BLUES JUNCTION Productions
7343 El Camino Real
Suite 327
Atascadero, CA 93422-4697
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“American history wells up when Aretha sings.”
- President Barack Obama
On August 16, 2018, the world lost an iconic musical, social and cultural figure in Aretha Franklin. She had been suffering from failing health for some time. To Franklin’s great credit and those around her, much of that personal business was kept from the public eye. She died, as she had lived, with unflinching dignity and class. For the record, she died of pancreatic cancer. She was 74 years old.
Miss Franklin, as she is universally referred to by her closet friends, colleagues and associates, commanded, and yes, even demanded respect and she got it. Respect was much more than a career defining anthem which galvanized both the civil rights movement and woman’s liberation at a time when both concepts were struggling for acceptance.
Her life in music began as a child singing in the gospel choir in Detroit’s New Bethel Baptist Church where her father C.L. Franklin was the Minister. Music in the Franklin household was a family affair, as her older sister, Erma, and younger sister, Carolyn, were also in that same choir and went on to have professional singing careers of their own.
However, it was Aretha, the middle daughter, who from a very early age garnered much attention and before she left this mortal coil, had secured a place as one of America’s most beloved musicians of all time. She was an accomplished piano player, but it was her unmistakable singing voice which tapped into gospel, blues, rhythm & blues and jazz in a way that helped propel the sound of soul music to dizzying heights. The music of Aretha Franklin has a universal appeal. Her music is revered by casual fans as well as the most sophisticated music aficionados, ethno-musicologists, the harshest critics and her fellow musicians. It is in this context that Aretha Franklin stands on the highest mountaintop of American music, whose lofty peak has only enough room for herself and Ray Charles.
To have any understanding of the genius of Aretha Franklin, it is important to understand a fundamental principle of the American experience. It goes back to the notion that only three things are guaranteed best sellers in America, drugs, sex, and God. In the African-American community “God” is a much safer way to go and in fact, unlike the other two, represents a “get out jail free card.” This isn’t a trivial thing when one is clinging to the lowest rung in the harsh and often brutal caste system in this country.
Aretha Franklin’s mother was an accomplished piano player and singer in her own right, but it was her father who represented the most important influence in her life. Early in the century, there were street corner preachers and hustlers working for nickels and dimes in a hat. On the other end of the God business was Clarence LaVaughn (C.L.) Franklin. He was a preacher who gained a national reputation for his articulate sermons. Many of his homilies were recorded and sold hundreds of thousands of copies and could be heard on black radio stations throughout the country. He became a celebrity who had all the trappings that went with that, namely wealth and notoriety.
Franklin wore alligator shoes, dressed in expensive suits and drove new Cadillacs. He even fathered a child out of wedlock…with a twelve year old girl. This is where that get out of jail free card comes in handy. This sense of entitlement is a part of the “church culture” into which Aretha was born. It has been widely reported that Aretha Franklin had been sued 88 times for not paying her bills. It was as if paying florists, limo companies and various contractors and sub-contractors was beneath her. This poorly kept secret is a very “church” thing and has no theological boundaries. After all, one can’t expect Aretha Franklin to only take away the many positive aspects of this upbringing.
C.L. Franklin went on the road for weeks at a time with what was called the C.L. Franklin Gospel Caravan. These shows included the famous preacher reciting his greatest hits of course, but also gospel music provided by Sister Rosetta Tharpe, The Dixie Hummingbirds and The Soul Stirrers, who at the time featured Sam Cooke.
Aretha wasn’t just along for the ride; while still a child she began performing on these showcases. Her piano playing and singing stood out with a maturity and command that didn’t comport with her young age. Franklin also witnessed a lot of “adult” behavior. When it comes to hedonism rock stars got nothin’ on preachers and gospel singers. It is important to realize that an 'Aretha Franklin' doesn’t just happen by accident.
Aretha Franklin grew up in a large six-bedroom home which had silk drapes and a living room large enough to accommodate a grand piano with lots of room to spare. Because of her father’s fame, the Franklin household was a gathering place for other black entertainers. As a child Aretha didn’t have to leave home to hear Art Tatum, Oscar Petersen, Duke Ellington and Nat Cole play a grand piano. Famous singers from Ella Fitzgerald to Della Reese were also visitors to the Franklin household. Dinah Washington gave singing lessons to young Aretha and her sisters. The cornerstone of the gospel music world, the Reverend James Cleveland taught Aretha church cords on this piano.
