Ray Charles

Ray Charles is the first major studio album by Ray Charles, released in 1957 on Atlantic Records and produced by Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler, the album that established Charles as the defining voice of soul music by fusing gospel vocal technique with secular rhythm and blues subject matter, a synthesis that was considered theologically transgressive by the gospel community but commercially and artistically revolutionary in the broader popular music world. Charles wrote and arranged several tracks; the album includes 'The Sun's Gonna Shine Again,' 'Hallelujah I Love Her So,' 'What Would I Do Without You,' and 'I Found My Baby,' drawing on the blues and jump blues tradition that Charles had absorbed in Florida and Georgia in the late 1940s. The core innovation, applying the shouting, call-and-response, and bluesy ornamentation of church singing to explicitly romantic and secular content, was the direct invention of soul music as a genre and influenced every subsequent soul and R&B artist. Charles's piano playing, which combined the jazz vocabulary he had developed through his work with Lowell Fulson and The McSon Trio with the gospel organ-style approach he had absorbed from church music, gave the performances a rhythmic and harmonic sophistication that distinguished them from conventional R&B piano of the period. The album is the foundational document of soul music and stands as one of the most important albums in the history of American popular music.