For Fans of Ray Charles

When Ray Charles released 'Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music' in 1962, country radio stations refused to play it and country fans bought it by the millions anyway. He took Hank Williams and Don Gibson songs and sang them with the full weight of Black Southern gospel, exposing the common heartache underneath what had been treated as segregated musical traditions. The result did not sound like country and it did not sound like R&B. It sounded like America, undivided.

Taylor Hackford's 2004 film 'Ray' succeeded where most music biopics stumble because Jamie Foxx did not impersonate Ray Charles so much as inhabit the internal logic of the man. The film does not airbrush the addiction or the infidelities; it treats them as part of the same relentless drive that made the music extraordinary. Foxx's physical performance, especially the way he rendered Charles's relationship to sound, earned every frame of that Academy Award.

Most genres have a founding document that critics agree on in retrospect. 'What'd I Say,' recorded more or less live in a single 1959 session, is unusual in that people recognized it immediately. Ray and his band had run out of material at a dance and he improvised a call-and-response groove with the Raelettes that pushed the crowd toward something close to a revival meeting. The Atlantic Records executives who heard the tape knew it was something new. So did everyone who bought it.