SIX

Shake, Rattle and Roll

With Jerry, things got better.”

—Ahmet Ertegun

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Although Herb Abramson was no longer a practicing dentist, the United States Army had paid for him to become one in return for a commitment to serve two years of active military duty. In February 1953, six years after he had completed his dental studies at New York University and just six months after his wife, Miriam, had given birth to a son, Abramson was ordered to report for service as a lieutenant in the Army Dental Corps in Germany. “When I left for the Army,” Abramson would later say, “Ahmet said to me, ‘I don’t know what we are going to do—after all, you used to supervise most of the sessions.’ I said, ‘Ahmet, you make three or four recording sessions entirely on your own, and even if each one bombs, by that time you will have learned enough to be confident in yourself.’ ”

By then, Ahmet had already spent enough time in the studio to know what he was doing. His real problem was to find someone who could function as Abramson had done on a daily basis at Atlantic for the past six years. Out late every night, Ahmet regularly showed up for work long after everyone else. As he would later recall, “Everyone was worried when Herb Abramson went in the army because I was not really a person who would come in the office at eight o’clock in the morning and start calling up distributors to pay their bills. It wasn’t my thing.”

While the departure of one of its founders could have well been the death knell for another independent record label, Ahmet managed to replace Abramson with a man who would help make Atlantic even more successful than either of its original partners could ever have imagined. A year before Abramson was called up for duty, he and Ahmet had asked Jerry Wexler to join Atlantic as a promotion man who would also run their publishing company.

A former staff writer at The Billboard, Wexler had demonstrated an unerring knack for favorably reviewing records that then became hits. After going to work for a music publisher, Wexler had further proven his music business acumen by bringing “Cry,” a huge hit for Johnnie Ray, and “Cold, Cold Heart,” a Hank Williams song that became a million-seller for Tony Bennett, to his friend Mitch Miller, the head of A&R at Columbia Records.

By the time he sat down with Ahmet and Abramson at Atlantic in 1952, Wexler had already decided what he really wanted to do was make records. Wexler, who knew both partners well and “considered them among the most cultured cognoscenti in the city,” told them he would not feel comfortable working for friends. When Ahmet asked what would make him comfortable, Wexler boldly replied, “Being your partner.” Wexler would later write he was not at all surprised when Ahmet laughed and rejected his proposal.

With Abramson about to begin his military service, Ahmet went to Paul Ackerman, the well-respected editor who had been Wexler’s “guru” at Billboard, for help in finding someone to join him at Atlantic. As Seymour Stein, the founder of Sire Records, who began working at Billboard when he was thirteen years old, later recalled, “Ackerman said, ‘There are a number of people I could recommend but there’s nobody better than Jerry Wexler.’ ”

A brilliant self-educated intellectual who never lost the guttural working-class accent of his youth, Gerald Wexler was born in New York City on January 10, 1917. After emigrating from Poland to America, his father, Harry, became a window washer who worked twelve hours a day at a job he hated for $4 a week. His mother, the former Elsa Spitz, was a formidable and eccentric figure who played piano, sang light opera, and wanted her son to write the Great American Novel.

Unlike his younger brother, Arthur, who joined the Communist Party and became “an ecstatic Marxist who followed Trotsky,” Wexler was “always a flaming progressive, just short of the red carrying card, which my mother was. She was a Communist. And so was my brother. I grew up with very left-wing socialist leanings but I balked at the point where I think all smart people did at being directed how to think and what kind of movies to watch and what kind of books were okay to read. I didn’t come close to toeing the party line. It was bullshit.”

As a boy growing up in Washington Heights in northern Manhattan, Wexler had spent most of his free time hanging out with the tough guys who frequented Artie Goodman’s pool hall on the corner of 181st Street and Bennett Avenue. Despite his mother’s insistence that he excel at his studies, Wexler had little use for school, often skipped classes, and soon acquired a reputation in his neighborhood as someone who never walked away from a fight.

While attending George Washington High School, Wexler saw Fletcher Henderson, Bix Beiderbecke, Jimmie Lunceford, Roy Eldridge, and Red Allen perform at the Savoy Ballroom and the Apollo in Harlem. Like his future partner at Atlantic, he became a passionate collector of jazz records, most of which he bought in Salvation Army depots and junk shops.

