Aretha Franklin an inspirational woman

Hamilton College music professor Michael Woods remembers Franklin’s pioneering career.

When I was 18 years old I graduated from high school. My buddy and I played in a cover band that did Motown tunes. In the summers we would jam in the late mornings at mine or the guitar player’s house. One morning I came running down to his front porch. I had just got a letter from Aretha Franklin! I had written to her several times telling her how awesome I thought her voice was. I always played my bass with a new sense of purpose after that day. She was my hero rivaled only by James Brown.

Now that the queen of soul has passed, we need to take a look at what soul music ought to be. Soul ought to be about producing sounds that are expensive because those sounds cost somebody a lived experience to create. With soul music, one does not just take a given beat and have it repeat 35 times without variation, and by a machine that does not laugh, cry or dance. A robot does not bring the funk like a black drummer from the hood. The very nature of soul music is to exalt the subjective qualities of the music over the objective aspects. Soul is about how an experience or its musical equivalent makes you feel.

As a black teenager, the sound of Aretha’s voice always filled me with hope. Our politicians today would do well to listen to black singers and try to spot the sound of hope and then legislate to it. Jesse Jackson knew that it is much easier to keep hope alive than to let it die and try to force it back to life. If you can spot it in the sounds that people make, you can be certain that it is quite alive. Even when she sang songs that seemed sad, the very color of her voice filled me with energy and courage to face whatever the challenge was. When I heard Aretha sing, no one had to try to convince me that black life mattered. I knew it mattered because no one else in all of America could riff like that. You can not create the sounds that she does without having lived through some tough times.

John Hammond, as her manager, tried to turn her into another Billie Holiday. She was quite capable of singing jazz with very beautiful shadings. But when she went down and recorded at Muscle Shoals Alabama, they finally let her turn on the power and she developed the sound of one of the most haunting and compelling African American cries in all of popular music.

The colorful metaphors she employed when she sang “Oh Me Oh My” are classic. “Skylark” is a story about a young beautiful black woman searching for love. She is asking a bird to fly up and look over the scene and see if it can help her find her lover. The shape and subtlety of the phrasing is magnificent! When she does “Bridge Over Troubled Waters,” it is as if a black female mother figure is reaching out a hand to me as I sink. That hand has a sure grip and it pulls me to safety. When she sings “Eleanor Rigby,” the woman transforms from an obscure British woman into a little old black lady with a handbag that is way too large and thick unattractive stockings who attends a small, almost forgotten AME Zion church outside of Detroit. The power and tone color of her voice alone makes the difference.

When she sang “R.E.S.P.E.C.T.” she broke through on two levels at the same time. The song was a female anthem for self-empowerment. At the same time it was one of the first songs where a woman could say “Gimme my proppers when I get home.”

She has won so many awards that it is off of the scale! Even the governor of Michigan once declared her voice a natural resource!

Aretha and Sam Cooke were the first two major popular artists that survived the transition from church to R&B. At that time most black church people felt that if you were going to sing gospel you had to do that and only that. I am glad we expanded our understanding of her world class voice and allowed her to create a body of work in multiple styles. To me her voice is so spirited that every note she sings is spiritual.

She has sung to honor Obama as well as Mandela, but it is the average man who goes to work every day and tries to make a decent living that she truly represents.

It is my sincere hope that her death will make a final contribution: A clarion call for our greatest singers of all ethnic backgrounds to make statements of dignity and sing songs of love and not just sex. The next time you visit a black church like the ones her father used to pastor, linger at the altar for a moment after service when the once rockin’ church has fallen back into silence. Quiet yourself and see if you can pick up a faint soulful riff of Aretha when she was yet a teenager singing “While the Blood Is Runnin’ Warm In Yo Veins” floating on the air.

The greatest R&B voice in the history of American music has passed into another realm. But that much soul has to leave a residue.