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Complete archives for People

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A poet and novelist who knew the Queen of Soul as a
teenager looks back at the forces and influences
that shaped one of the world's greatest singers.

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By Al Young

August 3, 1999 | For a good half-century the splendid instrument that is Aretha Franklin's voice has been transporting more listeners to invisible worlds than all the airlines, trains, buses, spacecraft and ships combined. The invisibility of music has always invited a likeness to spirit: realms of mystery, pleasure zones, sound-pictures, sound-feelings, sound-wisdom in rhythm; intimate specifics and imponderables -- all of it indescribable, really. When I listen to Aretha, I hear the connection between sound and spirit. Both are invisible, and yet each is a force whose effect on us is always incalculable.

By the early 1960s, Ray Charles, among others, had so popularized the so-called soulful sound in rhythm & blues that its influence slopped over into jazz. "That was the real me," Ray Charles says to this day of his church-tinged voicings. Even so, he was accused of bastardizing sacred musical idiom. In the wake of Charles' popularity among hip and square listeners alike, alto saxophonist Cannonball Adderley and the quintet he led got themselves a big (what would now be called crossover) hit with "'Dis Here," a gospel-driven blues penned by his pianist, Bobby Timmons. On the album, taped live at San Francisco's Jazz Workshop, Adderley introduces the song by telling his audience that the quintet's going to do something based on church music. "I'm not talking about your Bach chorales," he explains. "I'm talking about soul church music."

Also Today Respect: Aretha Franklin, 1967 The Queen on the radio and a taxi driver's volcanic rant bring a whole new meaning to human connectedness and mutual R-E-S-P-E-C-T.

"Soul church music," its harmonies, rhythms and the urgent fervency of the black sanctified sound recharged pop music so powerfully during the 1960s that rhythm & blues, the very designation, disappeared. In a sense, Aretha Franklin, still directly connected to gospel tradition, took Ray's message and ran with it across every border there was. Re-labeled "soul," African-American vernacular music suddenly found itself yet again in a category by itself. While "soul" sounded better than the old "race record" label of the 1920s and '30s, its effect was to exclude the music of James Brown, Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin from the rock 'n' roll roundup. Artists and pundits still debate the negative and positive effects of this name change, but one thing is clear: It was during the later, socially uneasy, '60s that Aretha Franklin emerged as the Queen of Soul.

In 1960, Aretha landed a recording contract in New York with Columbia Records, which, over the course of six years and nine albums, tried to develop her as a snazzy supper-club singer of tasteful, jazz-friendly standards, ballads and Broadway show tunes. She had no problem putting over such material. She could perform cabaret songs persuasively -- even beautifully -- but her heart was never really in it. On the LP "Unforgettable: A Tribute to Dinah Washington," Aretha polished up such classics as "If I Should Lose You," "What a Difference a Day Made," Hank Williams' "Cold, Cold Heart" and the title track, "Unforgettable." Among the star players backing her were vibist Teddy Charles and trumpeter Ernie Royal, both of whom were either recording or gigging at the time with Charles Mingus. Also on the date was the sought-after George Duvivier, bop legend Bud Powell's favorite bassist. And at piano? Aretha Franklin herself -- who else? It does seem to have been during her association with Columbia that Aretha's skills at piano and her ear for harmonic nuance and subtle phrasing developed immensely.

When, at the urging of record exec and producer Jerry Wexler, Aretha moved from Columbia to Atlantic Records in 1967, her career went through the sea change that brought her vocal powers to full world attention. Wexler booked her into the Florence Alabama Music Emporium (FAME) Studios in Muscle Shoals, Ala., to record with a smoking rhythm section: electric pianist Dewey "Spooner" Oldham, guitarist Jimmy Johnson, bassist Tommy Cogbill and drummer Roger Hawkins, who all happened to be Southern white players. After listening to the playback of "I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You)," everyone in the studio knew that Aretha had achieved something phenomenal. In fact, Atlantic had itself a hit single in search of an album. Sales of Aretha's first Atlantic album, wisely titled after her unstoppable single, flew all the way out of the ball park. Those Atlantic sessions put Aretha Franklin on the map, where an artist of her caliber badly belonged. But, in a real big way, she also put Atlantic on the map. Suddenly the fortunes of the moody, doleful young Detroiter and the cranky, home-style, independent label specializing in black R & B, blues, and jazz were grandly braided. Years later, when the Rolling Stones signed with Atlantic, Mick Jagger admitted that they wanted to be on the label that had launched Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin and other black American greats who had been their inspiration.

Starting with that first hit single, Aretha quickly established herself as an international singing star. Before its star jumped ship for the Arista label eight years later, Atlantic would have 14 Aretha Franklin albums as well as most of the hit songs associated with her that have since become classics: "Respect," "Do Right Woman, Do Right Man," "Dr. Feelgood," "Save Me," "Baby I Love You," "(You Make me Feel Like) A Natural Woman," "Chain of Fools," "Since You've Been Gone," "Think," "I Say a Little Prayer," "This House that Jack Built," "See Saw," "Eleanor Rigby," "Call Me," "Spirit in the Dark," "Don't Play That Song," "You're All I Need to Get By," "Bridge Over Troubled Water," "Spanish Harlem," "Rock Steady," "Day Dreaming," "Wholly Holy," "Angel," "Until You Come Back to Me" and "I'm in Love." By the time she performed her song "Think" (co-written in 1968 with Ted White, her then husband) in the 1980 film "The Blues Brothers," an entire generation had sprung up that knew her only from a radio diet of Golden Oldies, such as that one, which could be a song of either love or protest. She sings:

I ain't no psychiatrist,
Ain't no doctor with degrees,
But it don't take too much high I.Q.
To see what you're doing to me.

And the song concludes:

You need me,
And I need you,
Without each other
There ain't nothing we can do.

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