It wasn’t just world-renowned musicians who were frequent visitors to the Franklin household. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King was a close friend and confidant of C.L. Franklin and a person Aretha knew personally throughout her childhood and throughout his short life. King’s influence in the arenas of social justice and civil rights would remain with Aretha Franklin throughout her life. In 2017, for instance, Franklin turned down an offer to sing at Donald Trump’s inauguration. She had sung at other Presidential inaugurations in her lifetime, perhaps most notably at Barack Obama’s first inauguration. On that glorious day she sang My Country ‘tis of Thee wearing a “Sunday go to meeting hat” which spoke directly to her background in the church. Yet, it was this most recent repudiation of Donald Trump that is reflective of a lifetime of using her celebrity status to take a stand on behalf of a righteous cause.
Way back in 1956, a fifteen-year old Aretha Franklin was picked up by the record label which had released sermons by her father, JVB Records. The label was started by Detroit record shop owner John Von Battle. That first release was a gospel album entitled Songs of Faith. On the album Aretha Franklin sang the Thomas A. Dorsey standard Precious Lord, Please Take My Hand. The song had been recorded by others including Sister Rosetta Tharpe as early as 1941, and famously by Mahalia Jackson in 1956 on the Columbia label. The song received the most exposure when Elvis Presley sang it a year later in 1957 in front of 50 million television viewers on the Ed Sullivan show. The Mahalia Jackson version of the song was a favorite of Dr. King. She would often sing it at his rallies and speaking engagements. However, Franklin she was asked to sing this song at the funeral of the slain civil rights leader. Four years later Franklin sang Precious Lord, Please Take My Hand at Mahalia Jackson’s funeral as well.
The attention Franklin received from that song and this album stimulated an interest with other labels. While still a teenager, Aretha Franklin was recruited to sign with Berry Gordy’s fledgling Motown label that had just set up shop in Franklin’s hometown. Instead she signed with famed talent scout John Hammond and Columbia Records. Like one of her idols, Sam Cooke, Franklin made a seamless transition into the secular marketplace.
Much has been written about Franklin’s career at Columbia. Many thought the label mishandled this incredible talent. While that may be, I find some of the most compelling music ever recorded on various tracks from the nine albums she recorded on the iconic label.
It was obvious the label tried to make her into an “all around” entertainer in kind of the Dinah Washington mold. A combination of super club blues and jazz, rhythm & blues and even standards from the great American songbook were thrown at the young musician. She handled everything with aplomb.
Franklin, who was still a teenager in 1960, embraced this material as if she had been singing in this vein her entire life. In a way she had, as the gospel traditions are steeped in rhythm & blues and in fact it may just be the other way around. They can’t be separated. The Sunday tent revivals in the black community are simply an exercise in calling up the redemptive spirits that wrestled with the soul just a few hours earlier in the wee hours of a Saturday night. Aretha Franklin was deeply ensconced in all of this.
Through 1966, she made one terrific album after another on the label, starting with her February, 1961, secular debut album Aretha: with the Ray Bryant Combo. Many of the songs on this album had been recorded and released as singles the previous year and include standards like Harold Arlen’s Over The Rainbow and the Gershwin Brothers’ It Ain’t Necessarily So.
She recorded eight more albums through the fist half of the decade of the 60’s. While these recordings never found a particularly large audience in that Beatle crazed musical landscape, real musicians began to take notice of Franklin’s immense talent.
The great Etta James once recalled listening to Aretha Franklin's version of the Hoagy Carmichael and Johnny Mercer jazz standard Skylark. In the second verse, Franklin jumps an octave. “I had to scratch my head and ask myself, How the fuck did that bitch do that?” James goes on to say, “I remember running into Sarah Vaughan, who always intimidated me. Sarah said, 'Have you heard of this Aretha Franklin girl?' I said, 'You heard her do Skylark, didn't you?' Sarah said 'Yes, I did. And I'm never singing that song again."
The Columbia recordings by Aretha Franklin have withstood the test of time and have enjoyed a renaissance in interest over the years and of course have also benefited by a renewed interest in all aspects of this amazing career in the wake of Franklin’s death last month. The box set of these releases is currently selling on Amazon for $799.00.
However, Franklin and these Columbia recordings were just a precursor to an incredible run of success she would have after signing with Atlantic Records. She was about to leave the great American songbook behind and venture into a world of stardom that very few have ever achieved. For an African-American female performer it was unprecedented.
By this time Franklin was also carrying with her both responsibilities and heartache in large quantities. Franklin gave birth to her first child when she was 13years old. She had her second child by a different father a couple of years later. She then married a ginned-up street hustler named Ted White in 1961. White also served as her manager. It has been widely reported that her eight-year marriage with White, with whom Franklin had a third child, featured both verbal and physical abuse.
Yet, all of this seemed to galvanize an ambition, drive, determination and resolve in Franklin. She was about to capture lightning in a bottle at Atlantic. The right material, the right musicians, the right producer and engineer came together with the right singer at the right time.
