The passing of Aretha Franklin might not seem especially relevant to a weekly series mostly dedicated to songs from the golden age of American pop standards. But, in fact, several of her earliest singles were of numbers we've featured here, including "Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody" (Number 12 for Aretha on the Canadian charts in 1961), and "Try a Little Tenderness" (Number 100 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1962). As the daughter of the Reverend C L Franklin, one of the most famous preachers of his generations, she began her recording career with gospel, and then moved into jazz standards. She never stopped singing them. In fact, she was one of the last stars to tailor her set list to wheresoe'er she happened to be: Many years ago I took a date to see Aretha at the Victoria Palace in London and, in among "R-E-S-P-E-C-T" and "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman)", she made a point of offering a little Gershwin - "A Foggy Day (in London Town)".
It must have befuddled her a little that, after accepting an invitation to join Frank Sinatra for his celeb "Duets" album in the early Nineties, she wound up with not Cole Porter or Rodgers & Hart but a goofy bit of Europop the Chairman had taken a liking to in later years - "What Now, My Love?" It's a pretty nifty record (as you can hear on our centenary salute to Carl Sigman, the man who put an English lyric to it), and a great arrangement by Don Costa. You can't always say the latter about her early standards work: Aretha's voice soars, but the charts, notwithstanding some fine players, are often pedestrian. She was not yet twenty when she signed with Columbia, who seemed to think they could cut her in on a piece of the Etta James/Dinah Washington action - as in, respectively, "At Last" and "What a Difference a Day Made".
Etta wasn't impressed: "Aretha sang the sh*t outta those standards," she said. "Just as good if not better than me. But Columbia didn't know how to reach black listeners, and my company, Chess, did. Leonard Chess had a genius for feeling out the black community. Jerry Wexler was the same. They were white Jews who would never use the word n*gga, but they knew us n*ggas better than we knew ourselves. Columbia didn't have no one like that. They had John Hammond, but he was like a college professor up there in the ivory tower. He wasn't street like Chess or Wexler... In general, Aretha's Columbia sh*t wasn't black enough for blacks and too black for whites."
So Aretha went to see Jerry Wexler at Atlantic Records and told him: "I want hits." He found them for her, almost immediately - "Do Right Woman", "Respect", "Natural Woman". The last is a great song by Gerry Goffin & Carole King that, alas, was wrecked for me after I heard the Lettermen sing:
You Make Me Feel Like A Natural Ma-an
- which I still think is one of the funniest musical jokes ever, albeit unintentional. In Jerry Wexler's hit phase, Aretha never had a regular writing team; she just picked songs hither and yon, by a wide range of composers. I confess, while full of R-E-S-P-E-C-T for the blockbusters, that I have a preference for those tracks where she dials it back a notch, Ronnie Shannon's "I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)", Morris Broadnax, Clarence Paul and Stevie Wonder's "Until You Come Back to Me (That's What I"m Gonna Do)". (A parenthetic thought: There were a lot of parentheses in Aretha's catalogue.) On "I Say a Little Prayer", she roughed up the smooth polish of Bacharach & David's Dionne Warwick production, and made it, to my ears, a little more emotionally arresting. Yip Harburg, lyricist of "Over the Rainbow", used to define songwriting thus: Words make you think a thought; music makes you feel a feeling; a song makes you feel a thought. Aretha was without peer at communicating the feeling of a song: That didn't always mean respecting the precise weight of a particular lyric phrase, the way Dionne does, but rather being true to the underlying emotional impulse of the words. You can hear that even on her late Eighties Number One with George Michael, "I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me)" (her last great parenthetic smash): Simon Climie, who wrote most of the song, and Don Black, who chipped in two crucial words, discuss that number on our recent Non-Stop Number Ones spectacular. Most of the appalling number of ululating "divas" who imitate her mimic the techniques - the melismas, the gospel shrieks - but without the ability to communicate feeling.
