Jerry Wexler: The Man Who Invented Rhythm & Blues

"We were absolutely a cult. It was 'we happy few' as the English say. We used to hang out at the Commodore Record Shop, this little in-group, and get together in the evening. We loved McSorley's Ale and maybe we'd smoke a cigarette without any name on it. People would bring their favorite records and we'd be listening to Louis and his Hot Five, Hot Seven, whatever."

A mother who was convinced she had birthed the next Faulkner, and a Stateside stint in the Army during WWII (spent partly in Miami) helped steer Wexler down a more focused path. He attended college in Kansas upon being discharged, and in 1946 returned to New York to pursue a career in journalism and the music business. In a day when music publishers held more power than record companies, he first worked as a song-plugger, and then as a Billboard reporter. In 1949, he coined the term "Rhythm and Blues" for the magazine's black music chart to replace the term "Race Music."

Wexler was the wordsmith, and revered and respected his favorite authors — Hemingway, Fitzgerald, James M. Cain and John O'Hara — as he did his favorite jazz and bluesmen. Praising a Big Joe Turner big band album, he wrote that Boss of the Blues had been created sub specie aeternitatis. Look it up — the Latin and the album.

Ertegun thought and felt the same way. They became friends and in 1953, when he asked Wexler to join Atlantic Records, partners as well. It was a gesture Wexler never forgot. "In a way," he said after Ertegun's death in 2006, "he handed me a life."

Wexler's first years at Atlantic found him recording the music that built the foundation of rock — songs about partying, romancing and one about shaking, rattling and rolling, that really had more to do with what happened in car backseats than in the kitchen. Some went further: Clyde McPhatter's "Honey Love" (banned by some radio stations for indecency) and the Clovers' "Down in the Alley" ("I'll plant you now and dig you later/Because you're my sweet potato") were a refreshing poke at the propriety of the '50s.

For Wexler, it was on-the-job training: "No one really knew how to make a record when I started. You simply went into the studio, turned on the mike and said play." Atlantic's forte was a sound that was clear, precise, and heavy on the groove — the label was one of the first to mike the rhythm section separately. "My rubric [for the sound] was 'Immaculate Funk,' " he wrote in his autobiography Rhythm and the Blues (a must-read for anyone seeking a handle on how American music came to be).

When most radio stations were playing Perry Como and Doris Day, Wexler pleaded, cajoled, bullied and even paid to get airplay for the latest Atlantic singles. Everyone — black and white — was listening. As Ertegun once put it, "they could segregate everything else, but they couldn't segregate the radio dial."

With Ertegun sitting one desk away in their small office on Manhattan's West 56th Street, Wexler fought a righteous fight: hassling distributors for payment, battling other labels for market share, at times getting what was needed by sheer force of personality. He was no angel — he could be imperious and had a reputation for unusually erudite, red-faced rants.