100 Best Albums Of All Time

01 Bye Bye Love

02 You Don’t Know Me

03 Half as Much

04 I Love You So Much It Hurts

05 Just a Little Lovin’ (Will Go a Long Way)

06 Born to Lose

07 Worried Mind

08 It Makes No Difference Now

09 You Win Again

10 Careless Love

11 I Can’t Stop Loving You

12 Hey, Good Lookin’

At the height of his fame as an R&B artist, Ray Charles announced that he was going to make a country music album. The executives at ABC-Paramount told him that the people who liked country music didn’t want to hear it sung by a black man and the people who liked his music didn’t like country.

In the 1950s Charles’ hits like ‘I Got a Woman?’ synthesised blues and gospel into soul music. By the end of that decade he was one of the biggest stars in the US. Frank Sinatra called him ‘the Genius’. But he had negotiated complete artistic control in his deal with Paramount (the first black artist to do so) and he could make whatever the hell record he liked.

According to sideman Marcus Belgrave, ‘Sid Feller told him, “You shouldn’t be doing this,” and Ray said, “this is the music that I love, I’m definitely going to be doing this”.’ While Elvis Presley was a little bit country and a little bit rock & roll, Charles brought soul to the whole Nashville experience, complete with massed strings and voices. Eddy Arnold’s ‘You Don’t Know Me’ took on a whole different nuance in the context of a racially charged America. ‘He used to give me the idea for an album – say country music and I’d dig up 40–50 songs in that category,’ said Feller. ‘Ray would select the songs he thought he could contribute something to, from those songs. It was mostly the lyrics that sold him … the story.’ The songs on Modern Sounds tended towards the same themes as the blues – love gone wrong. As Charles himself said, ‘The words to country songs are very earthy like the blues, very down. Country songs and the blues is like it is.’

On Modern Sounds the material ranged from the honky tonk style of Hank Williams’ ‘Careless Love’ and ‘Hey, Good Lookin’, to the pop/rockabilly of the Everly Brothers’ ‘Bye Bye Love’. Recording took only two sessions, the first from 5–7 February and a week later on the 15th in New York.

The centrepiece of the album and its biggest hit was Don Gibson’s countrypolitan ‘I Can’t Stop Loving You’, which had been recorded by Kitty Wells. Charles threw everything at it with a massive orchestration, the almost church-like swelling vocals from the Raelettes in the chorus and Charles’ own inimitable phrasing. The song went to #1 across the country and propelled the album up the charts. One distributor was quoted as saying, ‘the record is so hot that people who don’t even own record players are buying it’.

The social and political implications of a record crossing racial barriers are obvious. But the key to the album was in the title (from Sid Feller) – ‘Modern Sounds’. Charles took all of these songs and changed them substantially to make them his own. He broadened the emotional strictness of many and swung the tempos. After this album both country and R&B artists began to expand their palettes and the sound of music itself changed.

Ray Charles used to say that country and blues aren’t just cousins – they’re blood brothers. ‘Like I’ve always said, man, all my life I’ve always liked different kinds of music,’ said Charles. ‘If you’re a sportsman you like baseball, you like a little football, you might even care for golf … know what I mean? I’m a musician, man. I can play Beethoven, I can play Rachmaninov, I can play Chopin. Every now and then I play these things and I shock the hell out of people.’