Who Was Jerry Wexler?

Good question.

Unfortunately, it's a question not enough people can answer. Which is precisely why we’ve excerpted Bruce Weber’s excellent obituary, which appeared in The New York Times.

Jerry Wexler, who as a reporter for Billboard magazine in the late 1940s christened black popular music rhythm and blues, and who as a record producer helped lead the genre to mainstream popularity, propelling the careers of Ray Charles, Wilson Pickett, Aretha Franklin and other performers, died at his home in Sarasota, Fla. He was 91.

Mr. Wexler was already in his 30s when he entered the music business, but his impact was immediate and enduring. In 1987, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame recognized his contributions to American music by inducting him in only its second year of conferring such honors.

Mr. Wexler actually didn’t care for rock ’n’ roll, at least as it evolved in the 1960s and ’70s. Though he signed Led Zeppelin and eventually produced records for Bob Dylan, Carlos Santana, Dire Straits and George Michael, his main influence came in the 1950s and ’60s as a vice president of Atlantic Records, working largely with black artists who were forging a new musical style, which came to be called soul music, from elements of gospel, swing and blues.

“He played a major role in bringing black music to the masses, and in the evolution of rhythm and blues to soul music,” Jim Henke, vice president and chief curator for the Hall of Fame, said in an interview. “Beyond that, he really developed the role of the record producer. Jerry did a lot more than just turn on a tape recorder. He left his stamp on a lot of great music. He had a commercial ear as well as a critical ear.”

Mr. Wexler was something of a paradox. A businessman with tireless energy, a ruthless streak and a volatile temper, he was also a hopeless music fan. A New York Jew and a vehement atheist, he found his musical home in the Deep South, in studios in Memphis and Muscle Shoals, Ala., among Baptists and Methodists, blacks and good old boys.

“He was a bundle of contradictions,” said Tom Thurman, who produced and directed a documentary about Mr. Wexler in 2000. “He was incredibly abrasive and incredibly generous, very abrupt and very, very patient, seemingly a pure, sharklike businessman and also a cerebral and creative genius.”

The title of Mr. Thurman’s documentary, “Immaculate Funk,” was Mr. Wexler’s phrase for the Atlantic sound, characterized by a heavy backbeat and a gospel influence. “It’s funky, it’s deep, it’s very emotional, but it’s clean,” Mr. Wexler once said.

Though not a musician himself, Mr. Wexler had a natural rapport with musicians, who seemed to recognize his instinct for how best to employ their gifts. He presided over the 1954 recording session of Ray Charles’s breakout hit, “I Got a Woman.” He said later that the best thing he had done for Charles was to let him do as he pleased.

Mr. Wexler wasn’t always a mere listener. In the mid-1960s, at a recording session with Wilson Pickett, Mr. Wexler wanted more of a backbeat in the song “In the Midnight Hour” but couldn’t explain in words what he wanted, so he illustrated it by doing a new dance, the jerk.

In the late 1960s and ’70s, he made 14 Atlantic albums with Ms. Franklin, whose musical instincts had been less than fully exploited at her previous label, Columbia. Mr. Wexler gave her more control over her songs and her sound, a blend of churchlike spirituality and raw sexuality, which can be heard in hits like “Respect,” “Dr. Feelgood” and “Chain of Fools.”

“How could he understand what was inside of black people like that?” Wilson Pickett said. “But Jerry Wexler did.”

Gerald Wexler was born in New York City on Jan. 10, 1917, and grew up in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan at a time before the building of the George Washington Bridge, when swimming in the Hudson River was a summer pastime.

His work at Billboard attracted the attention of Ahmet Ertegun of Atlantic Records, then a small independent label focusing on black music. Mr. Ertegun asked Mr. Wexler to join the company in 1953.

Over the next decade Mr. Wexler’s drive, his sales and promotion skills, and, according to the business practices of the day, his indulging in payola — the bribery of disc jockeys to play a company’s records — helped make Atlantic a leader in the recording industry. In the 1950s the company produced records by the Drifters, the Clovers, Joe Turner, Ruth Brown and, in partnership with the songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, the Coasters.

In the 1960s, however, Mr. Wexler and Mr. Ertegun began to take different paths. Mr. Ertegun gravitated toward rock ’n’ roll, while Mr. Wexler — was drawn to the niche sounds he found in places like Memphis, where a small label, Stax Records, its principal studio located in a former movie palace, had gathered a mix of black and white musicians and produced a sound based on spontaneity and improvisation.

In the early 1970s Mr. Wexler helped resurrect the career of Willie Nelson with two albums for Atlantic, but he left the label in 1975. (It had been bought by Warner Brothers in 1967.) Later he produced Bob Dylan’s 1979 album “Slow Train Coming,” a celebration of the singer’s embrace of Christianity, for Columbia. When Mr. Dylan accepted his first Grammy Award for best male rock vocal performance, for the song “Gotta Serve Somebody,” he first thanked God and then Jerry Wexler.

In the 1980s Mr. Wexler helped Linda Ronstadt with her career-changing album of Sinatraesque standards, “What’s New,” a project begun when she spent an afternoon with Mr. Wexler listening to records and for the first time heard the 1930s singer Mildred Bailey.

“When I said I wanted to sing like that, Jerry said the best way was to get a pianist and learn how those songs are done,” Ms. Ronstadt told The New York Times in 1983. She added, “One thing Jerry Wexler taught me was that if you’ve got a sexy or torchy song, you mustn’t attitudinize on top of it, because it sounds redundant.”

Given the chance, Mr. Wexler would have produced to the end and beyond.

“I asked him once,” said Mr. Thurman, the filmmaker, “ ‘What do you want written on your tombstone, Jerry?’ He said, ‘Two words: More bass.’ ”