A recurrent college dropout, Wexler left City College after two semesters and then spent most of his only term at New York University in the pool hall. After his mother learned the tuition for out-of-state students was just $100 a term, she took him to enroll in the Kansas State College of Agriculture and Applied Science (now Kansas State University) in Manhattan, Kansas.

Forsaking his studies, Wexler frequently made the hundred-mile journey to Kansas City to see Big Joe Turner, Bennie Moten, and Andy Kirk and His Clouds of Joy. As one of Wexler’s professors wrote his mother, “Gerald is a young man of marked ability who is manifestly unable to integrate his own personality into the world. He is teacher’s pet, yet teachers loathe him for his intolerable habit of trying—and too often succeeding—to steal their show.”

After Wexler was asked to leave the school, his mother journeyed to Kansas to bring him home. On their way back to New York, she announced they would first be stopping off in Niagara Falls because, I’ve never had a honeymoon. This might be my only chance.” Years later when someone asked her about the “oedipal implications” of her relationship with her son, she said, “Freud, shmeud. I loved Gerald, but I never wanted to fuck him.”

Back in the city, Wexler joined his father in washing windows, a job he also thoroughly detested. He began hanging out at the Museum of Modern Art, where he watched foreign films and developed “an affinity for the Surrealists, particularly Magritte.” During a Sunday afternoon jam session on 52nd Street, then the center of the jazz world, he got high for the first time by smoking a joint rolled by Mezz Mezzrow, who had regularly come to Sunday lunch with Ahmet and his brother at the Turkish embassy in Washington.

Drafted into the army after marrying Shirley Kampf in 1941, Wexler embraced the discipline and forced routine of military life and was assigned to the military police as a customs guard. Returning to Kansas after he was discharged, he completed his studies for a degree in journalism and then returned to New York City.

In 1949, he was hired as a $75 a week cub reporter for Billboard where, in his words, “I was the only guy who knew how to use a semicolon.” When the magazine decided to change the name of its Race Records chart, Wexler threw out the term “rhythm and blues” and the name stuck. As he wrote later that year, “Rhythm and blues is a label more appropriate to more enlightened times.”

A powerfully built man with dark hair and jug handle ears who had the rough-and-ready look of a dockworker, Wexler let his wife, Shirley, negotiate his deal at Atlantic with Ahmet and Herb and Miriam Abramson “because she had more confidence in me than I had in myself.” In return for $2,063.25, Wexler received a 13 percent share in Atlantic Records and a weekly salary plus expenses that gave him a weekly draw of $300. Neatly defining what would become the nature of their relationship, Ahmet took the money Wexler had invested and used it as a down payment on a green Cadillac convertible. He then gave the only vehicle in which a real record man could be seen to Wexler to replace his aging Dodge.

On Wexler’s first day on the job, Miriam Abramson dumped the mail on his desk and he “fell into the role I would play for the next fifteen years—I ran the candy store. I got there early and I left late. I worried like crazy. I scrutinized bills, pored over details, supervised, and screamed when someone fucked up.” Constitutionally unable to delegate authority to anyone, he “operated with a divine disbelief in the competence of the staff. Consequently my modus operandi drove my employees nuts . . . My goals were short-range and limited: tactics always, strategy never.”

A human dynamo born with the kind of energy that sometimes verged on the manic, Wexler always felt he had something to prove to those who had preceded him at Atlantic. While he would later credit Jesse Stone for having taught him everything he knew “about our craft,” Wexler was also keenly aware that Stone “always looked on me as an interloper with a slightly jaundiced eye. Because I came in to take Herb Abramson’s place. I came in after him. He had already been part of the fabric of the company. I was a replacement.”

Like Ahmet, Wexler was also a walking encyclopedia of jazz and blues. While the two men shared an overwhelming passion for all forms of black roots music, they could not have been more different in the way they conducted their business. “If I was a plodder,” Wexler would later write, “Ahmet was an artist. He moved and managed by inspiration . . . He had phenomenal instincts, not simply as a talent scout but as a producer and songwriter as well . . . Fortunately, we complemented one another. Like a good rhythm section, we swung as a unit.”

