I’m counting down my 100 favourite songs of all time. To keep this from becoming a Bob Dylan / Tom Waits love-in, only one track per artist is allowed.
Go to 69: Timber by Coldcut
Go to 71: Deceptacon by Le Tigre
There are three main categories of Aretha Franklin songs.
1. The don't-mess-with-me anthems
The one song that everyone knows Aretha for is Respect. I’m still blown away whenever I remember that it was originally recorded by Otis Redding and features on one of his most popular albums, Otis Blue. No-one thinks of Respect as an Otis song. Not even him.
After hearing Aretha’s version, he mostly stopped singing it, saying “from now on, it belongs to her”. This is Otis fucking Redding, by the way. One of the great r’n’b stars, at the peak of his tragically short life. Not some second-rate performer who might rightly doff his cap in the path of the Queen of Soul.
But he was right to renounce it. Aretha Franklin took a downtrodden man’s desperate appeal for respect and turned it into a hardworking woman’s powerful demand for R-E-S-P-E-C-T. By changing the perspective, emphasis and tone while adding the spelling bee chorus, she transformed Respect into a feminist anthem.
It also became a natural rallying cry for the civil rights movement. Though the reserved Franklin rarely spoke out about political matters, she had an implicit understanding of the message and the power of the messenger. Her father was a prominent Detroit church and community leader and, according to his daughter, “had been preaching black pride for years”. The Reverend CL Franklin turned his family home into a hub for artists and activists and even Dr Martin Luther King Jr stayed there during a visit to the city. A year after Respect’s release, Aretha would sing at Dr King’s funeral.
While the song became a source of power, pride and positivity for many people, for the singer its meaning may have felt hollow. Despite the force of her call for respect, Aretha Franklin often seemed driven more by a fear of disrespect. Having seen too many of her peers ripped off by unscrupulous promoters, she insisted on being paid in full before every show then carried her cash-filled purse on stage with her. And when she came home at the end of the night, there may not have been an awful lot of respect waiting for her.
2. The Woman/Man torch songs
In 1961, the 19-year-old Aretha married Ted White, just a few weeks after they first met. Her father opposed the union and numerous other friends and family members had doubts about White’s suitability. Motown producer Harvey Fuqua described him as a “straight-up pimp”.
After installing himself as Aretha’s manager, White became the domineering overseer of her career. He is credited as her co-writer on a number of songs – including that other great don’t-mess-with-me anthem, Think – though it’s likely that he just added his name for the royalties.
There are three main categories of Aretha Franklin songs.
1. The don't-mess-with-me anthems
The one song that everyone knows Aretha for is Respect. I’m still blown away whenever I remember that it was originally recorded by Otis Redding and features on one of his most popular albums, Otis Blue. No-one thinks of Respect as an Otis song. Not even him.
After hearing Aretha’s version, he mostly stopped singing it, saying “from now on, it belongs to her”. This is Otis fucking Redding, by the way. One of the great r’n’b stars, at the peak of his tragically short life. Not some second-rate performer who might rightly doff his cap in the path of the Queen of Soul.
But he was right to renounce it. Aretha Franklin took a downtrodden man’s desperate appeal for respect and turned it into a hardworking woman’s powerful demand for R-E-S-P-E-C-T. By changing the perspective, emphasis and tone while adding the spelling bee chorus, she transformed Respect into a feminist anthem.
It also became a natural rallying cry for the civil rights movement. Though the reserved Franklin rarely spoke out about political matters, she had an implicit understanding of the message and the power of the messenger. Her father was a prominent Detroit church and community leader and, according to his daughter, “had been preaching black pride for years”. The Reverend CL Franklin turned his family home into a hub for artists and activists and even Dr Martin Luther King Jr stayed there during a visit to the city. A year after Respect’s release, Aretha would sing at Dr King’s funeral.
While the song became a source of power, pride and positivity for many people, for the singer its meaning may have felt hollow. Despite the force of her call for respect, Aretha Franklin often seemed driven more by a fear of disrespect. Having seen too many of her peers ripped off by unscrupulous promoters, she insisted on being paid in full before every show then carried her cash-filled purse on stage with her. And when she came home at the end of the night, there may not have been an awful lot of respect waiting for her.
