Rise to Fame
'I've Got a Woman' in 1954 wasn't a hit record. It was a scandal. Churches called it sacrilege because he'd taken gospel music and replaced Jesus with sex. Atlantic Records had signed him in 1952 when he was imitating Nat King Cole. He stopped imitating. The sound he built - gospel melodies, blues feeling, jazz chords - became what everyone else would call soul music. By 1959, 'What'd I Say' cracked the pop top ten, and he signed with ABC-Paramount for $50,000 a year plus ownership of his masters.
In the Spotlight
Rolling Stone put him at #2 on its greatest singers list, right behind Aretha Franklin. Over his lifetime he accumulated 17 Grammy Awards and was in the first class of Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees in 1986. 'Georgia on My Mind' has been Georgia's official state song since 1979. A state named a song after him.
Side Notes
Those sunglasses weren't a style choice - a photographer painted them onto a promotional photo when he was 18, and they stuck. By 1962, he'd founded his own record label, Tangerine Records, and was one of the first musicians to own his master recordings. In 1961, he canceled a show in Augusta, Georgia rather than perform for a segregated audience, and faced the resulting lawsuit rather than back down. He battled heroin addiction for nearly 20 years and quit cold turkey after an arrest at Boston's Logan Airport in October 1964. None of this slowed the schedule.
Final Chapter
Genius Loves Company, the duets album he'd finished recording shortly before his health collapsed, was released in September 2004 and won five Grammys the following February, including Album of the Year. Jamie Foxx won the Academy Award for Best Actor for the biopic Ray that same season. His funeral at First African Methodist Episcopal Church in Los Angeles drew B.B. King, Stevie Wonder, Wynton Marsalis, and Willie Nelson, who performed 'Georgia on My Mind.'