In every sense, their brand-new partnership was a marriage of opposites. While Ahmet was always cool, Wexler burned with a red hot flame. Born with a sense of entitlement second to none, Ahmet made it seem he had nothing to prove and wanted only to have a good time. A true child of the Depression, Wexler saw the rain cloud lurking behind every brilliant ray of sunshine. Because his father had fallen short of making his own mark in the world, Wexler was driven by “ravening fear.” Ahmet was hip. Wexler was a hipster. And yet at Atlantic they soon became a perfectly matched pair, the record business equivalent of Mr. Inside and Mr. Outside.

In large part this was due to Ahmet’s ability to harness Wexler’s immense talent. Having grown up in thrall to his older brother, Ahmet had further refined his skill at playing the supporting role in the double act during his years with Herb Abramson. In Jerry Wexler, who was determined to make the best of his first real shot at success in the record business by outworking all his competitors even if this also meant working himself and others to distraction, Ahmet had found the perfect partner. With Jerry Wexler firmly ensconced in the chair where Herb Abramson had once sat, the label was ready to rock.

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When they went out on the road together for the first time to push Atlantic’s latest product by talking to disc jockeys, record retailers, and distributors in New Orleans and Chicago while looking for talent no one else had signed, Ahmet and Jerry Wexler discovered they had far more in common than their love for music and an overwhelming desire to make hits. As Wexler would later say, “We were very similar because we were both driven by a very heightened sense of irony. Irony prevailed. Discerning the ridiculous in the bourgeois around us and playing off that.”

Seven years older than Ahmet and married, Herb Abramson had always been a steadying influence on his junior partner whenever they had set off on such trips together. Unlike Abramson, Jerry Wexler was up for everything and not about to judge the man for whom he was now working, thereby freeing Ahmet to indulge in outrageous behavior on the road.

With money in their pockets and an insatiable appetite for having as much fun as humanly possible, Ahmet and Wexler amused themselves by goofing on everyone they met. Feeding off one another like a pair of seasoned actors who had seen too many Bob Hope and Bing Crosby road movies, they regularly put on what Wexler called “little playlets” in which Ahmet assumed the role of the fast-talking sharpie while Wexler played along as the unwitting stooge who could never quite grasp that his partner was robbing him blind in every possible way.

In a pawnbroker’s shop in New Orleans, a city where Wexler had never been before, Ahmet helped himself to a stack of twenty-dollar bills an inch at a time while generously telling his partner to do the same with a stack of singles, a routine inspired by a lengthy profile of the legendary playboy, gambler, and playwright Wilson Mizner in The New Yorker. Knowing they were smarter than anyone with whom they came into contact, Ahmet and Wexler believed they could get away with just about anything on the road.

Wherever the two men went, Ahmet always knew everyone who mattered and where to go to hear great music while having more than one cocktail to make the night pass more quickly. Even then, Ahmet could drink most men under the table. Although no one could keep up with Ahmet, Wexler did his best to try.

During their first visit to New Orleans, Wexler got so drunk one night at the legendary Dew Drop Inn that he could not make it back to the hotel and instead spent the night there with “two ‘Miss Fines’ to keep me warm.” When he stumbled downstairs in the morning, Wexler discovered Big Joe Turner eating breakfast in his undershirt with singers Smiley Lewis and Lloyd Price of “Stagger Lee” fame, who then went to the piano to accompany Turner as he sang. As Wexler would later say, “The road trips with Ahmet were like a total release. We were goofing on people and they had absolutely never seen white guys like us before. We used to have so much fun.”

While on the road together, the two men also somehow managed to get their business done, recording Turner, Professor Longhair, Guitar Slim, and Champion Jack Dupree in New Orleans and then cutting a Joe Turner session with Elmore James on guitar at the Chess Records studio on the South Side of Chicago on October 7, 1953. When Leonard and Phil Chess showed up that night, four of the reigning kings of the independent record business sat down together to talk like friends.