2. The Woman/Man torch songs
In 1961, the 19-year-old Aretha married Ted White, just a few weeks after they first met. Her father opposed the union and numerous other friends and family members had doubts about White’s suitability. Motown producer Harvey Fuqua described him as a “straight-up pimp”.
After installing himself as Aretha’s manager, White became the domineering overseer of her career. He is credited as her co-writer on a number of songs – including that other great don’t-mess-with-me anthem, Think – though it’s likely that he just added his name for the royalties.
Seven years after they wed, TIME ran a cover story about Aretha that described White physically abusing his wife in public, which surprised no one who spent any time with the couple. According to the feature, she spent her days sleeping, watching TV and eating compulsively, a grim portrait of a depressed and downtrodden woman. Very much like this one:
“You’re a no good heartbreaker. You’re a liar and you’re a cheat. And I don't know why I let you do these things to me.”
“A woman’s only human. You should understand. She’s not just a plaything. She’s flesh and blood just like her man.”
“For five long years I thought you were my man. But I found out, I’m just a link in your chain.”
“A woman’s only human. You should understand. She’s not just a plaything. She’s flesh and blood just like her man.”
“For five long years I thought you were my man. But I found out, I’m just a link in your chain.”
So many of Aretha Franklin’s greatest performances are about sad women who love bad men. Her life experience meant she knew what she was singing about. But the feelings she expressed so powerfully when she sang were rarely explored outside of her songs.
She never discussed the two children she had before the age of 15. Nor her mother who left Aretha when she was six and died when she was 10. Her reverend father’s well-known womanising was unmentionable. And she acquired a lifelong loathing of the press after TIME exposed the details of her abusive marriage.
Throughout her career Aretha remained a closed book. When, late in her life, she suggested updating her memoirs, her ghostwriter hoped she might finally be ready to open up. But Franklin just wanted to add a chapter about awards she’d recently won. The closest that book came to acknowledging the impact of all her tough times and tragedies was the line: “There was no way I could express the pain. I merely went on.”
Yet those remarkable torch songs, powered by pain and teeming with emotion, tell their own story. Maybe even hers.
3. The spirituals
Of all the unknowns about Aretha Franklin, perhaps the biggest mystery surrounds what may be her greatest performance. In January 1972, she sang with the Southern California Community Choir at the New Bethel Baptist Church in Los Angeles and the live recording of the event went on to become the best-selling record of her career.
But a film version, shot by Sydney Pollack on 16mm cameras, remained unseen for decades. With little documentary experience, the renowned director neglected to use clapperboards to mark the start of each take, which made it nearly impossible to synchronise the film with the sound recordings. 40 years later, the dying Pollack gave producer Alan Elliot permission to try and finish the film.
Elliot remortaged his own home to buy the negatives from Warner Bros and spent two years working with digital technology to finally get the pictures and music in sync. But just as he prepared for the premiere of Amazing Grace, Aretha Franklin slapped an injunction on the film.
Given her father’s profession, Aretha naturally spent much of her formative years singing in gospel choirs. After signing to Colombia Records in 1960, she spent seven years making records that flittered from jazz to blues, doo wop to r’n’b without achieving real commercial success. Colombia’s John Hammond later admitted that the label never worked out how to marry Aretha’s gospel background with a pop sound.
Her next label most certainly did. Her first three albums for Atlantic Records – packed with those classic don’t-mess-with-me anthems and man/woman torch songs – all went gold. And when sales began to slow in the early 70s, Aretha went back to church.
Amazing Grace documents Aretha Franklin at her most joyful, soulful, spiritual and mournful. There’s little understatement here. She is all powerful. Her voice pounds on heaven’s door. Her runs send members of the congregation into divine ecstasies. Even the devil’s confidant Mick Jagger turns up to bear witness.
Quite why the aging Queen of Soul didn’t want people to see the finally finished documentary isn’t clear. She told the Detroit Free Press that she had seen and loved the film. Yet her injunction mentioned violation of image rights and her lawyer suggested Elliot’s attempt to release it was “an act of thievery”.
