ARETHA FRANKLIN
Set in motion 50 years ago this month, Aretha Franklin’s I Never Loved A Man The Way I Love You plucked sublime soul from a near-catastrophic melee of violence and racial tension, and came to define the possibilities of a nascent genre. “We knew what we h
Fifty years ago this month a miracle occurred in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. And even racial tension and violence couldn’t thwart I Never Loved A Man The Way I Loved You.
It’s the evening of January 24, 1967, downtown florence, alabama. rick hall, the owner of fame studios in nearby Muscle shoals, is standing in the doorway of a motel room occupied by aretha franklin and her manager husband ted White. a disagreement, to put it mildly, is in progress. “are you calling me a redneck?” a fuming hall bellows at ted White. “Well, you sure look like one to me,” White spits back. “Why don’t you go fuck yourself?” yells hall with a shove. White retaliates with a punch to hall’s jaw. hall returns the blow and suddenly the pair are rolling on the floor in a flurry of fists. earlier that day, franklin had begun her first recording session for atlantic records in hall’s studio under the supervision of the label’s go-getting vice president and producer Jerry Wexler. in front of the swampers, the studio’s house band, she had delivered an emotional rendition of ronnie shannon’s ballad i never Loved a Man (the Way i Love you) destined to usher in a new soul era. the moment she’d stopped playing the piano and looked up, the musicians had gone wild. “there was much whooping, cheering, and slapping on the back,” says soft-spoken songwriter spooner oldham, who played electric piano on the track. “everybody there knew it was a case of right place, right time for everyone involved and the Lord that day. there were tears in my eyes, in everyone’s eyes.” “you knew histor y was being made,” agrees oldham’s songwriting partner Dan Penn, also present at the session. “Jerry Wexler said, ‘Let’s cut Do right Woman, Do right Man next’ which i’d written with Chips Moman for the occasion. the band worked it up a bit while i came up with some words for the bridge. By the time i’d finished them, rick hall and ted White had come to blows and aretha was on the plane back to new york.” and that’s how one of the most monumental recording sessions in soul music lore came abruptly to an end. “i was livid,” admitted Wexler in 2006. “aretha’s first session for atlantic records at Muscle shoals was over. We had only completed one song and had the beginnings of one other. Luckily, the finished one was one of the greatest songs ever recorded.”
The aretha Franklin Who stepped off the plane in Memphis that overcast January morning on her way to fame had travelled far. since making her solo singing debut with a stirring Jesus, Be a fence around Me in her father, the reverend C.L. franklin’s new Bethel Baptist Church in Detroit in 1952, aged just 10, she’d thrilled audiences on his gospel caravan tour up and down the country alongside the soul stirrers, Mahalia Jackson and the Caravans, then recorded her first album, Songs Of Faith, live in her father’s church for JVB records, aged 14. William Prince, the lead singer of the Precisions, a Detroit doo wop quartet, remembers her new Bethel performances with reverence. “My father played organ in her father’s church,” he says, “and she’d stand up and do a song. it would be a spontaneous performance. she’d start singing and you could hear the influence of Mahalia Jackson. But she was really out there on her own. no one else had her range or delivery. she was so dynamic and everyone would be up on their feet.” it wasn’t just the Lord’s songs aretha was attracted to. her father’s record collection was a rich source of jazz and blues and he was as likely to be holding court at the dinner table with pop stars like Dinah Washington, sam Cooke, Bobby Bland and fats Domino as with gospel singers the staple singers and James Cleveland. for the franklins, gospel and pop went hand in hand. When she followed her hero Cooke into the pop market she had her preacher father’s full support. “Both her and her father were looking for mainstream, meaning pop success,” Wexler noted. “for them, there was no