I was thinking that as well. Soul music was built largely around the vocal intensity of gospel, and that's something that Ray definitely infused into most of his records.

I don't see soul as that simple to categorize. Most of Motown does not have much gospel influence, for instance. Ray Charles sang with a lot of soul, but I don't see much of it as "soul music."

Hank Williams sang with a lot of soul, but did not make any "soul music."

So did many other R&B artists of the 50s. Are these things soul too?

Yes, just a 'lighter' version of soul.
Much the same way that Motown was.

Samson,

You obviously know your music. Can you tell me why Gene Allison (only 2 charted songs for the decade) is placed so relatively high? Does he have some lasting influence I'm not aware of?

I put him a little high when I realized I had left him out altogether. There are some artists below that will move ahead of him in the next revision.

That said, Allison was one of the first soul singers, very well respected within music - Sam Cooke once said he envied Allison's voice, which is pretty high praise coming from a singer like Sam. So his musical impact is high, he was one of a handful of artists who bridged that gap between secular and sacred thematically and stylistically, giving him good secondary influence, and had a few hits to give him some commercial impact as well.

I see you corrected Adam's misspelling of your name when you quoted him.

Pretty big ego you have, huh?

It might be arbitrary, but does anyone else see a case for Little Richard > Chuck?

Now Berry's influence is massive, he made the guitar the focale point of rock music (you could maybe say Lowman Pauling did it first, but Berry took it to unthinkable dimensions), and his style of 'short and sweet' guitar songs basically was the foundation for rock guitar itself. Plus his trademark writing style.
But I feel Little Richard's influence prevalent in more areas.
He was, largely, the first great 'shouter' of rock & roll, at least to the degree that he influenced a whole generation with it (like Ian Gillan of Deep Purple, just for one example). I don't think it'd be unfair to say that Richard was THE pioneer of a vocal style that just gave endless possibilities for future rock singers.
He also has titanic influence on the role of the rock frontman, pre-dating Jerry Lee by a few years I think, and taking raucousness and theatrics to a whole other level than anyone in rock before him (imo). The concept of the flamboyant rock showman owes A LOT to Little Richard.

I'm not sure about commercial impact, but I'm guessing that would be a win for Chuck.

Musical Impact: I really can't say here either. They are both practically worshipped by all the big rock icons that followed in their wake.

Now cultural impact I see as another win for Richard.
To start, I guess it depends on how you're defining the term. Whether or not you mean "changing the culture", or simply "having an effect on the culture".
I'm not sure if Richard actually "changed" anything culturally, but in my opinion he DID have a biig effect on it, by breaking down barriers in popular music, being an over the top gay black man from the South, etc. I can't imagine America's reaction to him during this period...had to have been quite a sight for this who had the opportunity to see him.

HMMM, this coming from a man who changed my words from this: "Actually though, in their defense on one thing, I'll say that the E-Street Band's exclusion when Bruce got in was technically CORRECT." to this: "Bruce was CORRECT." and falsely attributed it to me, THEN added your own response to this deception with the line: "He usually is."

You're a pip, Bruce, and I don't mean a member of Gladys Knight's backing group.

Mine was a joke. Yours wasn't. You just couldn't leave the mispelling there in the quote.

I know it was. It was even kinda funny (for you anyway), so I left it and didn't comment on it. As for changing a misspelling of my own name, when you quote someone's post you can edit it so easily that it was pointless not to. It has nothing to do with ego, just accuracy. I do it all the time when someone misspells anything in their post that I quote, be it an artist's name, or another word. It's no big deal. Nice of you to spot it though and dream up a giant conspiracy behind it.

By the way, I got banned from that forum where the guy criticized your hall of fame sftuff. It only took a few days.....and I didn't even use profanity or anything. He said that "I wasn't getting along with the other posters."

The guy actually said that if you don't look at the omissions and just look at who the hall of fame HAS inducted, that they are doing a great job and that there is not anybody who they inducted who does not deserve to be. When pressed, he claimed that Billy Joel was the worst induction because he did not influence anybody." According to him, the ONLY criteria for induction is influence.

I'm proud of you, I was hoping you'd piss them off. I'm actually surprised it took this long.

I had never seen or heard of that site until Taupin-Cetera brought it to my attention - and copied all of my pages onto those posting boards, which I don't appreciate (I gotta know where my stuff is being used and how). When I went back and read where his hatred of what I wrote started it seemed, not surprisingly, to be rooted in the fact that I was critical of the Hall's selection process, the fact the entire process is controlled by a select few who clearly are promoting their own personal taste-based agendas, and he seemed particularly miffed that I stated certain candidates were undeserving (he got pissed I called Traffic a bad choice).

Reading his choices for the most deserving candidates still not in and having the Johnny Burnette Rock 'n' Roll Trio, who you and I both love but c'mon, MOST deserving???, and Big Mama Thornton as the top two was laughable. How can I take him seriously? They don't have influence, not the kind that would vault them over at least two hundred other far more influential and overall deserving candidates. I tried pointing out that the R&R Trio's biggest influence was secondary at best and small in nature and he ignored it, then repeatedly misquoted me and tried implying things I stated meant something else entirely and kept overusing the word "integrity" to criticize me. Why waste time with someone like that? I haven't gone back since and could care less about his little site. I guess if he kicked you off because he doesn't want any dissent on his board that means he can go back to dictating all of the topics and steer the discussion to whatever he wants and have the few who show up there agree with him or face the consequences.

Actually, I think he would have let me stay if it was just him, but two or three of the regulars told him to ban me, and one schmuck pulled a "I'm out of here until you ban him" grandstand, and so he caved in rather than lose one (or more) of his whopping four regular posters.

He also measures influence almost entirely based only on remakes of the artist's songs. I think you're right though in that the board seems to be a circle jerk of 3 or 4 ignorant schmucks agreeing with each other's falacies.

Do you think he has any idea that "The Train Kept A Rollin" is actually a Tiny Bradshaw original, not Johnny Burnette & The R&R Trio? I seriously doubt it, if he gives them the most deserving spot for enshrinement based totally on influence (assuming he means guitar feedback, though they weren't the first, which I pointed out to him) and who remade whose songs.

People can, and have, disagreed with my applying HOF credentials but nobody can say I don't at least go to great lengths to make the case for or against each artist in a pretty limited amount of space and I think even HE looked at the pages and said he didn't find any major faults in the Top 150 candidates (of course, considering his own shaky awareness of things, I don't know if that's good or not). What he seems to do there, at least from what I saw, is basically talk with people who have the same general perception as he does and use their agreement as evidence they're all right. Seeing my initial critiques of the last two induction classes - and the fact I wasn't even around to debate them when they started ripping me - he apparently felt my disagreement with their views threatened that and they decided to go on the offensive (without me even being aware of it until I was actually told a year after it began). But that's the internet for you...

Speaking of Tiny Bradshaw, there's someone who could use a little more publicity on these pages too. Very interesting role in rock's formative period and he never gets mentioned at all. How many people do you think are even aware he existed?