Yet our Song of the Week department is dedicated to songwriters, and for most of her career Aretha was content to leave that to others - first to the Gershwins and Jerome Kern, Campbell & Connelly and Sam Lewis & Joe Young, and then to Otis Redding, Carole King, Simon Climie, and eventually Puccini. But in between the standards phase and the hits phase there was a brief moment when Aretha was seriously minded to become a singer-songwriter, and it produced one great lasting number.
The roots of that song lie deep in Aretha Franklin's personal life. Her father was a Baptist minister and "the man with the million-dollar voice", who made a fortune from preaching and drew almost every major black celebrity to his church: Mahalia Jackson changed baby Aretha's diapers, and Clara Ward encouraged her to sing. But C L Franklin was also a creature of prodigious sexual appetite who, barely a year before Aretha's birth, sired another daughter by a twelve-year-old parishioner he'd impregnated, Mildred Jennings. Aretha's mother, Barbara, was Franklin's second wife, and eventually she left him, taking with her the child from her first marriage but not those from her second. She died of a heart attack, a long way away, when Aretha was ten.
Her father continued his philandering, and, as vulnerable and damaged children tend to do, his daughter looked elsewhere for emotional support. She had two babies before the age of sixteen, and at nineteen married a former realtor who fancied himself her Svengali, Ted White. Childhood, marriage and career all intersected in the person of Dinah Washington, Queen of the Blues, one of the Reverend Franklin's parishioners and a, ahem, close personal friend. Miss Washington was also, briefly, equally close to Ted White (she had seven disastrous marriages, from which she sought much solace). Aretha, meanwhile, adored Dinah's voice. Just before Christmas 1963, Miss Washington died of an overdose of secobarbital and amobarbital, and Mr and Mrs Ted White rushed back from New York to console Reverend Franklin in Detroit. The minister was distraught, his daughter was afraid, and his son-in-law was cock-a-hoop: As Ted told the family, "The Queen is dead. Long live the new Queen: Aretha."
He rushed his missus into the studio to crank out a Washington tribute album he proposed to call What a Difference a Day Makes - ie, one day it's Dinah on top, now it's Aretha. Cooler heads prevailed, and it was renamed Unforgettable. Ted White drank, and was a mean drunk, and beat up his wife, now caring for a third baby. But he was savvy enough to see how the music business was changing. At Atlantic, all these guys nobody had ever heard of - like Ronnie Shannon (author of "I Never Loved a Man"), Chips Moman ("Do Right Woman") and Don Covay ("Chain of Fools") - were rolling in the dough from songs they'd written, and Ted figured that there was no reason he and Aretha couldn't be a hit songwriting team. What Mr White contributed to the musical partnership of "Franklin & White" is unclear. Aretha couldn't read music, but had taught herself to play piano as a child, and was respected as such by many professionals (Elton John among them). Whether or not she could write lyrics, she was certainly adept at putting words to music. The very last track John Hammond produced for her at Columbia was a Ray Charles instrumental, "Hard Times (No One Knows Better Than I)" (more parentheses), that Aretha played on the piano before concluding with what Hammond called "a great vocal flourish" - "Ray Charles says it was hard times, but I feel alllllllll riiiiiiiiight!" The label considered the track unworthy of release but Hammond treasured it until the day he died.
So my bet is that Aretha wrote the music and lyrics. And what did that leave for the Ted White half of "Franklin & White" to contribute? Ideas? Organization? Editing? None of those are to be disdained. But White's protégé was at this time growing more and more interested in both the arrangements of her music and in the message of her songs.
On April 15th 1968, six days after she'd sung at the funeral of Martin Luther King, Jr, Aretha Franklin found herself at the piano of Atlantic Studios in New York trying to nail down a song she'd roughed out a few weeks earlier:
You better think
(Think!)
Think about what you're trying to do to me
Think
(Think, think!)
Let your mind go, let yourself be free...
I doubt it's a lyric to which Ted White made much contribution - because it's a song for a woman trapped in an abusive relationship:
I ain't no psychiatrist
I ain't no doctor with degrees
It don't take too much high IQs
To see what you're doing to meYou better think
(Think!)
