SOUL, SONG AND SYMBOL
Aretha Franklin, Queen of Soul and diva of divas, was a deeply troubled woman whose unhappy life was the grist of her genius
Tributes are continuing to pour in for singer Aretha Franklin, who died on Thursday at the age of 76. Her voice made her the ‘Queen of Soul’ and one of the greatest singers in living memory. She was a symbol for feminism worldwide and civil rights in the US. Her funeral will be on August 31 in Detroit.
As I once discovered, Aretha Franklin was a deeply reticent woman, with a profound distrust of journalists, who spoke little about her craft and artistry and always shied away from revealing anything about her life.
It must have been an unguarded moment then when she once described her music as “me, with my hand outstretched, hoping someone will take it”.
Franklin, who died on Thursday at the age of 76 of pancreatic cancer at her home in Detroit, was without question the most superlative singer in popular music over the past 60 years — the undisputed Queen of Soul. But, in musical terms, more simply The Queen. She was also a deeply troubled woman.
The cliché about blues and soul being the music of hardship takes on a more complex psychological resonance when you consider the baroque tribulations of Franklin’s life.
Jerry Wexler, who presided over Franklin’s recordings in the late 1960s and early ’70s — her golden period — once said there are three qualities that make a truly great singer: “head, heart and throat”. The head is intelligence, the phrasing. The heart is the emotional feeling and sensibility that feeds the flames. The throat is “the chops” — the voice.
Franklin and Sam Cooke, he said, were the only artists he had ever known who combined all three.
The tributes to Franklin will inevitably concentrate on two of her best-known up-tempo performances — the high-octane cooking of Think in the film The Blues
Brothers, and Respect, the song that brought her to international fame in 1967.
But for me the voice of Franklin is best heard on ballads that expressed her vulnerability, her passion — and her faith. Natural Woman, a hit in 1968, which she performed to tearful acclaim at a tribute concert for the song’s composer, Carole King, in 2015; Angel; Oh Me Oh My (I’m A Fool For You Baby); I’m Your Speed.
A transcendent intensity
Listen to the title song of the gospel album Amazing
Grace, from 1972, and you hear a voice, as someone once put it, “on loan from God himself”.
The church, of course, was her cradle. Her father, the Rev CL Franklin, was a highly charismatic preacher, and from the age of eight Aretha was singing at his New Bethel Baptist Church in Detroit, and joining him on his “gospel caravan” tours.
He was the most famous black preacher of his day, a celebrated figure on the gospel circuit; the recordings of his sermons were bestsellers. Cooke was a regular visitor to his home and Martin Luther King was a close family friend. With her father as her manager, Franklin recorded her first album, Songs of Faith, when she was just 16. She was already a mother of two children.
Two years later, under the aegis of John Hammond — the man who had “discovered” Billie Holiday — she signed up with Columbia.
Over the next six years, she would record nine albums of jazz, blues and pop, but none that properly captured the fiery, transcendent intensity of her voice or the rapt, prayerful beauty of her piano playing. In 1967 she signed to Atlantic, coming under the wing of producer Wexler.
In a masterstroke, Wexler took her south to Muscle Shoals in Alabama, pairing her with the musicians at FAME studios. The result was the brooding, soulful I Never Loved A Man (The Way That I Love You), her first top 10 US hit, paving the way for her classic period, with such songs as Chain of Fools, Think, Respect and I Say a Little Prayer.
It seemed that every human emotion was contained within the compass of Franklin’s voice, but underpinning all of them was a deep and enduring emotional fragility. Franklin’s mother left her husband when Aretha was a child (she died when Aretha was 10) and her father was to be a dominant presence in her life.
Even within the libertine milieu of the gospel circuit, where hell-raising was as common as praying, Franklin’s father was notorious for his sexual appetites.
In 1940, he had been obliged to leave a church that he was ministering in Memphis after impregnating a 12year-old member of his congregation.
And his home in Detroit was said to be the scene of orgies in the hours after his God-fearing congregation was virtuously in their beds. This was the atmosphere in which the young Aretha was raised. She had given birth to two sons by the age of 15.
For years it was widely rumoured that the reverend had actually fathered her first child, who was named Clarence after him, although it was later claimed that the father was actually Donald Burk, a boy she knew from school. Both of her sons took her family name, and were raised by her grandmother and sister.
Wexler, who worked closely with Franklin for a number of years, wrote that in the studio she “never hit a wrong note, never showed a second of self-doubt … her execution miraculous” yet “her depression could be as deep as the dark sea. Anguish surrounds Aretha as surely as the glory of her musical aura.”
He added: “Five-and-dime psychologists could write volumes on her reliance upon unreliable men.”
None were more unreliable than Ted White, a Detroit pimp who she married at 19 against her father’s wishes, and who went on to become her manager. White was frequently violent.
In 1968, Franklin became the first African American entertainer to grace the cover of Time, but even while celebrating her accomplishments the report described how White had “roughed her up” in full public view in the lobby of an Atlanta hotel — an account that