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Chapter 6
have taken both the melody and lyrical pattern of his most famous hit from a
song that was made a mere three or four years earlier.
Like many 78 rpm records, this one was sold without liner notes. The center
of the record provides the only details. It gives the name of the track and
the band and a single word under the song title, “Ward”—presumably the
composer. “Ward” might be Clara Ward of the Ward Singers, a talented gospel
singer and songwriter who became Aretha Franklin’s mentor and who had her
own music publishing company.
There is a particular reason to think that she might have written the song:
Ray Charles clearly liked to adapt her music to secular ends. We know that he
“reworked” Ward’s gospel classic “This Little Light of Mine” into “This Little
Girl of Mine.” Ward reportedly was irritated by the practice. So far as we
know, the copying of the music did not annoy her because she viewed it as
theft, but because she viewed it as an offense against gospel music.
Charles is now starting to get criticism from some gospel music performers for secularizing
gospel music and presenting it in usual R&B venues. Most adamant in
her misgivings is Clara Ward who complains about “This Little Girl Of Mine” being
a reworking of “This Little Light Of Mine” (which it is), as a slap against the
gospel field. 14
This stage of Charles’s career is described, rightly, as the moment when his
originality bursts forth, where he stops imitating the smooth sounds of Nat
King Cole and instead produces the earthy and sensual style that becomes his
trademark—his own sound. That is true enough; there had been nothing
quite like this before. Yet it was hardly original creation out of nothing. Both
Charles himself and the musicological literature point out that “his own
sound,” “his style,” is in reality a fusion of two prior genres—rhythm and
blues and gospel. But looking at the actual songs that created soul as a genre
shows us that the fusion goes far beyond merely a stylistic one. Charles makes
some of his most famous songs by taking existing gospel classics and reworking
or simply rewording them. “I’ve Got a Savior” becomes “I Got a
Woman.” “This Little Light of Mine” becomes “This Little Girl of Mine.”
The connection is striking: two very recent gospel songs, probably by the
same author, from which Charles copies the melody, structure, pattern of
verses, even most of the title—in each case substituting a beloved sensual
woman for the beloved deity. Many others have noticed just how closely
Charles based his songs on gospel tunes, although the prevalence of the story
that “I Got a Woman” is derived from an early-twentieth-century hymn