That fear of disrespect never left her. She still needed to be paid before the show would go on. Only after Aretha Franklin’s death in 2018 did her estate give permission for Amazing Grace to be released.
The outlier
Rock Steady does not fit into any of the above categories of archetypal Aretha songs. Which is odd because, unlike most of the songs mentioned above, she actually wrote this one. In the studio, playing around on the piano while listening to her drummer Bernard Purdie tap out a beat
A pure groove rhythm merchant who recorded with James Brown, Purdie developed a signature drum pattern (adapted by The Police and Toto for hit singles) and wasn’t above using his name a pun for his solo releases (Purdie Good! and Purdie as a Picture being particular highlights). He began working with Aretha Franklin as her musical director in 1970 and later said that “backing her was like floating in seventh heaven.”
Well, something divine sure happened in that studio. But while Rock Steady was conceived by immaculate conception in Aretha’s head, the song’s birth involved a stable full of collaborators. It’s really the result of a focused jam session that producer Arif Mardin called “a dream come true”.
Rock Steady starts – fittingly – with a snap from Purdie’s snare followed by percussion from Dr John and an organ played by Donnie Hathaway that sensuously snakes its way through the entire track. Then comes that beat – a shoulder-slinking pulse that locks on and never wavers thanks to Purdie’s impeccable timing. Next, Aretha inhales and exclaims:
“Rock steady baby. That’s what I feel now. Let’s call this song exactly what it is.”
Meanwhile another regular collaborator, guitarist Cornell Dupree, is injecting funky licks at intervals of his own choosing. Bassist Chuck Rainey is serving up a rolling rhythm embellished with rumbling flourishes. Backing vocalists The Sweethearts of Soul are introduced with the irresistible repetitions of “what it is” and then take up some rhythmic “hands in the air” chanting while Aretha releases some of those trademark wordless exaltations. Just when you think things can’t get better, The Memphis Horns enter with exhilarating blasts of brass, like the coolest band of angels ever to blow heaven’s horns.
Rock Steady is a funky-as-hell gospel song created by communion of believers congregated in a sacred place to testify their faith. Instead of worshipping a god, they’re devoted to “a funky and low-down feeling” and the collaborative creation is a testament to the community choirs where Aretha learned her craft.
For many years, I had only ever heard a reggae version of Rock Steady by The Marvels. As it made perfect sense for a Jamaican band to sing a song named after one of the island’s signature genres, I never questioned its origins. Then one day, I heard Aretha Franklin singing Rock Steady and my mind was blown. That astonishment happened all over again when I later realised that it was her original composition.
For many years, I had only ever heard a reggae version of Rock Steady by The Marvels. As it made perfect sense for a Jamaican band to sing a song named after one of the island’s signature genres, I never questioned its origins. Then one day, I heard Aretha Franklin singing Rock Steady and my mind was blown. That astonishment happened all over again when I later realised that it was her original composition.
Aretha Franklin songs aren’t meant to sound like this. They’re supposed to be defiant, sad, ecstatic. Gutsy, forlorn, transcendent. They’re about standing up to power, putting up with lowlifes and giving yourself up to the highest power of all. They’re not usually about forgetting all that stuff and simply giving in to the need to "move your hips with a feeling from side to side.”
Rock Steady doesn’t sound like an Aretha song because it’s the rare sound of Aretha unburdened from all the misery and pain in her life, the events that forced her to be tough and defiant and made transcendence through religion so vital. For a precious three minutes, she puts the battles and betrayals, the slights and struggles to back of her mind, focuses on the beat she’s feeling right now and lets it all go.
Follow me on Twitter
If you like this, try:
Respect
Think
I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)
Do Right Woman, Do Right Man
Chain of Fools
Amazing Grace
How I Got Over
Rock Steady doesn’t sound like an Aretha song because it’s the rare sound of Aretha unburdened from all the misery and pain in her life, the events that forced her to be tough and defiant and made transcendence through religion so vital. For a precious three minutes, she puts the battles and betrayals, the slights and struggles to back of her mind, focuses on the beat she’s feeling right now and lets it all go.
Follow me on Twitter
If you like this, try:
Respect
Think
I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)
Do Right Woman, Do Right Man
Chain of Fools
Amazing Grace
How I Got Over
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