The sons of an itinerant Jewish shoemaker, Leonard and Phil Chess had been born in a Polish shtetl. Eleven years old when his family emigrated to America, Leonard had come up from the street in the roughest way imaginable. After working with his father as a junk dealer, he began running the Macomba Lounge in the tough Cottage Grove section of Chicago. To ensure no one would even think of trying to rob him when he left the bar with cash, Leonard bought himself a chrome-plated pearl-handled .44 revolver, which he strapped to his waist so it would be clearly visible. As he told his son Marshall, a gun in the pocket would “do you no good.”

Having been around black people his entire life, Leonard used the language of the street in a manner that caused some who had only ever spoken to him on the phone to assume he was black. Phil Chess, who was rounder and softer-looking than his older brother, was in many ways also easier to deal with than Leonard. “He was like Nesuhi,” Marshall Chess would say of his uncle. “Ahmet could not have done it without Nesuhi just like my father could not have done it without Phil.”

Although they were competitors, the Chess brothers and Ahmet and Wexler were also friends. Leonard regularly referred to them as “the New York Jews” and both men attended Marshall’s bar mitzvah. While the Chess brothers would sometimes help the partners at Atlantic by pressing copies of a big hit at one of their plants, the way in which they did business at their respective companies was completely different.

Running their label like the company store many of their artists had frequented as children while growing up dirt poor in the rural South, the Chess brothers gave their performers money and cars when their records hit big on the charts. They bought them clothing, paid their rent and legal and medical bills, and then deducted what they had spent from the artists’ royalties. Concerning the generous advances the brothers lavished on their most successful performers, Wexler would later say although he and Ahmet also “poured them out . . . we didn’t make their car payments . . . we didn’t pay their mortgages . . . we didn’t dress them. We were not lords of the manor.”

Wexler was also offended that the brothers sometimes referred to their artists as chaya,” which in Yiddish means “animals.” “The Chess brothers,” Wexler said, “did have a plantation mentality. You better believe it. Phil Chess once asked me, ‘Do you pay royalties on a continuous basis?’ I said, ‘Sure.’ He said, ‘We just cut them out after a while.’ ”

On the night they all sat down together in Chicago, Ahmet told Leonard Chess he had recently been listening to the radio as he drove through Atlanta but had not heard a single Chess record. Pulling over to the side of the road, Ahmet said he had called the deejay and said, “ ‘Listen, motherfucker, this is Chess Records. Have you got a wife and a family? You want ’em to live? Well you better start playin’ our records.’ That’s what I call promoting records. Now, what are you doing for Atlantic in Chicago?” Not realizing Ahmet was putting him on, Chess responded, “Come on, man, you didn’t! Now I got trouble in Atlanta.” As Wexler would later say, “Ahmet used to torture them with practical jokes.”

Wexler, who had far more in common with the Chess brothers than Ahmet, told Leonard he was crazy to have gone into business with Benny Goodman’s brothers Gene and Harry to set up Arc Music, thereby giving away half of his publishing company to them. Wexler offered to have Atlantic handle the Chess copyrights through Atlantic’s Progressive Music for a 15 percent share of the profits only to have Leonard dismiss the idea by saying, “I can’t bother with that.”

Throughout the course of their conversation that night, Ahmet continued to play the joker. When Leonard said he had made an agreement with Muddy Waters, whom Marshall Chess would later remember as having always been treated like a member of his family, to come over to the Chess house to do the gardening once his records stopped selling, Ahmet said he had cut a different deal with Big Joe Turner. “If his records don’t sell,” Ahmet said, “I can be his chauffeur.”

While varying stories about Muddy Waters doing manual labor for the Chess brothers have been disputed, Ahmet would later say that when he visited Chess Records, Leonard, who “was a good friend of mine, took me around. The office was a storefront and there was a receptionist when you walked into the office who had a phone and a typewriter. There was a fellow sweeping up. Leonard Chess introduced me to this guy. His name was Muddy Waters. He hired him part-time to do the cleaning in the office. He was also one of the artists. I said to Leonard Chess, ‘Where is your accounting department?’ He looked at me and said, ‘Accounting department? Oh, our accountant is that girl at the entrance.’ I said, ‘She’s the receptionist and she’s also answering the phone and she’s also typing your letters and she’s also the accountant?’ ‘Yeah,’ he said. When I asked him about royalties, he said, ‘Royalties?’ And he smiled and we didn’t go further into that. We were not run that way. Other independent labels were selling records for cash and didn’t even deny it. They were proud of it.”

