One of the most revered of all American record producers, Jerry Wexler helped to shape the sound of modern black American music. He also produced records by rock acts such as Bob Dylan, Dire Straits and George Michael, and was responsible for signing Led Zeppelin. However, it was his work with seminal black artists such as Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin for which he will be best remembered.

After making an early mark by coining the term rhythm and blues while working as a young reporter on the trade magazine Billboard, he joined another music industry giant, Ahmet Ertegun, at Atlantic Records. There he became one of the key architects in the creation of a new, self-confident black music scene, taking elements of blues, r&b and gospel, and adding a thumping backbeat to create the styles that came to be known as soul and funk.

He also changed the way that records were produced. “No one really knew how to make a record when I started,” he once said. “You simply went into the studio, turned on the mike and said, ‘play’.” Wexler turned this hands-off approach on its head and made record production into a fine art, paying close attention to every detail of the song’s construction and how the performance sounded.

At times this made him an abrasive task master and he was a demanding perfectionist in search of the sound he wanted — “the immaculate funk” as he called it. Yet he seemed to know instinctively how to get the best out of musicians and was held in high regard by almost all of those with whom he worked. Despite the fact that he was a white Jewish atheist from New York, he enjoyed a particular affinity with church-raised black singers from the Deep South and recorded much of his best work in studios in Memphis and Muscle Shoals, Alabama. Shortly before Ray Charles died, the singer paid tribute to his old producer’s “extraordinary insight”, while Wilson Pickett, whose classic hit In the Midnight Hour was one of Wexler’s finest productions, incredulously wondered: “How could he understand what was inside of black people like that?”

Born Gerald Wexler in New York City in 1917, his father was a Polish immigrant who worked as a window cleaner. At 19 his mother sent him to study at Kansas State College of Agriculture and Applied Science. It took him away from the Harlem jazz clubs where he had fallen in love with singers such as Billie Holiday, but opened up a new musical world as he discovered the blues music that filled the bars and clubs of nearby Kansas City.

His studies were interrupted by active service in the Second World War, but he went on to complete a degree in journalism, and by 1947 he was back in New York. After a brief spell helping his father to clean windows, he took a job with the music publishers BMI as a song plugger. He soon moved to Billboard, where he was hired as a cub reporter on $75 a week.At the time Billboard published a weekly black music chart which it called race records. Many were beginning to feel the term was inappropriate and Billboard decided to seek an alternative. He suggested “rhythm & blues”, and the following week the chart appeared under its new name.

That he had a highly attuned ear for a hit was evident when in 1950, while still at Billboard, he suggested to a young singer called Patti Page that she should record The Tennessee Waltz. She took up his suggestion and her version sold three million copies. The following year he went to work for Big Three, the music publishing arm of MGM Records, but in 1953 he joined Ahmet Ertegun at Atlantic Records, then a small independent label specialising in black music.

Over the next decade, Wexler and Ertegun worked in tandem to build Atlantic into a powerhouse of the American music industry. One of their first recordings was Ray Charles’s I Got a Woman, widely credited as the first soul record. They encouraged the singer to pursue the then groundbreaking hybrid of r&b, jazz and gospel that came to be known as soul music. During the 1950s he produced classic r&b hits by artists such as Joe Turner and Ruth Brown, and worked with the greatest vocal groups of the day, including the Drifters and the Coasters. Towards the end of his life he made a list of the 20 records he was most proud to have produced. Seven of them came from the 1950s: Professor Longhair’s Tipitina, Charles’s I Got a Woman and What'd I Say, Big Joe Turner’s Shake, Rattle and Roll, LaVern Baker’s Tweedlee Dee, Champion Jack Dupree’s Junker’s Blues and the Drifters’ There Goes My Baby.

Wexler was also an astute businessman who had a key role in Atlantic’s sales and marketing strategies, including, as he freely admitted, the scandals of payola, the practice of bribing disc jockeys to play a company’s records. He explained in his 1993 autobiography Rhythm and the Blues: A Life in American Music, that it was simply the way the music industry worked at the time. He also confessed in the book to a typical rock’n’roll lifestyle of drug abuse and numerous adulterous relationships.

In the 1960s, Atlantic expanded its interests into rock music, and it was Wexler who in 1968 negotiated the signing of Led Zeppelin to the label. However, his main interest continued to be black music. In 1965 he signed a distribution deal with the Memphis-based Satellite Records, which went on to become known as Stax. Among the records Wexler produced on the label was Wilson Pickett’s mighty In the Midnight Hour. It was characteristic of his production style that during the session to record the song, he did an impromptu dance in the studio to show the musicians the rhythm he was after.

Other classic recordings he made during the era included Green Onions by Booker T and the MG’s and a number of fine hits for Solomon Burke. He began working with Aretha Franklin, encouraging her to move away from gospel towards a dramatically sensual and soulful style. Wexler produced a string of monumental singles for her, including Respect, I Never Loved a Man (The Way That I Love You) and Chain of Fools. He ended up working on 14 Franklin albums. Another of his most influential recordings of the period was the ‘blue-eyed soul’ album recorded with Dusty Springfield which produced the 1969 hit, Son of a Preacher Man.

Many of his landmark recordings with Franklin and others were made at the FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, where he discovered and cultivated a collective of hugely talented multi-racial musicians that included the guitarist Duane Allman. In the early 1970s he began to produce a wider range of artists, including Dr John and Willie Nelson, but he left the label in 1975 after more than 20 years. He soon resurfaced at Warner Brothers and went on to produce pop albums such as Kim Carnes’ Sailin’ and Dire Straits’ Communique.

He also took Bob Dylan to Muscle Shoals in 1979 to produce his first born-again Christian album Slow Train Coming. The result was one of Dylan’s best-sounding albums, although not everybody, Wexler included, agreed with the sentiments behind the record. When the album won Dylan his first Grammy, the first two names he thanked in his acceptance speech were God and Wexler. He invited him back to produce the follow-up, Saved (1980).

Later in life, he produced Santana, José Feliciano, Linda Ronstadt and even George Michael among others. He was inducted into the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame in 1987 and, although he eventually retired to a Florida marina, he remained a music man until the end of his days. When asked what he would like inscribed on his tombstone, is said to have replied: “More bass.”

He is survived by his third wife, the novelist and playwright Jean Arthur, and a son and a daughter from a previous marriage.

Jerry Wexler, record producer, was born on January 10, 1917. He died on August 15, 2008, aged 91