contradiction between praying in church and hitting the pop chart and no doubts about how suitable a career in pop music was for her. their model was sam Cooke. they wanted her to make the same impact as he had.” “she learned a lot from sam,” concurs singer L.C. Cooke, sam’s younger brother, who in 1961 toured with the 19-year-old aretha, hank Ballard and the Midnighters and Clyde McPhatter. “he told her, always be strong, always be yourself, be aretha franklin and no one else and when you’re on-stage give your all. she was very young, she was still learning her craft but it was obvious she was different. her voice and style made her stand out. she had star quality. sam actually wanted her to sign to his label RCA. Berry gordy also wanted to sign her. her father thought Columbia was the place for her, though. it was established, already had a reputation.” But Columbia producer John hammond – who signed aretha after hearing a two-song demo in 1960 – saw her not as an r&B singer like sam Cooke, but as a jazz artist. hammond, who had signed Count Basie and Billie holiday, placed franklin with pianist ray Bryant, to some initial success. 1960’s label debut today i sing the Blues hit the us r&B top 10. 1961’s rock-a-Bye your Baby With a Dixie Melody took her into the top 40 in the us, australia and Canada. By the mid ’60s, she’d notched up two more us r&B chart hits with runnin’ out of fools and one step ahead. she was also a popular live draw. “she was becoming a fabulous performer in front of our eyes,” said herb kent, radio DJ for Wvon in Chicago from 1962 to ’70, who plugged her early songs on his show and caught her live. “her voice, her style, her movements on-stage. you knew she was going to be someone, already was someone.” “But there was a sense,” said Wexler, “that she wasn’t reaching her potential. that voice of hers, it should have put her on top. this was aretha franklin after all.” etta James, who would eventually lose her Queen of soul
“JERRY WEXLER SAID HE WOULD NEVER WORK WITH ME AGAIN. ‘I’LL BURY YOU,’ THOSE WERE HIS EXACT WORDS.” RICK HALL
crown to Aretha, agreed. In 2005, she told MOJO, “Aretha could really sing. Give her any kind of song – soul, jazz, R&B, a show tune – she would give it hell, but not being with a label like Chess or Motown or Stax, they didn’t know what to do with her. Columbia was a white label, they didn’t know her market. She should have been having hits. Instead, I was.”
Ted White WAS also keen to steer Franklin towards a white audience. the two had met at one of her father’s parties and married, in 1961, against her father’s wishes. Aretha, just 19 and already the mother of two boys, was flattered, looking to White both as a father figure to herself and her sons. But White’s interest was also professional. etta James claimed his intention was “to pimp Aretha out – not to other men, but to record companies. he gave her the attention she craved and she fell for him. he was good looking, he knew how to treat women well and it was a regular situation on the R&B scene. We were all pimped out, either for sex or music. Men made money from us.” White encouraged a repertoire of Broadway songs, with an eye on the sophisticated supper clubs. the result: potential Aretha hits went unnoticed. A dynamite performance of Rudy Clark’s the Shoop Shoop Song languished as an album track while Betty everett cashed in with an R&B number 1 in 1964; covers of dionne Warwick and Barbara lynn songs placed her in the role of follower rather than leader. Unhappy at the way her career was fizzling, Aretha became unreliable, failing to turn up to shows or promo opportunities with little or no explanation. She also stopped recording, sitting out the last year-and-a-half of her Columbia contract. “She really wanted to be a star,” said Wexler. “She wanted adulation, she wanted money. her father wanted the same things for her, and so did ted White. that’s what motivated the three of them then. And at Columbia she just wasn’t having big enough hits and it was easy to point the finger at Columbia and say it’s their fault.” When Franklin’s contract came up for renewal in 1966, the label was said to have lost $90,000 on her. But Wexler still jumped to sign her to Atlantic. “louise