Aretha was troubled, yet the undisputed Queen of Soul
As I once discovered, Aretha Franklin was a deeply reticent woman, with a profound distrust of journalists, and 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 yesterday at the age of 76 from 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 one considers the baroque tribulations of Franklin’s life.
Jerry Wexler, who presided over Franklin’s recordings in the late Sixties and early Seventies – her golden period – once said there are three
‘Her unhappy life was the weight she carried, but also the grist of her genius’
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. (You Make Me Feel Like) A 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.
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 Reverend 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.
Franklin was the most famous black preacher of his day, a celebrated figure on the gospel circuit; the recordings of his sermons were bestsellers. Sam Cooke was a regular visitor to Franklin’s home and Martin Luther King was a close family friend. With her father as her manager, Aretha Franklin recorded her first album,
Songs of Faith, when she was just 16. She was already a mother of two.
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 the producer Jerry 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 I Love You), which gave her first top 10 American 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, Mr Franklin 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 12-year-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 Mr Franklin 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 Franklin’s 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”.
“Five and dime psychologists,” he added, “could write volumes on her reliance upon unreliable men.” None were more unreliable than Ted White, a Detroit pimp whom 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 made Franklin, understandably, deeply distrustful of the media thereafter. I felt the effect of this myself. I had a rare interview with her in 1980, on her last ever visit to Britain. (She never returned, largely due to a fear of flying following an incident in 1984, which meant that thereafter she’d travel only by bus.)
It is a meeting that stays in my mind for all the wrong reasons. I was ushered into her suite at the Savoy, to find her seated on a sofa, flanked by then husband, Glynn Turman, her brother and manager Cecil, and two PR women, all sat in a semi circle – it seemed to give her reassurance.
I pulled up a chair in front of them tape recorder in hand, feeling as if I was facing a firing squad. She was awkward, suspicious, her answers brief to the point of monosyllabic. She seemed to have no interest in talking about her life but also, and more depressingly, her music. As the interview ground on, desperate to ignite her interest, I asked about the two albums she had made with Curtis Mayfield in the Seventies, Almighty
Fire and Sparkle – wonderful records, made at a time when her sparkle was actually threatening to fade and her music descend into formula. She shrugged.
They were, she said, making no attempt to disguise the boredom in her voice, “just records...” After little more than 20 minutes of this excruciating stuff, and having determined that she spent much of her time cooking and watching television soap operas, to my eternal regret, I abandoned the interview, frustrated, disappointed but also deeply saddened. Aretha was the Queen, and I idolised her.
At that time she was on the brink of a revival in her fortunes, that would come when, after 19 years, and she celebrated her first platinum-selling album in 1985 with Who’s Zoomin’
Who? But consistency always eluded
her.
She fought constant battles, with her weight, her drinking and agoraphobia, which kept her confined to her home for months at a time. She failed to show up for recording sessions, cancelled concerts, often at the last minute and with no explanation, short-changing her audience when she did turn up with perfunctory performances, where hits would be dismissed in hasty medleys and show tunes and schmaltz given the high five.
Biographies and accounts of her life depict her as small-minded and mean-spirited, deeply insecure and jealous of others’ success. None of this matters – at least to me. It is not necessary for geniuses to be nice people too, although we would wish them to be happy.
But even that, one feels, escaped Franklin. Her unhappy life was the weight she carried, but also the grist of her genius.
Her sister Erma once said that it was Aretha’s lot to channel “more emotion than one human being could bear”. It was also her gift to the world.