Wexler, Jerry (1917–2008)

US record producer and popular music journalist. Between 1948 and 1951, he wrote a column for Billboard in which he reported on African-American popular music and coined the term ‘rhythm-and-blues’. In 1953 he became a coowner of Atlantic Records, the most important mainstream record label to give exposure to black music in the 1950s and 1960s. After the sale of Atlantic in 1978, he joined Warner Brothers as an executive vice-president and continued to produce recordings until his retirement in 1982.

Wexler was born in New York City. As a young man he was an aficionado of the black music that he heard in New York jazz clubs in the 1930s. He served in the US Navy during World War II and worked for BMI and the publishing division of MGM between the late 1940s and early 1950s. During the 1950s he produced seminal, gospel-influenced recordings by Ray Charles, the Clovers, and Lavern Baker, and in the 1960s his work with Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, and Wilson Pickett helped establish the soul music idiom. In the 1970s he promoted the careers of Dr John, Dusty Springfield, and José Feliciano. His autobiography, The Rhythm and the Blues, was published in 1993.