What'd I Say

What begins as a piano figure over a shuffle groove gradually becomes something seismic. "What'd I Say" is perhaps the most important six minutes in the history of popular music that most people have never properly listened to from beginning to end. Ray Charles builds the song slowly — the groove establishes itself, then the Raelettes enter in the call-and-response pattern, then something begins to accelerate and loosen simultaneously, the structure releasing its formality and becoming almost improvisational in feel. Charles's voice here is shameless in the best sense — openly erotic, physically demanding, calling for responses from his singers and implicitly from everyone in earshot. The organ lines through everything like a second voice. By the song's final minutes it has abandoned conventional song structure almost entirely for something that feels more like a religious ceremony or collective physical experience. This is where soul music, rock and roll, and the church came completely fused, the synthesis that made the next fifteen years of American music possible. Countless musicians have named this as the moment they understood what music could do. You reach for it in the car alone when you want to feel completely alive — not happy exactly, just fiercely, undeniably present in your body and in the moment.