Aretha Franklin Soul Sister-in-Chief
How Aretha Franklin, soul sister-in-chief, became a civil rights heroine
Aretha Franklin didn’t just sing with the angels, she brought them down to the street corner
How many voices could compete with hers? It may be true that the “queen of soul” emerged from the shadow of the “queen of gospel”, Mahalia Jackson, but there was an even more elemental quality to Aretha Franklin’s singing. Mahalia walked on clouds with the angels; Aretha brought the angels down to the street corner.
Even a performer as charismatic as Otis Redding had to bow down in her presence. We may love his recording of Respect — he wrote it, after all — yet even his most devoted fans would have to concede that Franklin’s version, spitting fire and venom, took the song to another level. A feminist anthem was born, and Aretha was its midwife.
Her peak years coincided with a pivotal moment in American cultural history. That impressive stage persona represented the self-assurance and independence of a new generation, black and white. In the end, as blood flowed on the streets and the Sixties gave way to the Seventies, the idealism turned sour — but for a short time at least, Franklin was soul sister-in-chief.
Franklin belonged to an era when music still trumped marketing. Whitney Houston would out-sell her a couple of decades later, but there’s no question which of the two singers left the greater legacy. It was Franklin’s good fortune to come of age in a period when pop music was on a creative high. In Houston’s era of rampant materialism, it was more likely to be the soundtrack to a night at a cocktail bar. All the production values in the world could not mask the gulf in the quality of the songwriting.
What the two women did have in common, though, besides their church roots, was a turbulent private life. Aretha may have outlived Whitney, but she too had to come to terms with trauma and dysfunction. In her final years stories about her drinking and her ballooning weight took precedence over reviews of her concerts.
A good deal of the unsavoury detail — along with paeans to her talent — was laid bare in Respect, the 2014 biography by David Ritz, the music writer whose previous books had included an unflinching portrait of Marvin Gaye. Ritz had already collaborated with Franklin on her autobiography, Aretha: From These Roots. In Respect, however, he exposed the demons of a woman whose insecurities and tantrums had become the stuff of legend in the business. Franklin, always defensive towards the media and reluctant to own up to her frailties, was not pleased. “As many of you are aware,” she said in a statement, “there is a very trashy book out there full of lies and more lies about me.”
Her dismay was understandable. She may have been born into the gospel aristocracy — the daughter of a renowned preacher, she was singing in public from an early age — but her formative years were almost as turbulent as those of another child prodigy, Michael Jackson. Beyond church, many a gospel singer had a penchant for casual sex. In Franklin’s case, the result was that she was the mother of two children by two fathers by the time she was 14. Her first husband, Ted White — who also became her manager — had been a pimp, albeit one who was admired for his taste in English tailoring and French restaurants.
Like Nina Simone, Franklin often seemed to be drawn to the wrong kind of man. Her daily life was full of what the hymn Amazing Grace — one of her showstoppers — calls “dangers, toils and snares”. It’s a testament to her talent and dynamism that she managed to overcome them and build a recording career. Far from blasting, fully formed, into the pop charts, she spent more than half a decade trying to find her voice after signing an ultimately unfulfilling contract with Columbia Records.
At the dawn of the Sixties being signed to Columbia was regarded as the ultimate badge of respectability: after all, it was the home of Miles Davis, not to mention Leonard Bernstein and Glenn Gould. Given that she was under the aegis of the legendary talent-spotter and producer John Hammond — the man who helped to launch the careers of everyone from Billie Holiday to Bob Dylan — you might have expected Franklin to achieve instant success.
The label, though, never seemed sure whether to let her be herself or to turn her into another Lena Horne. Franklin seemed uncertain too. There are some fine moments in those early recordings — her skill as a singer and pianist was never in question, and she more than proved that she could handle a jazz standard — but sales were disappointing. What were her young fans supposed to make of her version of an oldie such as Rock-a-Bye Your Baby With a Dixie Melody, a love letter to the old South that was once part of Al Jolson’s blackface repertoire? (Franklin and her father were Jolson admirers, as it happened.)
Had she been starting out today, it’s quite conceivable that the young singer would have vanished without trace after one album. In the Sixties, however, talent was given more time to gestate. Nevertheless, at the end of 1966, six years after she signed to Columbia, she jumped ship to Atlantic, a company that had a much sharper ear for what the black audience wanted to hear. And in Jerry Wexler she found a producer who knew how to take her back to her gospel roots.
From the moment she entered the studio for her first session, the pieces began to fall into place. I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You) marked the arrival of a majestic new voice steeped in the blues. It made no difference that the backing musicians were white; all that mattered was that they spoke the common language of R’n’B. Even so, that first session was marred by a racially charged bust-up between White and one of the horn players. It took all of Wexler’s diplomatic skills to persuade Franklin to complete the project.
Which are the best albums from the Atlantic years? Many a fan will opt for Lady Soul (1968), which includes the glorious (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman, written by Carole King and Gerry Goffin. In 2015 Franklin would bring the house down at the Kennedy Center in Washington in a powerhouse performance of the song for an audience including King, one of the guests of honour. Ending with Franklin throwing her mink coat to the floor, it was, without question, one of the truly spine-tingling musical moments of the year.
Another 1968 release, Aretha Now, includes her take on the Burt Bacharach-Hal David classic, I Say a Little Prayer, an example of Franklin in less-is-more mode. As for in-concert albums, the Live at Fillmore West set, taped in the promoter Bill Graham’s celebrated San Francisco venue in 1971, is raw and impassioned. In the next one she returned to gospel basics on the ecstatic Amazing Grace, taped at a Baptist church in Los Angeles.
Fifteen years later, hopes were high for another church-based album, One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism, but this time the results were overblown. Indeed, Franklin would be destined to spend the second half of her career trying to match the miraculous quality of her earlier work. Her run at Atlantic extended into the late 1970s, but as with so many R’n’B stars the advent of disco did her few favours. Clive Davis’s Arista Records (which could also call on the services of Houston) subsequently provided a congenial home, but would you want to exchange any of those sleek, airbrushed records for the songs of the Atlantic years?
All of which left fans wondering how much contentment Franklin still found in her craft. Speculation about her health and reports of her financial troubles became more frequent. So too did reports of her diva outbursts. Other singers, Natalie Cole and Gladys Knight among them, found her to be hostile. The mixture of ego and insecurity poisoned her relationship with many of those who came into her orbit. Journalists who gained the chance to interview her grew used to her simmering silences and disdainful glances. Even a TV interviewer as polished as David Frost struggled with her as early as 1970, as the music critic Henry Pleasants recalled. A tense, chain-smoking Franklin was less than forthcoming:
“How did you sing?” Frost asked her.
“Religiously,” she replied.
“What sort of gospel?”
“My father’s gospel.”
“Which father?”
“Both fathers.”
“What do you want to get across when you sing?”
“What I feel.”
It was only when she had the opportunity to sit at the piano and play for Frost and the studio audience that she finally dropped her guard. The voice flowed and soon it cast its spell. Some people can only speak through songs. When she was singing, Aretha Franklin spoke in her own magical language.
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