sun,' 'Of Man River,' and 'In the Evening (When the Sun Goes Down).' 'Busted' reached number four on the Billboard Hot 100 and the album itself reached the top ten on the Pop Albums chart, demonstrating that Charles's post-Modern Sounds commercial standing was sufficiently strong to sustain albums in any of his three primary genres, soul, jazz, and country, at comparable commercial levels. The album is regarded as one of the more consistent expressions of Charles's mature soul-gospel approach and one of the cleaner statements of the recipe-as-spiritual-metaphor framework that structured his ABC-Paramount period. The album's commercial success in the year following the two Modern Sounds volumes confirmed that Charles's audience was sufficiently large and diversified to support him across multiple genre categories simultaneously, a commercial range that no other American popular artist of the period, with the possible exception of Frank Sinatra, had demonstrated with comparable consistency.