Bishop, a Philadelphia-based gospel DJ and friend of Aretha, called to say Aretha was ready for a new label,” Wexler said. “Aretha and ted White came to my new York office. She called me Mr Wexler, I had to call her Miss Franklin. ‘I want hits,’ she said, and we did the deal the old school way, just the three of us with a handshake and the promise of $25,000 for the first album.” Franklin fitted right into Atlantic’s roster. Ahmet ertegun’s label had, after all, facilitated the birth of soul music, with key releases by Ray Charles and Ruth Brown. “I felt a natural affinity with the Atlantic sound,” she wrote in Aretha: From these Roots, her 1999 autobiography with david Ritz. “to me, Atlantic meant soul. And more and more – especially with the advent of Atlantic artists like the Young Rascals, Arthur Conley and Wilson Pickett – soul music was exploding.” Wexler approached Jim Stewart, Stax’s self-effacing co-founder, to produce her – in the hope he’d do with her what he’d done with Otis Redding: “Which was,” said Wexler, “[to] take a raw blues singer and turn him into a worldwide pop star.” After Stewart turned him down, Wexler headed to Muscle Shoals to Rick hall’s Fame studio. Wexler, hall and the house rhythm section – Spooner Oldham (organ, electric piano), Chips Moman (rhythm guitar), Roger hawkins (drums), tommy Cogbill (bass), Jimmy Johnson (guitar) – had already struck gold with Wilson Pickett’s land Of 1000 dances and Mustang Sally. the brief Wexler gave was simple: “It was a case of sit her at the piano and capture the sparks flying. Basically I told her, go back to church and be yourself… I urged Aretha to be Aretha.” exactly what Sam Cooke had told her a decade earlier. “Jerry had a different approach [to Columbia],” said Aretha. “he wanted to base the music around me, not only my feeling for the song but my piano playing and basic rhythm arrangement, my overall concept… [he] made sure I put my personal stamp on [it]… Atlantic provided TLC – tender loving care – in a way that made me feel secure and comfortable. I went to work.”
Franklin personally picked 11 songs to record over a planned two-week session, arranging the piano parts on Fender Rhodes in her new York
home, and the backing vocals with her sisters Carolyn and Erma Franklin plus Cissy Houston, mother of Whitney. Well prepped and dressed ready for work – “business casual, a nice trouser suit, stylish, unlike a lot of artists who would dress down,” says Spooner Oldham – she entered the studio and, with tape rolling, she put down what would become the title track of the album in just two hours. Oldham admits he wasn’t sure who Aretha was when he went into Fame that first day. “I had heard her singing some night club songs, some show tunes, but nothing I had wanted to hear again and I didn’t know what to expect,” he says. “The band had no idea who she was,” adds Dan Penn, on whom she’d made a stronger impression. “They saw it as just another session, but I knew Aretha – I’d been listening to her records played on WLAC. You couldn’t ever forget that voice.” That voice had never sounded so intense and impassioned as it did that day. Liberated from the restraint of the jazz singer mould, sat at her piano with the band jamming, and using the collision of gospel, R&B and rock’n’roll as her vehicle, Franklin came of age. Sensual, powerful, in full bloom, she put her heart into her music and found her soul. “We didn’t get the right groove immediately, but once we got it, we were away,” says Oldham. “She was incredibly shy, she didn’t say much, just went straight to the piano, then out came the voice of an angel. It was the piano playing to my mind that really made it work. With that in front of her, she felt free to do just what she wanted.” However, Ted White had needed Wexler to convince him that Muscle Shoals was the right home for Aretha. He was sceptical about placing her in front of The Swampers, a white rhythm section with a reputation in the South for head arrangements – working up the backing from scratch with the singer. He argued that she was used to recording in New York, with an orchestra and a conductor and a musical script. Yet Wexler was sure that the Muscle Shoals way of working would liberate her and Aretha agreed. “This was worlds away from how I had worked at Columbia,” she said, “far more spontaneous and free-flowing, with so much more room to be creative… The enthusiasm and camaraderie in the studio were terrific, like nothing I had experienced at Columbia. This new Aretha music was raw and real and so much more myself.” I Never Loved A Man (The Way I Love You), the song, was
