Aretha Franklin

Tue, 03 Aug 1999 16:00:00 +0000

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."

Respect: Aretha Franklin, 1967

Tue, 03 Aug 1999 16:00:00 +0000

It was Washington, D.C., more than 30 years after my mother decided not to marry Rev. C.L. Franklin, and more than 20 years after his daughter Aretha, my old Detroit neighbor and schoolmate, finally switched from Columbia to the Atlantic label, slipped down to Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and cut that unstoppable hit, "Respect," that was still filling the sunny May air of a late Sunday afternoon on my way, this time by taxi, to National Airport, which is actually in Arlington, Va.

Leaned forward in the backseat, watching the querulous, lanky driver's eyes connect with mine in the rear view mirror, I was thinking about Leon Russell's line from "A Song for You," the one that goes: "I love you in a place/where there's no space/or time." That so many years had already passed and that I'd soon be landing again at Chicago's O'Hare Airport in the time it would take to listen to a Leon Russell and an Aretha Franklin back to back had me thinking in rhythm and patterns and clusters and slices. If, for example, I were ever asked for some reason to draw one of those demographic, statistical pieces sliced up to indicate how I'd spent my time on earth, there would have to be one thin, barely forkable sliver of pie to represent the entire 1 percent of my life I've spent making plane connections at O'Hare.

Salon.com > Al Young

Aretha Franklin

Respect: Aretha Franklin, 1967