Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music

Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music is a studio album by Ray Charles, released in April 1962 on ABC-Paramount Records and produced by Sid Feller, one of the most commercially successful and artistically significant albums of Charles's career, and the record that brought country music into the soul and pop mainstream by stripping away its regional and racial categorization and demonstrating that the emotional directness of the best country songwriting was universally accessible. Charles did not write the material; he selected 12 songs from the Nashville catalog, Hank Williams's 'Hey Good Lookin',' Don Gibson's 'I Can't Stop Loving You,' and Floyd Tillman's 'It Makes No Difference Now' among the principal tracks, and recorded them with full orchestral arrangements by Marty Paich and Gerald Wilson that replaced the country instrumentation with strings, brass, and the rhythmic vocabulary of soul. 'I Can't Stop Loving You' spent five weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and spent ten weeks at number one on the R&B chart simultaneously, the most commercially dominant single of Charles's career, and the album itself spent 14 weeks at number one on the Billboard Pop Albums chart. Modern Sounds sold over three million copies in its first year and is credited with making country music commercially acceptable to Black and urban audiences for the first time, and with accelerating the crossover of Nashville songwriting into the pop mainstream. The album has been certified double platinum in the United States and remains the foundational document of the country-soul crossover tradition.