Prohibition and the Jazz Age Love ballads dominated the market: Buyers of sheet music did not want for choice of styles or subjects. Love ballads dominated the market, but songwriters were not slow to incorporate current fashions into their "jazzy" numbers. When threats from these quarters were added to a storm of disapproval aroused by the revelation of a number of scandals at Hollywood, the motion-picture industry in some trepidation summoned to the rescue Will H. Hays, a politician high in the councils of the Republican party. Then there was Prohibition, the policy which made the manufacture, sale and consumption of alcoholic drinks illegal throughout the twenties. F. Scott Fitzgerald's familiar phrase, the Jazz Age, summed up the spirit of the period; Prohibition was the most patent symbol of its lifestyle. Prohibition and gang warfare proved a windfall for purveyors of melodrama, offering numerous new angles and situations. Twelve Miles Out ( 1926) by William Anthony McGuire was concerned with bootlegging and hijacking at sea with a dash of love rivalry thrown in, and a gangster play, Four Walls ( 1927) by Dana Burnet and George Abbott gave Muni Weisenfreund ( Paul Muni) his first important Broadway part after he had played some three hundred roles in the Yiddish Theatre. Gang War ( 1928) by the veteran Willard Mack, author of some sixty-five plays, launched an all-out attack on the spectators' nerves by his terrifying version of a Chicago beer-running feud, complete with gunmen, machine guns, bombs from the air, and the suffocating odor of gunpowder. A nostalgic view of the period presents jazz and Prohibition as expressions of the triumph of the pleasure principle. Historians on the other hand may see the hedonism of the era as a mask for alienation, and the conservative backlash as a reminder of the power of the establishment. Both jazz and Prohibition make most sense when seen as outstanding examples of the continuing struggle in mainstream American culture between two pronounced tendencies, which have been called the "ecstatic" - celebratory, immediate, implicit - and the "didactic" - controlled, predictable, explicit. The movie producers began to exercise some restraint in their pictures under these circumstances, but it did not go so far as to threaten the box-office appeal of their offerings. The clean-up campaign was successful in averting the threat of further censorship: only six states ( Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kansas, Maryland, New York, and Virginia) took legislative action. It somewhat restored the prestige of the industry. The evidence of the twenties suggests that it was a complex encounter, rarely clear-cut. The Volstead Act, which initiated the era of Prohibition, had more than one ironic consequence. The practices it sought to curb were made more desirable, as behavior hitherto thought of as mildly antisocial now became deliberate revolt. Criminal elements shed some of their marginality and found themselves the center of attention in the tabloid press. The sinister social evi! of organized crime was seen to foster and encourage another marginal group - the black subculture, whose music and dance provided the bulk of the entertainment in the gangster-run clubs. “Soul is a way of life, but it is always the hard way.” -Ray Charles For many people, the birth of American Soul can be traced directly back to 1954 and the incendiary Atlantic Records single “I've Got a Woman,” performed by a rising young artist named Ray Charles.  Mixing the Blues and Gospel in ways that had previously been taboo and mysteriously managing to merge sexual and spiritual, raw and tender, longing and lightness into one unforgettable, heart-pounding sound, the song literally shook the world.  It was the catalyst that lit a fire in countless young musicians who'd never heard anything like it, and the spark that helped set off an explosively creative period in American culture that led to the rock `n' roll revolution and beyond…not to mention igniting Ray Charles' own 50-year career. But just as amazing as the sound was the man from whom it emerged. The late musical legend Ray Charles has been dubbed “The Genius of Soul”-but what about the soul of the genius?  While almost everyone knows and loves Ray Charles' music-which would grow to encompass and re-create nearly every uniquely American style from Jazz to Country-few know the real story behind his hard-fought journey to artistic triumph. Ray Charles was a man of uniquely American contradictions, a dichotomous blend of big-city savvy and back-country simplicity, of sincerity and guile, of shouts and whispers.  He never liked labels or barriers of any kind, so his songs transcended genres, tapping into the whole wide range of American roots music and blurring the separations between Jazz, R&B, Country and Gospel to create something original, exuberant and moving.  It was said that he could just as easily make you dance as break your heart, could evoke joy as deeply as desolation, and sometimes he did both in the same song.  For Ray Charles, life itself was like that…full of pain, trouble and sorrows as well as exaltation, beauty and salvation. Born into crushing, Depression-era poverty on September 23, 1930 in Albany, Georgia, Ray Charles Robinson fell in love with music at a very young age. He was exposed to both the call-and-response hymns of his Baptist church and the rough-and-tumble Blues of local musicians.  Before he was five, he was already learning piano.  Then, a series of tragic events altered the course of his life. First, Ray witnessed his brother George's drowning death in an accident for which Ray blamed himself. Shortly thereafter, a combination of glaucoma and the trauma of watching his brother die caused Ray to progressively lose his sight. By the age of seven he had gone completely blind and, at his tough but devoted mother's insistence, learned to navigate the world based on his acute sense of hearing and fascination with sound. He never used a cane, a dog or any other tool he associated with dependency.  Instead, with his gifted, wide-open ears, Ray found his own way to approach life as a blind person. Through it all, music kept him going. Later, Charles would write in his book Brother Ray:  “I was born with the music in me, that's the only explanation I know of.” Next Page: Jazz: I Was Born with Music in Me More Content: Paul Whiteman Enters American Scene Jazz: I Was Born with Music in Me Jazz, Blues and Black Audience White Popular Music The New Woman and the Twenties Chanel Creations: Fashions for the Whealty Fashion and Modernity