I liked Leonard and I liked Phil,” Wexler recalled. “Were we on a different level? We were college graduates. They came over and rode a junk wagon with their father collecting bottles and rags. That was how they started. More power to them. Anybody that had any knowledge of who we were would realize that we were cut from different cloth from Leonard Chess and Herman Lubinsky and the Mesner brothers at Aladdin Records. We were head and shoulders above that.”

Unlike Ahmet and Wexler, Leonard and Phil Chess had gotten into the independent record business to make more money than they could have ever earned by running a bar. Although they had not grown up listening to black roots music, both men had a deep, instinctive feeling for the blues. The way in which they made their records was also entirely different from how the partners at Atlantic approached the process. As Wexler would later note, Leonard Chess would see Muddy Waters in a bar, take him into the studio, and tell him to play what he had played the night before.

In fact, Leonard Chess took a completely hands-on approach to making records. After Muddy Waters’ drummer could not get the beat right on a track, Leonard told him, “Get the fuck out of the way, I’ll do that,” and then sat down behind the drum kit to provide “a steady, serviceable thud.” Nor was he ever hesitant when it came to telling a performer how to sing. As Bo Diddley was about to cut his signature track, the eponymous “Bo Diddley,” Leonard ordered, “Motherfucker, sing like a man. The beat has got to move at all times.” Not surprisingly, Atlantic’s records never had the raw, gutbucket power that defined the Chess catalogue.

Far more than the Chess brothers, Ahmet and Wexler already understood the power of the media. Over the years, both men would do countless interviews in which they made it plain how much of a contribution they had made to the growth of the independent record business in America while creating some of the greatest music of all time.

Shortly before his death at the age of ninety-one in 2008, Wexler said, “It’s fashionable to present me as this street-wise kid stickball player from Washington Heights and Ahmet as the intellectual. That’s the big mistake. Because he came from the gilded palace and he was the son of the ambassador and I came from the street. Bullshit! I was a thousand times the intellectual that Ahmet was. I read a thousand times more books than he did. But that is not the public picture, is it? I was the street-wise kid. The street-wise kid was going home at night and reading Sherwood Anderson and listening to broadcasts of Fletcher Henderson.”

On the night these four men sat down together in Chicago to talk, Wexler was still completely in thrall to the man who was showing him the inside workings of the business in which they would both spend the rest of their lives. Insofar as the two new partners at Atlantic were concerned, everything was still, as Wexler himself might have said, completely copacetic.

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To stay in business, Atlantic had to sell sixty thousand singles a month and so Ahmet and Wexler often found themselves in the studio four nights a week. A hit record on the label would usually sell between 200,000 and 300,000 copies, but there were always far more misses than hits, and so the pressure to continue generating commercially successful material on a regular basis was unrelenting. As Wexler would later write, “We weren’t looking for canonization; we lusted for hits. Hits were the cash flow, the lifeblood, the heavenly ichor—the wherewithal of survival.”

Within the short space of nine months in 1954, Ahmet and Jerry Wexler cut two songs that became big hits and also changed the face of popular music. On February 15 in the Atlantic office, the partners recorded their first smash with Big Joe Turner, “The Boss of the Blues.”

Standing six foot two and weighing three hundred pounds, Joseph Vernon Turner Jr. was born on May 18, 1911, in Kansas City, Missouri. Leaving school at the age of fourteen, he began working as a cook and then a singing bartender in the clubs and bars on 12th Street in what was then a wide-open city run by “Boss” Tom Pendergast. In 1936, Turner performed in New York City for the first time on a bill with Benny Goodman and then appeared at the first of John Hammond’s legendary “From Spirituals to Swing” concerts at Carnegie Hall in 1938.

After performing on the first show Nesuhi and Ahmet put on in Washington, in 1945, Turner signed with National Records, where he was produced by Herb Abramson. A huge physical presence with a wide, soft face, sleepy eyes, and a neatly trimmed mustache, Turner was a blues shouter who could perform in a variety of genres, jazz, big band, jump blues, rhythm and blues, and what was about to become known as rock ’n’ roll.

