Calling him the new Elvis and saying he dances funny misses the point: American Idol Taylor Hicks is the embodiment of the last fifty years of popular music. In his Alabama hometown, Hicks tells Jon Caramanica why Ray Charles matters more to him than say... Justin Timberlake

Walking around Ray Charles's studio a couple of weeks after being crowned the fifth American Idol, Taylor Hicks is struck by the serenity of it all. The setup—furniture in place, clothes in closets, a library of ancient performance tapes—is very much as the legendary singer left it when he passed away in 2004. It's as if Charles might at any moment swing through and get back to business.

Representatives of the late singer's estate had picked Hicks up at his L.A. hotel in Charles's black Mercedes-Benz and taken him on a tour—past Ray's home in View Park and then on to the corporate headquarters of Ray Charles Enterprises, where Ray's studio remains.

He was thrilled just to be in the room, but in a month full of gifts, this one turned out to be the sweetest—Hicks would be allowed to record a song of his choice in the studio, the first person permitted to do so since Charles's death. "I pretty much lost it," Hicks says two months later, navigating the rolling streets of his hometown, Birmingham, Alabama, for only the second time since winning Idol, his eyes a bit moist at the memory. "If Ray was alive, they told me, he would have loved me."

After getting surprised with the news, Hicks was led to Charles's wardrobe and encouraged to pick out a jacket. He hesitated, then pulled one out and tentatively slipped it on. "It fit like a glove, no tailoring to be done," he says. "It was all I could do not to fall down and cry like a baby. It was almost like a nod from Ray, like, 'You're OK.'"

If FOX's American Idol approximates democracy, here's what Taylor Hicks's recent victory might say about our country: age trumps youth (at 30, Hicks is the oldest winner to date); the sight of a white boy singing the blues is not even remotely a shock; and, when given the chance, we'll support the underdog. Hicks is prematurely gray, dating back to his teenage years. He's slightly socially awkward. He's a bit doughy—though he walks with a swagger. And mostly, he's the product of a grandfatherish musical tradition. Hicks seemed comically out of place amid the well-scrubbed, stage-trained kids who were his competition.

And yet, this former bar singer was voted the most popular vocalist in America. Maybe it was the idiosyncrasies—his manic stage presence or his signature dance, a cross between Stevie Wonder's sway and a Tourette's tic. Or maybe it was his sterling voice, an alluring, evocative rasp that can be fierce or tender, and sometimes both at once. Or maybe it's because the musical miscegenation practiced by Hicks is so thoroughly part of American culture, that to deny him would have been to deny ourselves.

Taylor Reuben Hicks grew up in and around Birmingham, Alabama, in a decidedly nonmusical family. As a kid, when he wanted to hear records, he'd secret them from the homes of his friends and sneak them onto the record player at his house. "It wasn't all rosy," Hicks says of his childhood. "Family things. Moving around. I did some living as a kid. There's a lot of things that music's been able to replace in my life, and I'm forever indebted to it."

When he was 10, Hicks discovered he had a talent for mimicry. "I sang 'When Doves Cry,' and kids would laugh because I'd sound so much like Prince," Hicks says, sinking into the leather couch in the living room of his parents' Hoover, Alabama, home. "Even that run in the Commodores' 'Nightshirt,' where it goes into a falsetto—I hit that."

But classic-soul karaoke wasn't much in demand among Hicks's peers. "When everyone was hooked on Blind Melon, I was hooked on Ray Charles's Live in Japan" he says. "I was a musical outcast." He found sympathetic ears, though, while sitting in with various bands at local, racially mixed blues clubs, and eventually formed his own outfit that, while he was at Auburn University, barnstormed through the South playing everything from dive bars to frat houses to restaurants (he's still a few credits shy of graduating with a major in broadcasting). Night to night, the set list would vary—some Otis Redding, some Doobie Brothers, maybe some Koko Taylor or Widespread Panic. A few years ago, Hicks even landed a slot opening for James Brown in Montgomery, Ala. "When he danced, it was like Jim Jones's Kool-Aid," Hicks says wistfully. "It wiped everybody out."

Auditioning for Idol, he says, was more about strategy than fame. "My mentality is working musician—I need a gig." For years he'd been touring nonstop in a Mini van, pressing up his own CDs, and playing for tips. "If I got on television and sang my music, I could sell some CDs," he says. "You have to take every opportunity that comes your way."

After Kelly Clarkson, Ruben Studdard, Fantasia Barrino, and Carrie Underwood, Hicks is the first white man to win Idol, though the blue-eyed soul tradition he represents is long and deep. It arcs through Elvis Presley, Michael McDonald, Steve Winwood, Hall & Oates, Joe Cocker, and Justin Timberlake—a sound so familiar to American ears it's something of a surprise it took as long as it did to conquer Idol. But Hicks—who recalls a rootsier McDonald—is a perfect ambassador: gifted, humble, and most crucially, comfortable. So at ease and natural, in fact, that discussions about appropriation have been practically absent. Hicks isn't selling anything bigger than himself, and it works.