“THE BAND HAD NO IDEA WHO SHE WAS. THEY SAW IT AS JUST ANOTHER SESSION.” DAN PENN
the key. Legend has it that Ted White had met its writer, Ronnie Shannon, in a Detroit barber’s shop. Shannon, from Georgia, had stepped in to ask directions to Motown, introducing himself as a singer and songwriter. The barber told him to talk to White. When White’s haircut was finished, he went with Shannon out to his car, where he’d slept overnight, and Shannon sang him some songs. Impressed, White took him to his office, briefed him on the kind of songs he wanted Aretha to sing – “classy, sophisticated” – and Shannon penned I Never Loved A Man in an afternoon. Down in Muscle Shoals, Franklin sang the lyric – “You’re a no good heart breaker/You’re a liar and you’re a cheat” – as if it were autobiography, a window on her tempestuous marriage. It was shattering. “When Ted White heard her sing and play I Never Loved A Man, live for the first time, it was like he couldn’t believe his ears,” said Jerry Wexler. “It was like he was seeing what she was capable of for the first time, what she could actually achieve.” The mood in the studio was euphoric, edging towards ominously over-excited. “We knew that [Ted] had a volatile temper, and he took a bottle and took a slug in celebration,” Wexler said. “He then handed it to the trumpeter [Kenneth Laxton] and he took a slug. That bottle went back and forth, I don’t know how many times. I thought, Uh oh, that’s not good…” As things started to get fuzzy, playful banter turned to mud-slinging. White stormed out. Wexler, angry at the disruption to the session, ordered Hall to fire Laxton. “If it had ended there,” Hall said, “it might have been all right. The situation might have been salvageable.” Instead Hall followed White to the motel where White, Aretha and Wexler were staying, in the hope of straightening things out. Hall and White brawled, and even though Wexler intervened in the early hours of the morning, offering apologies and promises, Aretha and White flew back to New York the next day. “Ted White said Aretha would never work with me again,” Hall told MOJO in 2013. “Then Jerry Wexler said he’d never work with me again. ‘I’ll bury you,’ those were his exact words. It was dreadful.”
WEXLER PRESSED UP AN ACETATE OF I NEVER Loved A Man (The Way I Love You) on his return to New York and by the end of the week it was a radio hit. With only a half-finished Do Right Woman, Do Right Man for the B-side, he put the call out to Aretha and flew the Muscle Shoals band up to New York in the hope she’d arrive. “And she did,” says Wexler. “I wasn’t expecting that. I had to wait a couple of weeks, but in retrospect that didn’t matter.” So on February 8, 1967, she set to work at Atlantic Studios, at 1841 Broadway in midtown Manhattan. In front of Wexler, engineer Tom Dowd and arranger Arif Mardin, she added piano and organ to the rough Muscle Shoals demo. Then, over erma, carolyn and cissy’s sumptuous backing vocals, she delivered her knockout lead. Wexler had nothing but praise for her. “In terms of production,” he said, “I never gave her guidance. She was so confident. She knew exactly what she needed to do. everything was got down in one or two takes. All I had to do was get Tom Dowd to press ‘record’.” When Wexler invited the song’s writers, Dan penn and chips Moman, to hear the finished song, they were amazed. “We fly to New York and we’re in the control room at Atlantic and it’s like, Wow!” says penn. “Aretha starts to sing, her sisters come in behind her, she’s playing piano, I thought, Man, they sure captured the magic here.” When released as the flip to I Never Loved A Man (The Way I Love You), it delivered Aretha the hit she craved. placing at the top of the US R&B chart and remaining there for seven weeks, it also entered the US pop Top 10 and sold over a million copies.
