Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music is a studio album by the American singer and pianist Ray Charles. It was recorded in February 1962 at Capitol Studios in New York City and United Western Recorders in Hollywood, and released in March of that year by ABC-Paramount Records.
The album departed further stylistically from the rhythm and blues music Charles had recorded for Atlantic Records in the 1950s. It featured country, folk, and Western music standards reworked by Charles in popular song forms of the time, including R&B, pop, and jazz. Charles produced the album with Sid Feller, who helped the singer select songs to record, and performed alongside saxophonist Hank Crawford, a string section conducted by Marty Paich, and a big band arranged by Gil Fuller and Gerald Wilson.
Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music was an immediate critical and commercial success. The album and its four hit singles brought Charles greater mainstream notice and recognition in the pop market, as well as airplay on both R&B and country radio stations. The album and its lead single, "I Can't Stop Loving You", were both certified gold by the Recording Industry Association of America in 1962, as each record had sold at least 500,000 copies in the United States.
The album's integration of soul and country challenged racial barriers in popular music at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. In the process of recording the album, Charles became one of the first African-American musicians to exercise complete artistic control over his own recording career. In retrospect, it has been considered by critics as his best studio record and a landmark recording in American music. According to Robert Christgau, the album "transfigured pop, prefigured soul, and defined modern country & western music." It has been called one of the greatest albums of all time by publications such as Rolling Stone and Time. In 2026, the album was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Recording Registry for its "cultural, historical or aesthetic importance in the nation's recorded sound heritage."
Background
After his Atlantic Records contract ended, Ray Charles signed with ABC-Paramount Records in November 1959, obtaining a much more generous contract than other artists had at the time. Following his commercial and pop crossover breakthrough with the hit single "What'd I Say" earlier that year, ABC offered Charles a $50,000 annual advance, higher royalties than previously offered and eventual ownership of his masters—a very valuable and lucrative deal at the time. Composed by Charles himself, the single furthered Charles's mainstream appeal, while becoming a Top 10 pop hit and selling a million copies in the United States, despite the ban placed on the record by some radio stations, in response to the song's sexually-suggestive lyrics. However, by the time of the release of the instrumental jazz LP Genius + Soul = Jazz (1960) for ABC's subsidiary label Impulse!, Charles had virtually given up on writing original material and had begun to follow his eclectic impulses as an interpreter. As Charles himself noted in the liner notes of What'd I Say (1959), he was influenced by the genre in his youth, writing that he "used to play piano in a hillbilly band" and that he believed that he "could do a good job with the right hillbilly song today." At Atlantic, he attempted to incorporate this style and influence with his cover of country singer Hank Snow's "I'm Movin' On". Charles later said about the song, "When I heard Hank Snow sing 'Moving On', I loved it. And the lyrics. Keep in mind, I'm a singer, so I like lyrics. Those lyrics are great, so that's what made me want to do it."
Charles's recording of his acclaimed studio effort The Genius of Ray Charles (1959) brought him closer to expressing his jazz and pop crossover ambitions. Described by one music critic as "the most important of his albums for Atlantic", the record was the first to introduce Charles's musical approach of blending his brassy R&B sound with the more middle of the road, pop-oriented style, while performing in the presence of a big band ensemble.
When Charles had announced that he wanted to work on an album of country music in 1961, during a period of racial segregation and tension in the United States, he received generally negative commentary and feedback from his peers, including fellow R&B musicians and ABC-Paramount executives. According to him, the title of the album was conceived by producer Sid Feller and ABC-Paramount's executives and management people.
Instead of drawing what he should record from memory and his knowledge of country music, Charles asked Feller, his newly appointed A&R (Artists and Repertoire) man, to research top country standards through major country music publishers. Despite enlisting a roster of professional arrangers and musicians, Charles intended to control the artistic direction of the recordings. To indicate specific licks he wanted emphasized for certain songs, Charles would put together voice-and-piano demos and pass them along to the arrangers, informing them of what he wanted to do with specific sounds. According to Feller, at one point during recording, Charles rewrote an entire botched arrangement and dictated the parts to each of the 18 backing musicians. Writer Daniel Cooper said of Charles's adaptation of country elements, "His country forays play like a series of intricate variations or like one long meditation on the expansive qualities of music commonly described as the white man's blues." Charles has said that the country album was "completely different from rhythm and blues".
"You Don't Know Me" has a string and vocal ensemble production and themes of desirous unrequited love.
Both composed by Hank Williams, "You Win Again" and "Hey, Good Lookin'" are derived from Williams's different emotional perspectives. The difference is further accentuated by Charles's interpretations of the songs. and quickly became one of the best-selling albums recorded by a black musician of the time, as well as one of the best-selling country albums, This achievement was due in part to the mainstream promotional efforts Modern Sounds had received from ABC prior to and following release.
