The Controversial Song That Created Soul Music Topped the Charts on This Day in 1955
On March 15, 1955, Ray Charles hit number one on the Billboard R&B chart with "I Got a Woman" — and American music was never quite the same again.
The song was brewing for over a year by that point. In the summer of 1954, Charles was riding through the South with his band when he heard a gospel number called "It Must Be Jesus" by the Southern Tones playing on the radio. Feeling inspired, Charles started working with his trumpeter and bandleader Renald Richard — who transcribed Charles's ideas by hand as they drove, instrument by instrument, on the road — he rebuilt the song from the ground up, keeping the fervor and the melody but replacing the sacred lyrics with something decidedly earthly. He recorded it on November 18, 1954, at a makeshift studio inside Georgia Tech's radio station WGST in Atlanta.
Backlash Over Soul Music
The backlash was swift. Gospel preachers condemned it. Blues legend Big Bill Broonzy called it "mixing the sacred with the profane." The criticism stung even closer to home — Charles's own deeply religious wife admitted the song shocked her when she first heard it. In some communities, musicians who used gospel stylings for secular purposes were considered to have crossed to the side of the devil.
But people couldn't stop listening.
"Of course it created a lot of static from a lot of people," Charles said years later. "But then, on the other hand, it was a hit. It was a hit in the black community and the white community."
The song's reach extended far beyond Charles himself. A 20-year-old Elvis Presley added it to his live set almost immediately after it came out and kept it there for decades — performing it regularly through the 1950s, at his landmark 1969 Las Vegas comeback, and right up until his final tours in 1977. The Beatles recorded versions of it for the BBC. In 2005, Kanye West built "Gold Digger" around a sample of it, introducing the song to an entirely new generation.
Music historian Peter Guralnick has argued that "I Got a Woman" exerted as profound an influence on the course of American popular music as any single record before or since. It was the first of eleven number one R&B hits for Charles, and the moment that soul music was born.