“ARETHA WAS USING THIS ALBUM TO TELL HER STORY, BOTH THE GOOD AND THE BAD BITS.” JERRY WEXLER
A week later, she put down a further nine songs which would complete the I Never Loved A Man The Way I Love You album, songs she’d pored over with Wexler. “She came out to my home in Great Neck [on Long Island, NY],” he said. “We played through records together looking for songs for her to sing. She’d have definite ideas on what would work and what wouldn’t and how she’d approach doing something. She was already incredibly knowledgeable about music. Her musical intelligence was huge, despite being so young.” “Her and Jerry did their homework before they came to the studio,” says Oldham. “And it paid off. She’d start playing piano, sing a little, we’d pick it up from there, work it all up from scratch, come up with a chord chart. Those sessions were long, from 10am to midnight, a bit of supper, not much talk but always a lot of fun because it was so creative. And the control room would be rocking. Jerry and Tom would be listening, smiling, grinning. I don’t remember a time when things weren’t working for us at those New York sessions.” Covers of Ray Charles’ Drown In My Own Tears and Sam Cooke’s Good Times and A Change Is Gonna Come paid tribute to her touchstones. On the first, penned by Henry Glover and debuted by Lula Reed in 1951, Franklin turned heartbreak jazz into deep soul. A stripped-down A Change Is Gonna Come became stirring, take-it-to-the-river sermonising. Cooke’s version may have expressed wistful hope, but Franklin’s has more conviction. She knows she will overcome all obstacles. “She wanted to tell people where she had come from,” Wexler said. “This was her musical background laid bare; Ray and Sam coming out of the church. There was also a sense, though, that she was saying, ‘I’m this good, I’m the new Ray, the new Sam.’ She was always reserved, she gave so little away about her personal life and let her music do her talking. It felt like she was using this album to tell her story, both the good and the bad bits.” On top of exceptional vocal and interpretational skills, Franklin was proving herself a songwriter – an opportunity denied her female peers at Stax, Chess and Motown. Dr Feelgood (Love Is A Serious Business) was pure licentious come-on blues. Don’t Let Me Lose This Dream, meanwhile, pinned her allegiance to Martin Luther King’s civil rights movement over a bossa nova beat inspired by Astrud Gilberto and Stan Getz. But it was a fervid makeover of Otis Redding’s Respect that put her directly on the frontline. When released as the second single from the album in April, it was immediately adopted as a feminist and civil rights call to arms. The black journalist Phyl Garland dubbed it America’s “new national anthem” and when Wexler played Otis Redding her version, he told him, “I just lost my song… That girl has taken it from me.” For Franklin it provided an emotional release and documentation of her relationship with White, which would worsen in proportion with her growing fame. White was unable to deal with the power shift and Aretha took to drink to cope with the tension. The pair divorced in 1969. In his autobiography Rhythm And The Blues: A Life In American Music, Jerry Wexler described her as “Our Lady of Mysterious Sorrows… I don’t pretend to know the sources of her anguish, but anguish surrounds Aretha…”
RESPECT GAVE ARETHA FRANKLIN HER FIRST US pop Number 1. The album was a huge success too. Issued on March 10, 1967, it became her first US R&B Number 1 and biggest pop hit placing at Number 2. She was thrilled. “everything about that first Atlantic album pleased me,” Aretha wrote. “The acceptance, the sales, the musical power, the cover design…” By the end of the year, she’d been crowned the Queen Of Soul by the WVON radio DJ and club promoter Pervis ‘The Blues Man’ Spann, who in a mock coronation ceremony at the Regal Theatre in Chicago placed a crown on her head. Then on February 16, 1968 Aretha Day was declared in Detroit by the city’s Mayor Jerome Cavanagh. She would notch up a further six US R&B Number 1 albums, four of which were certified gold during her Atlantic tenure, all patterned on I Never Loved A Man… She also received eight consecutive Grammy Awards for best female R&B song – the award eventually, unofficially becoming dubbed ‘The Aretha’; her total currently stands at 18. For five years from 1967, her mastery was complete. There was also extraordinary music throughout the ’70s. After 1980 there were hits, but increasingly few and Franklin’s presence receded, more than ever the aloof, opaque character Wexler remembered from 1967. Yet she remained and remains, reputationally, the pre-eminent soul singer, the embodiment of the genre, an iconhood carved out by that very first Atlantic album. “We all knew as soon as we heard the playback,” said Jerry Wexler. “We knew what we had created, that this would be the future… It’s the moment Aretha, the soul singer and the Queen Of Soul, is born.” In terms of its components, the music could hardly have been simpler, more direct. Yet it had very nearly never materialised at all. “How did we manage to get that performance out of her when Columbia had failed?” pondered Wexler. “The material and the environment at Columbia just wasn’t conducive to her letting go and finding her voice in the music. We provided that environment. It was that easy. We gave her the room to do it her way.” For Aretha, though, “…soul was the key. There was no compromising, no deliberate decision to go pop… We weren’t trying to manipulate or execute any marketing plan. We were simply trying to compose real music from my heart.” Which is exactly what they did.