Long Player: Country music with a stroke of 'The Genius'

In 1962, Ray Charles decided to exercise a little of the artistic freedom he'd been promised on signing with ABC-Paramount Records.

In doing so, he set a ripple effect in motion that changed the musical landscape.

Few in the industry thought Charles' idea of recording an album of country songs was a good idea.

Not only was there a climate of high racial tension in the United States at the time, audiences on both sides of the soul/country fence saw the genres division in black and white.

But R&B singer Charles had tasted success on the pop charts since leaving Atlantic Records in 1959, scoring No 1 spots with Georgia On My Mind and Hit The Road Jack, and felt he'd earned the right to call the tune.

Together with producer Sid Feller he whittled a long list of potential songs down to an even dozen, settling on material made famous by the likes of Hank Williams, the Everly Brothers and Eddy Arnold.

Modern Sounds In Country And Western Music was a huge crossover success, topping the Billboard pop albums chart and delivering four charting singles, including No 1 hit I Can't Stop Loving You.

It introduced R&B's predominantly black audience to writers and performers they had previously shunned, and eased open the gates that had long held black performers back from commercial success in pop.

Most significantly, Charles had become the first black artist to oversee his own career milestone.

He controlled the material, the musicians, the production and the arrangements, right down to rewriting orchestra parts to give them his own spin.

The album's mix of jazzed-up, bluesy and schmaltzy covers has many highlights but nowhere does Charles' ability to imbue a song with the pangs of raw emotion show more than in You Don't Know Me and It Makes No Difference Now.

He soars, dips, groans and cries in the universal and colour-blind language of the heartbroken.

- By Jeff Harford