Locals recall Aretha
“There will never be another like her,” says writer/producer Steve Tyrell, among notables who weigh in.
Aretha Franklin disliked air conditioning, which she felt negatively affected her voice. In Franklin’s defense, that voice was one of the greatest in American popular song, so she was more than entitled to a distrust of the invisible “fuel” that makes Houston run.
Despite Franklin’s aversion to our ubiquitous cooling units, she still left her imprint on Houston, much as she did the rest of the world. Upon her death Thursday, locals mourned the passing of an incomparable musical stylist and interpreter, who sang songs about dignity and empowerment and respect with vulnerability and combativeness and empathy. She did so not just with conviction but a sense of vocal shading and quiet/loud dynamics that have been largely forgotten as generations of younger singers capable of covering the same octaves prove their limitations by failing to harness the breadth of their gifts.
Houston native Joel Berry has seen hundreds of shows in the city, almost all of them with his wife, Linda. They saw the Beatles and the Beach Boys. He’s in the process of documenting the shows. But he recalled a show at the Arena Theatre in 2002. To the Berrys, the show stood out both for the music and two smaller moments.
Prior to the performance, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee presented Franklin with a plaque and referred to her as “Madame Franklin.”
Franklin took the stage and settled in at the piano. She started a song, then interrupted herself. “There’s something I need to say to Ms. Lee. I’m not a madame. I am a mademoiselle. I have not been a madame for many years. I am a mademoiselle.”
Berry remembered the venue’s air conditioner being off. “We were told that it was because Aretha didn’t like how it affected her voice,” he said. “It didn’t take long for the room to get uncomfortably hot.”
Midsong, Franklin’s hairpiece began to fall. She stopped the song, pulled it off and “tossed it onto the piano and started fiddling with the bobby pins in her hair. When she felt comfortable with the way her hair looked, she said, ‘Now let’s get back to the music.’
“That’s when I decided she wasn’t a diva,” Berry said. “She was definitely one of a kind.”
That one-of-a-kind quality informs the other remembrances of Franklin from Houston.
Mayor Sylvester Turner called her “a legend and an institution.
“She started off in the church,” Turner said. “Her father was a pastor, so people my age, we grew up on Aretha Franklin.”
Steve Tyrell, a writer/producer/singer from Houston, called her “a national treasure.”
“There will never be another like her,” he said.
Houston native Bill Bentley, a veteran of the music industry, saw her first at the Paladium Ballroom in 1966 opening for Percy Sledge. “The show was church, and then some,” he said.
He said Sledge was at the peak of his popularity with the single “When a Man Loves a Woman.”
“Opening was an incredibly inspired woman who I had heard of but didn’t know her music,” he said. “She played piano like a fiery angel lived inside her, and when she started singing the crowd literally gasped.”
Bobby Phats, host of the long-running hip-hop and R&B show The Groove on KPFT, called Franklin “truly one of the most gifted and talented singers America has ever produced.”
“She is one of a handful of artists who influenced the course of soul music. For me, discovering her music as a teenager was like finding the holy grail,” he says. “Every record was a teaching lesson on how to deliver soulful, powerful vocal performances. She was the true embodiment of soul. That’s why she’s the Queen.”
The Rev. Marcus Cosby of Wheeler Avenue Baptist Church said Franklin was “more than just a singer; she was a symbol. A symbol of perseverance and transcendence that refused to be limited to a genre or generation. Her legacy will forever be an iconic representation of tremendous ability coupled with unique humility. The world has been made better because of her regal life.”
Franklin’s regal life didn’t necessarily start that way. She was born a preacher’s daughter in Memphis, Tenn., in 1942, but she truly embodied so much about America, as her family moved to New York and later Detroit, which she came to call her home. Though we make distinctions between music and culture from the North and South and Midwest, Franklin’s vocals existed in the hours between a Saturday night and a Sunday morning, a duality that transcended region. She was the greatest of soul singers, and like rock ’n’ roll, she was as much Memphis as she was Detroit because our country thrives on aspiration and mobility.
She was also a totem to collaboration. Franklin’s earliest recordings didn’t earn her the audience her talents deserved. She returned to her roots, recording in northern Muscle Shoals, Ala., and in Tennessee and went from a talent to an iconic star.
Franklin’s work in the late ’60s and early ’70s was career defining, and musically redefining. She enjoyed success long after it, but those years held sway over multiple generations of singers, including Christina Wells, a Houstonian who is currently competing on “America’s Got Talent.”
“I have been singing Aretha Franklin from the time I was a little girl,” Wells said. “‘Natural Woman’ was the first Aretha song that really spoke to me. I had fallen in love for the first time, and I sang that song with all the passion in my heart.”
Wells cited Franklin as more than just an inspirational figure for an aspiring singer.
“With her strong voice and her fuller figure, she gave me someone who looked like me — and maybe, just maybe — I could sing like her someday,” she said.
Lyle Lovett remembered Franklin from a 2015 PBS taping at the White House. He’d seen her at the Kennedy Center Honors before and said hearing Franklin live “was awe inspiring.”
He remembered the White House event as being similar to many of her shows.
“Apparently, Ms. Franklin didn’t care for air conditioning,” Lovett said.
“When I arrived that morning for rehearsal, the White House was warm and the air was still,” he said. “As the production crew worked feverishly to get rehearsals going, I overheard an overheated producer say, ‘Aretha is the only person in the United States who can get the air conditioning turned off in the White House.’”
Controlling the temperature of a room, for some singers, wasn’t just a metaphorical concept.
Lovett recalled Franklin “in the balmy East Room” of the White House “wearing a fur coat.
“She proceeded to blow the roof off. Her singing was effortless. Her movement was minimal. But the sound of her voice was majestic.”
Lovett said the other performers were gathered in the green room watching her performance on TV monitors. She finished, walked through the green room, looked at her awed mini-audience and nodded at him.
“‘Mr. Lovett,’ she said, and nodded from across the room as a way to say hello,” he said. “I’ll never forget it.”