Ahmet signed Big Joe Turner to the label in March 1951 after seeing him perform at the Apollo with the Count Basie band. Hurried in without a rehearsal as a last-minute replacement for the band’s ailing regular singer, Jimmy Rushing, Turner’s first performance turned out to be a disaster. As Ahmet later described the evening, “The Basie Band had intricate arrangements that were not exactly 12-bar blues. In between the blues, there would be maybe 18, 20, 24-bars. Joe couldn’t read music . . . So he was singing with the band, but he would come back in in the wrong place; and the band would clash with what he was doing. Then the band finished and he was still singing!”

The audience at the Apollo was known even then for being “the toughest and very critical—so at the end of this tragic moment for Joe, they started hooting, howling, jeering, and laughed him off the stage.” Rushing backstage to console Turner, Ahmet was told the singer had already left. Finding him in the bar of the Braddock Hotel next door, Ahmet told Turner he “shouldn’t be a sideman with an orchestra anyway; you’re a star in your own right—we want to make you a big star. Come and make records with us.”

A seasoned veteran who knew how the record business worked, Turner replied, “Okay, if you pay me money.” When Ahmet said he could come up with $500, Turner said, “Yeah, that’s good.” Quickly, Ahmet then added, “For four sides.” Turner, who always called Ahmet “cuz,” said, “All right, cuz. I’ll go with you and see what happens.” With Ahmet whispering the lyrics of a song he had written for him in his ear, Turner cut “Chains of Love” and then “Honey Hush” for Atlantic, both of which became R&B hits.

Jesse Stone would later say Herb Abramson had come to him before Turner’s session at Atlantic on February 15, 1954, to say he wanted to find an up-tempo blues number for Turner to sing for a change. As Abramson was then in the army, it must have been Ahmet who made the request. In Stone’s words, “I threw a bunch of phonetic phrases together—‘shake, rattle, and roll,’ ‘flip, flop, and fly’—and I came up with thirty or forty verses. Then I picked over them.”

Writing under the name Charles Calhoun, Stone came up with five verses and a chorus for “Shake, Rattle and Roll.” While the title describes someone about to roll a pair of dice from a cup, it was also widely understood to be a euphemism for sexual intercourse. The song itself became what writer Nick Tosches would later call “the perfect record” with lascivious lyrics that were not quite dirty enough to keep it from being played on the radio. Perfectly paced to the rocking beat, the chorus was so simple and infectious even a child could sing it.

With Stone on piano, Mickey “Guitar” Baker—later of Mickey and Sylvia fame—on guitar, Connie Kay on drums, Wilbur DeParis on trombone, and Sam “The Man” Taylor blowing a killer solo on tenor sax, “Shake, Rattle and Roll” was, as rock critic Greil Marcus would later write, “a story of domestic lust, lustful impatience, sexual wonder, and sex—grinding—that at once goes far beyond the salaciousness of the R&B hits of the time and is somehow as clean, healthy (and perhaps as dutiful) as hard work.” As Marcus also noted, it was the chorus that sold the song. If in “Shake, Rattle and Roll,” Big Joe Turner was “a great actor more than a great singer,” then Stone, Ahmet, and Wexler, who were wearing white shirts and black ties and clapping their hands as they shouted “their heads off behind him” gave it “a flashy, white, drunken frat-boy edge.”

Turner had cut twenty sides for Atlantic before making “Shake, Rattle and Roll,” but nothing he had ever done for the label compared to this record. Going to number one on the R&B charts after it was released in April, “Shake, Rattle and Roll” stayed there for eleven weeks. The song was then covered with sanitized lyrics by Bill Haley and the Comets on Decca. Released in July 1954, that version became the first rock ’n’ roll song to sell a million copies.

While the cover did not have the filthy groove and low-down funk of the original, it did open the ears of white teenagers across America to a sound they had never heard before. While the question of what was actually the first rock ’n’ roll song remains a source of debate among music historians and critics, “Shake, Rattle and Roll” ranks high on any list. Using the original lyrics, Elvis Presley also cut his own version of the song as a demo for Sam Phillips at Sun Records in 1955 and the song then became a hit for him as well. In time, “Shake, Rattle and Roll” would help launch Atlantic’s rise to the forefront of the independent record business. As Greil Marcus wrote, the record “still sounds like a door being flung open. But it doesn’t quite sound as if people have made it to the other side.”

