THE MAKING OF A LEGEND
Franklin worked with the greats, and soared above them
Aretha Franklin defined American music.Other seminal singers — Bing Crosby, Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles — gave voice to this country’s joy and pain, but no one expressed that joy and pain with Aretha’s power.
Aretha’s power was rooted in history, both personal and cultural. She was a brilliant but troubled woman born in a brilliant but troubled family. She emerged during the 1960s, a brilliant but troubled time.
Her most important producer, Jerry Wexler, called her “Our Lady of Mysterious Sorrow,” a handle she intensely disliked. She saw herself as happy and carefree.
Her self-styled mythology rejected any characterization hinting of psychological unrest or emotional mystery.
Yet it is a mystery — the enigmatic and aching beauty of her voice — that makes her art so compelling.
She came from a long line of great divas — Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Mahalia Jackson, Clara Ward, Etta James — who were all hauntingly mysterious. Their mystery only augmented their grandeur.
Aretha was nothing if not grand. She grew up a princess.
Her coronation as Queen of Soul in 1967 at age 25 was inevitable. Her father, the Rev. C.L. Franklin, was himself royalty, one of the kings of African-American Christianity and a progressive to boot.
He turned the tables on Al Jolson’s “Jazz Singer” story where the rabbi renounces his son for singing secular songs. The minister, who loved Al Jolson, frequented nightclubs and invited B.B. King and Dinah Washington to Franklin family dinners where young Aretha was trotted out to play her version of Eddie Heywood’s “Canadian Sunset.”
As a pre-teen, Aretha’s virtuosity was in full display both as pianist and singer. Detroit in the 1950s — and Aretha’s home in particular — was a critical fulcrum for American music.
The blues had come up from the Mississippi Delta in the person of John Lee Hooker, a vital presence on Hastings St., steps away from Rev. Franklin’s New Bethel Baptist Church where Aretha gained her reputation as a prodigy.
She was both witness to and participant in the Golden Age of Gospel. Her primary teacher was James Cleveland, himself crowned King of Gospel, who, along with singers like Albertina
Walker and Marion Williams, schooled Aretha in the baroque style of praise and worship.
Aretha made that style her own. Detroit was also a vital jazz center. Aretha studied her brother Cecil’s Sarah Vaughan records. He took her to Baker’s Keyboard Lounge to hear Art Tatum, Betty Carter and Sonny Rollins. She soaked it all in.
In the early ’60s, Motown was starting up, but the minister had bigger plans for his daughter.
He facilitated a contract with Columbia, the label of Johnny Mathis and Barbra Streisand. It wasn’t until 1967, though, that Aretha found success, this time on Atlantic Records singing the searing soul music that turned her into an international superstar.
She earned the world’s respect by marrying the three great strains of her heritage — gospel, blues and jazz — into a sound both emotionally raw and technically refined.
Listening to Aretha, we feel visceral pleasure. We feel visceral pain. We feel a woman expressing pent-up emotions we ourselves are incapable of releasing.
We feel ruthless honesty in a voice celebrating the ragged condition of the unguarded heart; a voice whose sacred source makes an inaudible God audible; a holy voice combining a maze of contradictory elements into sensuous harmony; a voice forcing us to surrender to its frightening beauty; a voice, I am certain, that will live forever.
Ritz is the author of “Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin.”