Writing of the album shortly after its release, Billboard magazine claimed that, "in addition to being powerful dealer material, this package will fracture knowledgeable jockeys who will find in it a wealth of material to talk about as well as play." The hit singles quickly gained a significant amount of radio airplay on both country and R&B stations. By mid-May, the album's lead single, "I Can't Stop Loving You", had sold 700,000 copies within its first four weeks of release. Following his tenure with ABC-Paramount, Charles later went on to achieve more commercial success recording country music under Columbia Records throughout most of the 1980s.
Critical reception
Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music received positive reviews from critics of both rhythm and blues and country music. "I Can't Stop Loving You" earned Charles a Grammy Award for Best Rhythm & Blues Recording at the 1963 Grammy Awards, while the album was nominated in the Album of the Year category.
Since its initial reception, the album has been praised by critics for Charles's style and manner of interpreting country music into his R&B musical language. AllMusic editor Stephen Cook called the album a "fine store of inimitable interpretations", and stated, "Less modern for its country-R&B blend and lushly produced C&W tone than for its place as a high-profile crossover hit, Modern Sounds in Country and Western fit right in with Ray Charles's expansive musical ways while on the Atlantic label in the '50s".
Accolades
In 1999, the album was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, as was "I Can't Stop Loving You" in 2001. Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music was cited by The Recording Academy as a recording of "historical significance". "I Can't Stop Loving You" was ranked number 49 on Country Music Television's list of the 100 Greatest Songs of Country Music. In November 2003, Rolling Stone ranked the album number 104 on its list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, and 105 in a 2012 revised list, and 127 in a 2020 revised list. The album was also included in Robert Christgau's "Basic Record Library" of 1950s and 1960s recordings, published in Christgau's Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies (1981).
{|class="wikitable"
|-
! Publication
! Country
! Accolade
! Year
! Rank
|-
| Blender
| align="center"|United States
| The 100 Greatest American Albums of All time
| 2002
| align="center"|16
|-
| Blender
| align="center"|U.S.
| 500 CDs You Must Own Before You Die
| 2003
| align="center"|*
|-
| CMT
| align="center"|U.S.
| 40 Greatest Albums in Country Music
| 2006
| align="center"|2
|-
| Elvis Costello (Vanity Fair, Issue No. 483)
| align="center"|U.S.
| 500 Albums You Need
| 2005
| align="center"|*
|-
| Fast 'n' Bulbous
| align="center"|U.S.
| The Best Albums from 1949–64
| 2005
| align="center"|85
|-
| Greil Marcus
| align="center"|U.S.
| STRANDED: "Treasure Island" Albums
| 1979
| align="center"|*
|-
| Pause & Play
| align="center"|U.S.
| Albums Inducted into a Time Capsule
| 2008
| align="center"|*
|-
| The Recording Academy
| align="center"|U.S.
| Grammy Hall of Fame Albums and Songs
| 1999
| align="center"|*
|-
| The Review (University of Delaware)
| align="center"|U.S.
| 100 Greatest Albums of All Time
| 2001
| align="center"|88
|-
| Robert Dimery
| align="center"|U.S.
| 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die
| 2005
| align="center"|*
|-
| Rolling Stone
| align="center"|U.S.
| 500 Greatest Albums of All Time
| 2023
| align="center"|127
|-
| Stereophile
| align="center"|U.S.
| 40 Years of Stereophile: The 40 Essential Albums
| 2002
| align="center"|Honorable mention
|-
| Time
| align="center"|U.S.
| Top 100 Albums of All Time
| 2006
| align="center"|*
|-
| VH1
| align="center"|U.S.
| The 100 Greatest Albums of R 'N' R
| 2001
| align="center"|97
|-
| Various writers
| align="center"|U.S.
| Albums: 50 Years of Great Recordings
| 2006
| align="center"|*
|-
| John Tobler
| align="center"|United Kingdom
| 100 Great Albums of the Sixties
| 1994
| align="center"|*
|-
| Paul Morley
| align="center"|U.K.
| 100 Greatest Albums
| 2003
| align="center"|*
|-
| Exposure
| align="center"|Canada
| 50 Greatest Albums not to make the Greatest Albums lists
| 2005
| align="center"|10
|-
|align="center" colspan="7" style="font-size: 8pt"| (*) designates lists that are unordered.
|-
|}
Legacy and influence
Country music
In the wake of Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music and its success, country music experienced an immediate increase in popularity. According to music writer Daniel Cooper, "the album raised the genre's profile", specifically Nashville sound, which Charles had covered. Doug Freeman of the Austin Chronicle wrote of Charles's influence through the album, stating:
Summing up on the impact Modern Sounds had on country music and listeners, writer Daniel Cooper states, "There is no telling how many people, who perhaps never paid much attention to country music or even had professed to dislike it, listened anew based on the impact of having heard what Ray Charles was capable of doing with that music."