Six months later under completely different circumstances, Ahmet and Wexler recorded another song that helped break down the barriers between black music and the white audience that was still learning to appreciate it. Before Ray Charles cut what would become his breakthrough hit on Atlantic, he had already recorded thirty-eight sides for the label without finding the distinctive sound on which he would base his career. As Paul Wexler, himself a record producer, would say of Ahmet and his father, “These guys were so attuned to black popular music at that point that they could hear the talent in its rawest form before even the talent knew what it wanted to do.”

Ray Charles had written what would become his first great song while lying in the backseat of a car rolling through Tennessee, Kentucky, and Indiana as he was touring with his band. Smoking cigarettes and marijuana, Charles heard a gospel song entitled “Jesus Is All the World to Me” on the radio and began singing along to it with trumpet player Renald Richard, who then wrote down the lyrics and added a bridge from another song.

Calling Ahmet and Wexler in New York, Charles asked if they would come to Atlanta, where he would be performing at the Royal Peacock Club at 186 Auburn Avenue in the black section of the city. Flying to Atlanta, the partners took a cab to the “very inexpensive motel that went with the club.” Saying, “I’ve got something you boys need to hear,” Charles suddenly took off down the stairs. Because the singer had already plotted out his route to the club, the partners had to struggle to keep up with him.

In an empty club in the middle of the afternoon, Charles’s seven-piece band was already onstage. As soon as Charles heard Ahmet and Wexler walk in behind him, he counted off “I Got a Woman” and the band tore into it. Ahmet and a “stunned” Wexler were deluged by what Wexler would call “an amazing succession of songs.” Both partners knew they needed to find a studio to record the material they had just heard.

Through Xenas Sears, a local R&B disc jockey, the partners booked studio time on November 18, 1954, at WGST, the Georgia Tech University radio station. Throughout the session, they had to stop recording every hour on the hour so the staff announcer could read the news. Making the situation more difficult, the station’s elderly engineer kept missing Ahmet’s frantic cues to adjust the microphones for solos and ensemble passages.

When Charles had recorded “Mess Around” in New York City nine months earlier, Wexler, who was then still coming onboard at Atlantic, had listened quietly without offering any input. During this session, Wexler’s “anxious stream of suggestions” irritated Charles. Despite the chaotic nature of the session, the partners cut four songs. While listening to playbacks of “I Got a Woman,” both Ahmet and Wexler felt certain they “had found Ray’s breakthrough smash at last.”

Released in December 1954, the record became Ray Charles’s first number one R&B hit. As Charles’s biographer Michael Lydon wrote, “The record blended elements like a hybrid flower. It had a dancing beat like a jump blues, but it was based on gospel’s ‘rise to glory’ chords, and the cheerful lyric, infectiously delivered by Ray, gave that mix a pop music gloss.” Charles repeated the phrase “I got a woman, way over town” so often during the song that the partners hoped it would become “a sing-along line people would plug nickels into jukeboxes to hear over and over again.”

For the first time in the history of popular music, an artist had blended the blues and gospel into a single song. By doing so, Ray Charles had taken a giant step in creating the new musical genre that would come to be known as “soul.” Concerning their session in Atlanta, Ahmet would later say, “It was a real lesson for me to see an artist of his stature at work.”

By now, Ahmet had formed a close personal relationship with Charles. A “quick mimic” who “played a mean game of checkers,” Charles’s incredible self-confidence allowed him to maneuver with consummate skill through a world he could not see. “Totally focused” on his own music, Charles always knew exactly what was going on around him and unlike many other musicians “followed the news on the radio and could talk about what was going on in the world.” In a manner Ahmet could never have anticipated, Ray Charles would eventually teach him more about the record business than any other artist.

In the short space of six months, Atlantic had released two songs that would define the future of the record business in America. “Shake, Rattle and Roll” helped begin rock ’n’ roll. “I Got a Woman” established soul. What the two songs had in common were Ahmet and Wexler. While even they knew there was always an element of luck involved in everything they did, the partners at Atlantic were now well on their way to becoming the greatest team in the history of the record business.