Overview
Objectives
- Examine some of the musical characteristics of the earliest rock and roll hits and how these musical genres relate to earlier genres studied in the previous lessons such as blues, gospel music, rhythm and blues, and hillbilly music
- Describe the technological changes and its impact in the music industry
- Examine the influence of disc jockey Alan Freed
- Identify various rhythm and blues artists
- Examine some of the ways that white artists modified the music of black artists in their cover versions
Ray Charles and the Gospel Side of Rock and Roll
One of the first artists to move freely between gospel music and rhythm and blues and achieve commercial success was Ray Charles. Ray Charles lost his sight at age seven to a rare form of childhood glaucoma. He studied music in Florida at the St. Augustine School for the Blind, and he learned to read and write music in Braille. When his parents died, he left school at age sixteen to make it on his own as a musician. Wrapping the sounds and rhythms of black gospel music around traditional secular lyrics made Ray Charles one of the most influential musicians of the twentieth century. He used jazz-style horn riffs in many of his arrangements. He was among the first musicians to use the Fender Rhodes electric piano.
He joined a hillbilly band for a short time and learned how to yodel. He formed a female backup group called the Raelets, and they served as the model for later girl groups such as the Supremes. Everything he did was charged with electrical energy and emotional intensity. Charles had a strong and unmistakable style of his own—a raspy, passionate, gospel-soaked, oratorical delivery that turned every song into an emotional event.
In 1952, Charles signed with Atlantic and began recording songs that freely blended gospel with rhythm and blues. Although some listeners were shocked at Charles’s combination of sacred and secular genres into this new style of gospel blues, he saw no reason to separate the two styles of music. In his autobiography, he wrote, "I’d been singing spirituals since I was three, and I’d been hearing the blues for just as long. So, what could be more natural than to combine them?" Charles’s combinations often took the form of adapting the melodies and lyrics of gospel songs into electrifying rhythm and blues numbers. He converted "Talkin’ ‘bout Jesus" to "Talkin’ ‘bout You ♫" and "I Got a Savior" to "I Got a Woman ♫." "This Little Light of Mine" became "This Little Girl of Mine ♫."
In "I Got a Woman" (1954), Charles adapted the lyrics of the gospel song "I Got a Savior" and borrowed the melody and harmonic progressions from the Southern Tones’ gospel recording "It Must Be Jesus ♫." Charles turned up the volume on his gospel sources, adding electric instruments, secular lyrics, and a high-energy performing style. Charles has sometimes been called the greatest gospel singer alive, but he actually never recorded a straightforward gospel song. This hybridity of gospel and rhythm and blues is nowhere more apparent than in "What’d I Say ♫" from 1959, complete with moaning that treads the line between religious ecstasy and sexual delight. The frenzied music that builds to a fever pitch would be right at home in a religious service, and the groaned call and response passages between Charles and his backup singers are just as suited to a rhythm and blues recording as they are in a gospel song.
"Ray Charles was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1981, and was one of the first inductees to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1986."