Atlantic was no stranger to blues, rhythm & blues and deep southern soul music. Label founder and owner Ahmet Ertegun, producer Jerry Wexler, along with the innovative and highly respected recording engineer Tom Dowd, hit it big with their Atlantic recordings on Ray Charles in the 1950’s. The genius famously left that label for the greener pastures of ABC Paramount. So famed producer, Jerry Wexler and the wunderkind of the recording studio, Tom Dowd couldn’t wait to record the mighty and until now, underappreciated talent that was Aretha Franklin, but they would have to wait until her contract with Columbia expired.
In the meantime, Atlantic signed a distribution deal with Stax Records out of Memphis. Tom Dowd’s first recording in Memphis with the famed Stax house band was an album by a then mostly unknown vocalist named Otis Redding. His album, Otis Blue/Otis Redding Sings Soul included mostly covers. It also had a Redding original entitled Respect. This strategic alliance between Atlantic and Stax came to an end two years later in 1967 about the same time Franklin signed with Atlantic.
Aretha Franklin was sent to Rick Hall’s Fame studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. It was a place where she could get some of that deep-fried southern grease onto a record. As it turned out it wasn’t the place, but the musicians that gave those records that southern feel and groove. It was just one year earlier that Hall hit it big with When A Man Loves A Woman with Percy Sledge. Yet, Wexler’s dream almost got derailed before it even got started.
While Aretha was playing and singing on her very first Atlantic session and on her very first day in Rick Hall’s Fame Studios all hell broke loose in an incident involving her husband/manager White, Hall and Wexler, a horn player or two and vodka. Various accounts and the severity of the altercations between the three parties varies only slightly depending on who is telling the story. They did get one song down and it was a good one I Never Loved a Man (The Way That I Love You).
The acrimony from this testosterone and vodka fueled incident spilled on to the relationship Hall hoped to nurture with Atlantic Records and Wexler. It was Wexler who declared publicly that he would never work with Hall again. Wexler kept his promise. He simply brought the Muscle Shoals rhythm section, affectionately known as “The Swampers” to Atlantic’s New York City studios to complete the first Aretha Franklin album on the label. He then helped to finance the building of Muscle Shoals Sound right in the shadow of Hall’s Fame Studio in that small town in northern Alabama. The Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section of guitarist Jimmie Johnson, drummer Roger Hawkins, bassist David Hood and keyboard player Barry Becket ran the studio that opened in 1969, where they would eventually cut tracks with Franklin.
That first album entitled I Never Loved A Man (The Way that I Love You) was the huge hit which had eluded Franklin during her run on Columbia. This certified Gold Record was released on March 10, 1967, and is considered one of the greatest albums of all time.
The album opens with a reworking of that Otis Redding song Respect that came out just a year and half earlier on his Otis Blue/Otis Redding Sings Soul album. Franklin’s interpretation of the song changes the thematic element of the tune from the sad sack begging for respect when he gets home to a woman and a black woman at that, demanding it in no uncertain terms. She even added the spelling out of the word, R-E-S-P-E-C-T and the lyric, “find out what it means to me.” Sock it to me…indeed. The song, complete with a King Curtis tenor sax solo on the bridge, is simply unforgettable and helps to make it a song for the ages.
As Redding himself said upon hearing Franklin’s version of the song, “Well, it’s hers now.” That may have been the understatement of the century. It became an instant anthem which spoke directly to both the civil rights movement and the woman’s liberation movement. It has been widely speculated that it was also a rebuke to Ted White, her failing marriage and that rocky business association. White and Franklin were divorced a year later.
Now that Franklin’s stardom had been firmly established, she never again would allow anyone to stand in her way. She did things her way and on her terms. Throughout her career, for instance, she insisted that concert promoters pay her cash in advance before she would take the stage. She kept that money in a purse at her feet under the piano where she could keep an eye on it during her performance. If there is anybody who thinks that this is eccentric, it is only because they are not an African-American who grew up in the music business in the 1950’s and 60’s. Sorry folks, nobody is going to rip off Miss Franklin.
Franklin also kept much of her personal trials and tribulations out of the public eye. Not an easy thing when you are operating in the harsh glare of a very bright spotlight.
Not surprisingly maybe President Obama put it best when he said of Franklin. “Nobody embodies more fully the connection between the African-American spiritual, the blues, R&B, rock and roll—the way that hardship and sorrow were transformed into something full of beauty, vitality and hope.”
Wexler wrote in his memoirs. “I think of Aretha as Our Lady of Mysterious Sorrows. Her eyes are incredible, luminous eyes covering inexplicable pain. Her depressions could be as deep as the dark sea. I don’t pretend to know the sources of her anguish, but anguish surrounds Aretha as surely as the glory of her musical aura.”