More than race, though, Hicks is a product of the South, his sound informed by region. "I cut my teeth in honky—tonks and juke joints," says Hicks. "I worked the chitlin' circuit." This bleeding together of black and white signifiers is particularly Southern in origin, where there's a history of overflow between sounds and cultures, in spite of endemic segregation. Hicks's native Birmingham, of course, is the seat of the Civil Rights Movement—it's where black people were hosed by Bull Connor, where Martin Luther King Jr. was imprisoned and wrote "Letter From Birmingham Jail," and where a series of racially motivated bombings led the city to be dubbed "Bombingham."

More than four decades later Birmingham still bears those scars. As a musician, though, Hicks has been operating at its creative fringes, gigging regularly at places like Ona's Music Room, a mood-lit, speakeasy-style venue owned by Ona Watson, a local jazzbo who's performed with Eddie Kendricks and Grover Washington Jr. "He's my little brother," says Watson, who is black, in the hours before Hicks was to take the stage for a solo show at local entertainment complex WorkPlay. "We're trying to dispel that old Alabama tradition."

With that in mind, for his first major public appearance following his Idol win, Hicks appeared at Birmingham's City Stages festival in June as a surprise guest during a set by Snoop Dogg, playing harmonica on "Gin & Juice."

"I like rap," Hicks says, "because rap tells the truth." He counts Alabama rappers Deuce Komradz among his favorites. "The idea I had was, Has Hues harmonica ever been run through rap music?" The appearance was notable not just because of the minor odd-couple media frenzy it created, but also because it marked Hicks as someone willing to break free of the narrow confines Idol had laid out for him. Even his first post Idol single, "Do I Make You Proud," was a blow against the show's vision for him. It's effectively a pop-gospel number, broad and triumphalist, and well suited to Hicks's raspy grain. But even though it fit neatly with Idol's saccharine pop vision—show producers handpick songs for the finalists—it wasn't the song Hicks was initially given. "I walked out of the studio and said, You guys deal with it. I'm not singing that music."

"You have to keep up with the times," continues Hicks. And so even though, in the Idol tradition, his forthcoming, as-yet-untitled album will feature a Ray Charles cover, which he will record in the icon's studio, it'll also look to more eclectic influences—David Bowie and Beck among them, Hicks says. "Don't think for a second I don't want to be hip," says Hicks, a bit defensively. "Because I do."

Hicks has engendered a peculiar sort of cult following—the Soul Patrol, a loose band of fanatics who congregate at his appearances and online. They're hopelessly devoted to him—raising money for his favorite charities, maintaining Web sites in his honor, snapping up copies (17,000 as of August) of his self-released CD, Under the Radar, available from only one store in Birmingham. During intermissions on the Birmingham stop of the American Idols Live! Tour 2006, they send text messages that are displayed on one of the jumbo screens in the arena:

im a hicks chick
taylor I wanna patrol your soul
taylor looks like leno but sings like elvis

Hicks has also become a subject of public conversation—he was named one of People's Hot Bachelors in the weeks after he won Idol. Though he won't reveal who he voted for in 2004, he's visited the White House—the most notable part of the trip, he says, was "talking to the cooks. They were high-fiving me, telling me to play some Ray Charles. I kinda felt at home." He's even inspired some noteworthy backlash from, of all people, fellow blue-eyed soul man Justin Timberlake, who said in an interview that Hicks "can't carry a tune in a bucket." (Timberlake retreated from the statement, and Hicks declined to reply.)

Timberlake's statement may have generated more momentum had he been correct, but Hicks's Idol rnn was impressive. His read on the Elton John's 1971 "Levon" was tender, and he skillfully brought out the hurt lurking beneath the surface of James Ingram's 1980 ballad "Just Once." Best, perhaps, was Hicks's version of Elvis Presley's 1969 "In the Ghetto," one of the icon's most thoughtful numbers. It was a vivid, inspired performance: Hicks owned it, clutching the song tight, as if to shield it from the cold. It might have been the defining song of the whole Idol season.

It was also the moment that balanced out his equally memorable stage antics. A true showman with a honed sense of his own stage personality, he rarely hid from his eccentricities, especially his signature dance, which he's been cultivating for years (Hicks's high school girlfriend told People.com he used to do "what he called 'the Carlton dance,' from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.")

"They make fun of my dancing and stuff," says Hicks. "But go listen to Soul Train—they watched Sylvester Stewart [aka Sly Stone] perform 'I Want to Take You Higher,' and they had the same reaction when they look at me. The Soul Train and the Stax revues, those people that couldn't get it, those things make me just completely resilient."

It's odd, in 2006, to hear a young white man talking about overcoming judgment, and using the struggles of old soul men as touchstones. But those stories are so entrenched in the collective memory provided by popular culture that they've become almost neutral, robbed of their specific import, robbed of their context.

Hicks gets tagged as Elvis quite a bit—after his show at WorkPlay, in the next morning's Birmingham News, the paper's reviewer plainly declaimed, "All right, it's official. Taylor is the new Elvis." But the compliment—and the people who say it usually mean it that way—is misleading. Elvis was cool, effortless, and a bit sinister. Hicks is quite the opposite: earnest, excitable, and a bit bumbling. Elvis portended a sea change in the shape, color, and sound of popular music; Hicks has no battles to win, the beneficiary of five decades of popular musical crossbreeding. If Elvis was the catalyst, Hicks might be the end product. And if Elvis was the fear, maybe Hicks is the relief.