Think about what you're trying to do to me
Yeah, think
(Think, think!)
Let your mind go, let yourself be free...
There is, of course, an acknowledgment of mutual dependency:
You need me
(Need me)
And I need you
(Don't you know)
Without each other there ain't nothing people can do...
But I doubt anyone in the studio that day was thinking of Ted and Aretha's woes or any other "You Don't Own Me" scenario, notwithstanding the song's release - an accumulation of wailed "Freedoms!", in which soloist and backing singers (the Sweet Inspirations) feed off each other, and build and build and build... That April of 1968, a mere two months after Dr King had presented Miss Franklin with a Southern Christian Leadership Center Award, he was dead, and public buildings in Washington were surrounded by machine-gun nests, and people wondered who would be next (the answer to that question would come a few weeks later in June). Aretha didn't write "Think" to be "about" that moment, but the context of the times enlarged the song:
People walking around everyday
Playing games, taking score
Trying to make other people lose their minds
Ah, be careful you don't lose yours...
So a song about Ted White universalized itself to become a song about America. A cautionary one-word warning to an abusive husband became, obliquely, a caution to a nation spiraling out of control in that year of fevers half-a-century ago.
I have always loved the photograph at the top of this page. There are others over the years - a big star surrounded by bassists and engineers and trumpeters and producers in slacks and shirts in a nondescript room where something magic and timeless is about to happen. "Diva" is an overused word in the pop biz, but Aretha actually was one - snooty, mercurial, peremptory, dismissive, etc, etc, etc. Yet in the studio she knew enough to put all that on hold and understand (as she didn't quite in her Columbia days) that the star has to connect with the session player or everyone's wasting his time. On "Think", from her opening piano, the record is defined by its urgency and relentlessness, and everybody's on board with what Aretha's trying to do - the Sweet Inspirations, and a tight band of musicians mostly flown in from Muscle Shoals, Alabama, because Jerry Wexler had decided that his star singer responded better to rawer arrangements worked out in the studio than to the formal charts John Hammond had given her. On this occasion, he's right, no question: The call-and-response, the gospel whoops, Aretha's piano, Spooner Oldham's organ, Roger Hawkins' drums... If you listen very carefully, the guitarist Tommy Cogbill, whether consciously or otherwise, appears to be not whistlin' but pickin' "Dixie".
The fevers of '68 passed. By the time Aretha Franklin reprised the song twelve years later as a finger-wagging waitress in The Blues Brothers, "Think" was yet again a word of warning to an errant man. Not Ted White: He was long gone, and returned to the real estate biz. He never found another meal ticket, and she never needed a Svengali. They spoke maybe once every ten years, usually over something related to Ted, Jr, like his college graduation, that sort of thing.
But the violence, the bloody moment in which "Think" was born, penetrated deep into the diva's life. A year before The Blue Brothers was released, the Reverend C L Franklin, father of children by twelve-year-old girls, close personal friend to Dinah Washington and other female celebrities, and "the man with the million-dollar voice", was shot during a robbery at his home. He lingered on in a coma for half-a-decade before he died in 1984. Aretha kept the house but never set foot in it. Likewise his church. For a while her life was haunted by the premature deaths of loved ones, and her father's house of worship became for her a place of pain. I remember the first time a colleague of hers told me about her murdered father, and how I thought then how odd it is that even the most wealthy and successful among us cannot insulate themselves from the worst pathologies of our world.
Early on, Aretha Franklin discerned that the life of a serious songwriter was not for her, but for a brief, magical moment fifty years ago her life and the times, the words and the music aligned perfectly:
You better think
(Think!)
Think about what you're trying to do to me
Yeah, think
(Think, think!)
Let your mind go, let yourself be freeOh, freedom
(Freedom!)
Freedom
(Freedom!)
Oh, freedom, yeah, freedom...
Rest in peace.
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