Despite this anguish, or perhaps because of it, Franklin continued to record a string of hit songs that were nearly universally beloved by virtually anyone who heard them. She was that rare performer whose music was embraced in equal measure by the general public and critics alike. Songs such as Dr. Feelgood, Do Right Woman, Do Right Man, Baby I Love You, Chain of Fools, Think, I Say A Little Prayer, See Saw, Spirit In The Dark, Rock Steady and others can be pulled from one successful album after another in the late 60’s and early 70’s.
Some of these were written by Franklin and others like Robbie Robertson’s The Weight, Lennon and McCartney’s Eleanor Rigby or Paul Simon’s Bridge Over Troubled Waters, originally sung by Art Garfunkel, sound like they were custom made vehicles designed for the undisputed Queen of Soul. They weren’t, of course, but by the time she got done with them they had been scorched by Franklin to the point that you can’t or perhaps just don’t want to recall what the original even sounded like.
One song in particular was written specifically for her. One afternoon Jerry Wexler spots the married couple and songwriting team of Gerry Goffin and Carol King walking down Broadway in Manhattan. The record executive rolls down the window of his passing limo and yells out to the two pedestrians, “Write me a hit for Aretha.” The next morning the pair was in his office and handed him, You Make Me Feel (Like a Natural Woman). Franklin took the tune and turned it into an unforgettable tour de’ force.
I was recently discussing Aretha Franklin’s amazing run of success at Atlantic Records during the late 60’s and early 70’s with African-American roots music empresario, Charlie Lange. He has hosted both blues and soul radio programs for over 35 years and is the founder and proprietor of Bluebeat Music, among his many other credits in a ridiculously long resume in the business of American music. Lange said, “Aretha Franklin didn’t follow trends. She created them. She was connected to the music in a real palpable way in which all audiences could relate. It was real and virtually everyone who heard it could feel that. There was never any bullshit with her music.”
I don’t pay attention to which records sell in large numbers and which ones don’t. I can’t predict what the general public will embrace and what it will ignore, so the number of top ten, top forty or number one hits on this chart or that chart means absolutely nothing to me. I could care even less about awards. But for those who do care about such things Franklin sold millions of records and won eighteen Grammys. She also was voted #1 in Rolling Stone magazine’s “Greatest Singers of All Time”. For the record Ray Charles was #2. That is pretty cool until you realize that Bob Dylan clocked in at #7 and Mavis Staples landed in the #56 slot. There isn’t an honor that has eluded Aretha Franklin including being the first female inductee to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. She is a Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient and has received a Kennedy Center Honor. Franklin even sang the National Anthem at a Super Bowl when that colossal carnival of commerce rolled into her hometown of Detroit in 2006.
Yet, when I think of Aretha Franklin I think of hearing the song Respect on the radio for the very first time while sitting in the car while my folks went shopping in my hometown of Orange, California. Those precious moments fulfilled two very primal needs in my life that I still cling to this day. One is the avoidance of shopping malls and the other is to listen to music. In this case an AM car radio.
I knew at that moment when that song came blasting out of the speakers that the next .62 cents I had rattling around in my pocket would be spent on the 45 of that record. The song sounds like it was shot out of a cannon and you are trying desperately to catch it in mid-flight.
When I think of Aretha Franklin, I think of the twelve-year old boy trying to buy the 45 of Miss Franklin’s Think. I didn’t know the name of the song. I thought it was called ‘Freedom’. Because of how she rips herself from the lyric and in a moment of unadulterated ecstasy and shouts the word “Freedom.” A man standing next to me had the last copy on the shelf and told me the song was called Think. The clerk said they would get another shipment overnight and have it ready to purchase the next day. Of course, I was standing next to my bicycle and in front of the front door when the clerk opened it for business the next day.
For a youngster, like myself, it was a very early glimpse into the rich world of black culture and expression that wasn’t by and large a part of my upbringing. Of course, these aren’t things a youngster thinks about. I guess I knew on some level that I was beginning to latch onto something very deep and emotional. It was something that I could hang onto for the rest of my life. Aretha Franklin opened up that world for myself, as well as everybody in America and around the world for that matter.
Tonight, as I listen to her Live at The Fillmore West album I can hear the music of the sanctified Baptist Church colliding head on with rhythm & blues in a way that is simply thrilling. By the time she starts in with Spirit in the Dark I have already been taken to a place that I never want to leave.
I guess when I think of Aretha Franklin I think of another quote by President Obama who said, “If you are ever playing DJ at a party, kick it off with Aretha doing Rock Steady.”
As an eleven-year-old and some fifty years later, Miss Franklin has always filled my heart with joy. Her music makes me think more, feel more and love more…oh yeah…and as President Obama suggests… dance more. You really can’t ask any more of an artist than that.
- David Mac
Copyright 2022 BLUES JUNCTION Productions. All rights reserved.
BLUES JUNCTION Productions
7343 El Camino Real
Suite 327
Atascadero, CA 93422-4697
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