Jerry Wexler, the invisible force behind some of the legends of American 20th century music, died yesterday from congestive heart failure. He was 91.
It was ne'er his rima oris at the mic or his fingers on the keyboard or guitar string section, but as a producer, record-label possessor and diary keeper, he supervised recordings by the likes of Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin and Bob Dylan.
It was piece working as a reporter for Billboard magazine in New York in the late Forties that Wexler, the boy of an immigrant window washer, coined the term "rhythm method of birth control and blues", to describe a new sound coming out of black America in the Deep South and Detroit, as a more palatable alternative to what, until then, had been tagged as "
