Ray Charles - Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music

Ray Charles did something radical in 1962 with Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, carrying Nashville standards into a world of lush strings, big band swing and pure soul.

Having secured unusual creative control at ABC-Paramount, Charles chose to make a country album at a time when the genre was rarely associated with Black artists. Working with producer Sid Feller, he picked songs made famous by Hank Williams, Don Gibson, Eddy Arnold and the Everly Brothers, then reimagined them with orchestral and big band arrangements.

I Can't Stop Loving You is the album's towering moment, a slow, aching reading with a choir answering every line, and it became one of the biggest hits of his career. You Don't Know Me is just as heartbreaking, while Bye Bye Love opens the record with brassy, finger-snapping swagger and Born to Lose sighs over a bed of strings.

The arrangements alternate between big band sides and string-swept ballads, and Charles' voice rides both with total ease, finding the blues hiding inside these country songs and making every lyric sound lived in.

The album opened doors between genres that had long been kept apart, and its influence can still be heard across country and soul today. It sounds every bit as bold now as it did then.