The 500 - #118 - Late Registration - Kanye West

I was inspired by a podcast called The 500 hosted by New York-based comedian Josh Adam Meyers. His goal, and mine, is to explore Rolling Stone Magazine's 2012 edition of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

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Album #:118
Album Title: Late Registration
Artist: Kanye West
Genre: Hip Hop, Pop Rap, Progressive Rap
Recorded: Three Studios in Hollywood, One in New York

Released: August, 2005
My age at release: 40
How familiar was I with it before this week: A couple songs
Is it on the 2020 list? Yes, at #117, rising one spot
Song I am putting on my Spotify Playlist: Gold Digger

I love the way music transforms. How a melody can slip out of one era and reappear in another wearing a completely different outfit. How something sacred can become secular, and then become something else entirely. I think of it as sonic alchemy (although I suspect I'm not the first to use that term). For me, it defines the way one artist melts down an old sound and recasts it into something new. Eventually, a new creation exists that is unrecognizable from the original source material.

It reminds me of the way my classroom lessons evolve over the years, and how each new cohort of students finds inventive ways to remix the challenges I give them. I often call these “low floor, high ceiling” activities because the entry point is accessible to everyone, but the possibilities stretch as far as their imagination. One of my favourites, a simple rock‑blaster coding game, has been reimagined for more than a decade in ways that still surprise me.

Gold Digger, the second single released from Kanye West's sophomore studio release, Late Registration, is a fascinating tale of sonic alchemy that takes place over more than a century. It is also a musical odyssey that continues today and, I suspect, will keep going beyond my lifetime.

It all started in 1901 when American gospel songwriter William Lamartin Thompson penned the Christian hymnal Jesus Is All The World To Me. Thompson, born in East Liverpool, Ohio, in 1847, studied at the New England Conservatory of Music in his early twenties. After facing rejection from commercial publishers in New York, he founded The W. L. Thompson Music Company in 1875. It soon became a prominent gospel publishing house and allowed Thompson to retain the rights to his music -- a rarity at the time.

William Lamartin Thompson

Fast forward 50 years and the gospel quartet The Southern Tones borrowed the hymn's melodic structure and transformed it into the song It Must Be Jesus. The reworked piece became a modest hit, mainly on Southern gospel radio stations where, one afternoon in 1954, singer Ray Charles was listening to it.

It Must Be Jesus - by The Southern Tones.

Charles secularized the gospel groove, a decision that shocked some church communities at the time, and wrote the soul song I Got A Woman. Charles kept the melodic contour of the song, as well as its rhythmic bounce. He also made use of the "call and response" lyrics, a technique that he would return to with his biggest hit, What I'd Say, in 1959.

Album jacket for the single, I Got A Woman (1954).

Fast‑forward another 50 years and Kanye West is in the studio, zeroing in on a tiny slice of Ray Charles’s I Got a Woman, the moment where Charles belts out that unmistakable line, "She gives me money, when I'm in need". Kanye lifts that fragment, reshapes it, and drops it into the foundation of his beat, building a new melodic world on top of Ray’s groove before laying down his rap.

To strengthen the Ray Charles connection, West recruited actor, comedian and singer Jamie Foxx to sing the a capella (vocal) introduction to the song. Foxx had won the Academy Award a year before for his portrayal of Charles in the biopic Ray.

Movie poster for Ray, starring Jamie Foxx.

So, a Christian hymn from 1901 informed a gospel hit from 1954 which was reworked into a R&B hit for Ray Charles, which, 50 years later, was sampled in a platinum selling hip-hop classic. That sonic alchemy continues today. In 2025, American rapper Freddie Gibbs partnered with DJ/producer The Alchemist (real name Alan Maman) to release the song I Still Love H.E.R. which samples West's Gold Digger. The beat, indeed, goes on.