Social impact
Following the album's release, Charles quickly earned an influx of white listeners and audiences at concert venues, without experiencing any fall-out from his predominantly black audience. Writer Daniel Cooper later said of the album's effect, "It's an idea as corny as any country song you can think of, and one that Charles knew to be true; music unites people. It just really does." In a July 8, 2004 article for Rolling Stone magazine, music journalist Robert Christgau praised the impact and influence that the Modern Sounds recordings had on music, stating "In the world it created, not only could a black person sing the American songbook Ella Fitzgerald owned by then, but a country black person could take it over. Soon Charles's down-home diction, cotton-field grit, corn-pone humor and overstated shows of emotion were standard operating procedure in American music, black and white."
In addition to its social implications, the musical integration of soul and country into popular format by Charles changed and revolutionized racial boundaries and restraints in music, and contributed to the historical Civil Rights Movement. Robert Fontenot of About.com was one of several writers to praise the album's musical and social implications, stating "Arguably one of the most brilliant interpretive albums ever released, it did more to integrate modern American music than almost any other LP in history." In paying tribute to the magazine's selection of the 100 Greatest Singers of All Time, which had selected Charles at #2, singer-songwriter Billy Joel noted the album's racial and social impact in an article for Rolling Stone, stating "here is a black man giving you the whitest possible music in the blackest possible way, while all hell is breaking loose with the civil rights movement." Another article for Rolling Stone, written in honor of Charles and his achievements, later stated that through his Modern Sounds recordings, Ray Charles "made it acceptable for black people to sing country & western music, in the process doing almost as much to break down racial barriers as did the civil-rights movement."
Subsequent work by Charles
In addition to the album's legacy as one of the most influential recordings of all time, Modern Sounds also had an effect on Charles's later work. By the mid-1960s and continuing into the 1970s and 1980s, the majority of his musical output was focused onto more middle of the road and pop releases, featuring less of his recognizable, trademark soul and R&B, and more of the crossover and fusion tendencies of Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music. On the album's influence, columnist Spencer Leigh of The Independent stated that "Numerous artists followed Charles's lead, but it must be said that Charles himself repeated the trick much too often." The period of releases following Modern Sounds has been recognized by writers as a "critical slide" and the weakest in his recording career.
On October 27, 1998, Rhino Entertainment issued a four-disc box set entitled The Complete Country & Western Recordings: 1959–1986, which chronicles Charles's country and western recordings. The collection features the two volumes of Modern Sounds, as well as his later country singles for Warner Bros. Included in the set is a hardcover booklet of essays by producer Sid Feller, writer Daniel Cooper, and Ray Charles, along with liner photography by Howard Morehead and Les Leverett. On June 2, 2009, both volumes of Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music were reissued as a single package by Concord Music.
Track listing
All tracks were produced by Ray Charles and Sid Feller.
- In October 1988, the album was reissued on compact disc by the specialty record label Rhino Entertainment, accompanied by three bonus tracks.
|-
|align="left"|UK Albums Chart
|align="center"|6
|}
Singles
{| class="wikitable"
!rowspan="2"|Year
!rowspan="2"|Single
!colspan="4"|Peak positions
|-
!width="100"|US Hot 100
!width="100"|US R&B Singles
!width="100"|Easy Listening
!width="100"|UK Singles
|-
|align="center" rowspan="4"|1962
|align="left"|"Born to Lose"
|align="center"|41
|align="center"|—
|align="center"|—
|align="center"|—
|-
|align="left"|"Careless Love"
|align="center"|60
|align="center"|—
|align="center"|—
|align="center"|—
|-
|align="left"|"I Can't Stop Loving You"
|align="center"|1
|align="center"|1
|align="center"|1
|align="center"|1
|-
|align="left"|"You Don't Know Me"
|align="center"|2
|align="center"|5
|align="center"|1
|align="center"|9
|-
|align="center" colspan="7" style="font-size: 8pt"| "—" denotes a release that did not chart.
|-
|}
See also
- Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music Volume Two
- The Blue Room (Madeleine Peyroux album), a 2013 release that includes several songs on this album
- Album era
- Progressive soul
References
Bibliography
Further reading
- "The Hidden Faces of Country" by The Guardian
- "In Praise of Brother Ray" by Metroactive
- Album analysis by Everything2.com