The record in context

It happened in December 1958, at a dance in Brownsville, Pennsylvania. Ray Charles had a four-hour contract and had played through his entire book with about twelve minutes still to go. So he did what only a supremely confident bandleader would do: he told the musicians he was going to start something and had no idea where it was headed, and that they should follow him. He told the Raelettes to repeat whatever he sang. He put his hands on a Wurlitzer electric piano, found a low bouncing riff, and started making up verses about girls in colored dresses who knew how to shake that thing. The dancers went wild. Without knowing it, the room had just witnessed the composition of a song.

When Charles brought it to Atlantic’s small studio on 56th Street in New York on February 18, 1959, the session had the feeling of a live date. Engineer Tom Dowd was still learning the label’s brand-new eight-track recorder; the band and the Raelettes cut the song live, no overdubs, in three or four takes. There was a problem, though: the thing ran over seven and a half minutes, and the call-and-response moans between Charles and the Raelettes made Dowd and the producers nervous. Dowd solved it the way engineers do — he cleaned up the shouts, spliced out choruses, and split the song into two three-and-a-half-minute sides of a single. Released that summer, “What’d I Say” Parts I and II went to number six on the pop chart and number one R&B, became Charles’s first gold record and Atlantic’s biggest seller to date. In 2002 it entered the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry.

The scandal was the best publicity Atlantic never bought. A great many radio stations, black and white alike, refused to play the record, judging the ecstatic back-and-forth between Charles and the Raelettes too suggestive for the air. Billboard’s first review was lukewarm. Then the distributors started calling — audiences wanted it, banned or not — and the ban collapsed under the weight of demand. Charles himself never dignified the controversy with an explanation; asked about it, he declined to interpret his own song and left it there. He didn’t need to. Everybody understood exactly what the fuss was about, and everybody bought the record anyway.

Listen closely

Start with the riff — that loping electric-piano figure that opens the record and never really lets go. It’s a rhumba rhythm wearing R&B clothes, and it does something clever: it sounds improvised even on the finished record, loose and rolling, as if the song is still being made up as you hear it. That’s because it was. The whole arrangement breathes like a live performance — the horns answering, the drums clicking along — and you can feel the room in it, the sense of musicians listening to each other in real time.

Then comes the section that got the record banned: the middle, where Charles runs out of verses and starts to moan, and the Raelettes moan back. On paper it’s call-and-response, the oldest device in Black music, straight from the church. In practice, slowed down and stretched out over that insistent groove, it sounded to 1959’s radio programmers like something that belonged behind a bedroom door. Listen to it now and you can hear both readings at once — the sacred and the sensual braided so tightly you can’t pull them apart. That braid is the entire history of soul music in about ninety seconds.

Don’t miss the false ending — the moment the whole orchestra stops, the room seems to exhale, and then the Raelettes and the band start begging Charles for “one more time.” It’s theater, pure theater, a staged encore inside the record itself, and it was improvised just like everything else. The genius of it is that it makes the listener complicit: you’ve been dancing, you don’t want it to stop either, and suddenly the record is performing your own desire back to you.

Finally, listen to the whole thing as a document of risk. Atlantic’s biggest star walked into the studio with a song that was too long, too suggestive, and too strange for radio — and the label released it anyway, twice (a sanitized edit followed when the complaints rolled in). The gamble remade the label’s fortunes and proved something Charles seemed to know instinctively: the audience is always braver than the gatekeepers.