Episode seventy-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "What'd I Say" by Ray Charles, and at Charles' career in jazz, soul, and country. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.
Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Sea of Love" by Phil Phillips.
Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/

Erratum
I refer to the original lineup of the Raelettes as a trio, and as a result miss out Darlene McRae, the fourth member of the group.
Resources
There's no Mixcloud this week, as twelve of the fourteen tracks here are by Ray Charles, and Mixcloud has limits on how many songs by one artist one can include.
I've used two sources for the information here --  Charles' autobiography, Brother Ray, which gives a very clear view of his character, possibly not always in the ways he intended, and Ray Charles: The Birth of Soul by Mike Evans.
There are three collections of Ray Charles' work that everyone should own, and which cover the music in this podcast. The Complete Swing Time and Atlantic Recordings is a seven-CD set which contains everything up to 1959, The Complete ABC Years 1959-1961 is a three-CD set covering the next phase of his career, and Modern Sounds in Country & Western Vols 1& 2 is a single CD with those two albums on.
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Transcript
When we last left Ray Charles, he had just had a run of hits at Atlantic records, including several of the songs that became the foundation of soul music. But as I mentioned at the end of that episode, after that run of hits, he hit a dry spell, and for a few years he was releasing records like "Swanee River Rock", which were hardly up to the standards of his best work. After his first single of 1957, "Ain't That Love", which made the top ten on the R&B chart, most of his singles didn't chart at all for the next two years, with some bobbling around at the bottom of the R&B top twenty.
He was having a tough time in his life, too. He was addicted to heroin, he had a small child, and he was playing night after night in third-class venues. At one point, several members of the band, including Charles himself, had been arrested for heroin use, and Charles had had to pay a bribe of six thousand dollars to get the charges dropped -- he'd been let out of jail before the rest of the band, and had to record his hit "Hallelujah, I Love Her So" with session musicians rather than his regular band:
[Excerpt: Ray Charles, "Hallelujah, I Love Her So"]
Most of the places he was playing were bad in other ways. Many were filthy -- he sometimes had to rent hotel rooms to get changed in because the dressing rooms were unusably dirty -- and in those days before portable keyboard instruments became commonplace, he had to make do with whatever pianos were at the venues. He would talk later about how some were so badly out of tune that he'd have to play in C sharp while the rest of the band were in C, just so he could be something like in the same key as them.
This did improve his musicianship, though -- he had to learn to play in keys that most musicians would normally avoid, and he became a much more fluent pianist. But he ended up taking an electric piano with him on the road, so he could be sure it would always be in tune. Other musicians would make fun of him for this, as the electric piano was regarded at the time as a novelty instrument, not something a serious musician would use, but Charles knew it had possibilities.
So, by the late 1950s, Charles seemed to be trying to go more in the direction of becoming a jazz musician, rather than an R&B one, in an attempt to play more upmarket gigs. He kept releasing R&B singles, but he was increa