I don’t want to talk about the death of Aretha Franklin. Everyone’s going to do that. Instead of that, let’s think about the lives – plural – that she lived.
Few performers had as many “second acts” as she, and although there are good reasons why she seized the spotlight again and again, such longevity and renewal are uncommon to most. She started as a gospel singer. Franklin’s mother died on March 7, 1952, before her tenth birthday, and shortly after this at the age of 14, she committed to singing full time, going on tour with her father’s “gospel caravan” to sing at churches.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDroNc1-RzE
The transition from gospel to pop music and soul was a common event, most notably seen during Sam Cooke’s career and with The Staple Singers. Some thrived in the change but many did not. Rarely did the singers bring the fervor and passion of church singing to the pop stage, instead adapting to an entirely new set of dynamics.
The most arresting part of Aretha Franklin’s move was that it was in context only. She never left the spirit of gospel, even if the words of these new secular hymns seemed so very different. This spirit, however, was not allowed to really take hold in her first “life” as a recording artist on a major label.
Her first single, “Today I Sing The Blues,” issued through Columbia Records, was a hit on the R&B chart in 1960. She would have more songs become hits – not spectacular chartbusters, but modestly successful – but nothing that could launch her into full-blown stardom. The Columbia label never seemed to get that she was a gospel singer to the core and often worked to suppress those tendencies. Columbia cut her loose in 1966.
Columbia’s loss was Atlantic Records’ gain. In 1967, she recorded “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You),” which would finally put her on the map. Further singles included “Baby I Love You,” “(You Make Me Feel Like A) Natural Woman,” and “Chain of Fools.”
At this point, Franklin could have been remembered well for her gospel years or for her eye-opening soul career, and both would have been noteworthy. It was another song from the collected I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You album that made her an icon. “Respect” was already a great track from Otis Redding, but in the big picture was unremarkable. It hinged on this idea: “It’s okay if you mess around on me when I’m away, woman, but when I’m home, give your attention and love to me.” In this, the bones of a soul classic were in place, but it was still within the narrow lyrical confines of the man-in-charge, as so much of the music was then.
The brilliance of Franklin’s version of Redding’s song is not just the gender flip. It is that even though she is singing, “All I’m asking is for a little respect,” she’s not asking. That’s not something you get by just swapping the male signifiers to female. That’s all Aretha, her delivery, and her insistence. “You will respect me,” she said through her tone, if not the direct words, and immediately people took notice. One can only imagine how electrifying this might be to young women at the time to hear another woman on pop radio insisting she will not be dogged around on. In a single bold stroke, Aretha said no to subservience, magnifying powerful womanhood and blackness at the same time, and she was not in the mood for your lame, inadequate counterarguments.
Had Aretha’s fortunes ended here on the timeline, much as before, she would be remembered with more love, but she was not done.
By 1980, soul music was not as visible and powerful as it had been. Much of it had been co-opted by disco and younger singers who aimed for softer adult contemporary/AM Radio targets. Several of the stars of the rhythm & blues wave lived at the margins, with many fans and much industry recognition (if not commensurate opportunity), but forgotten by the present generation. In collaboration with John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, director John Landis brought the Saturday Night Live characters of Jake and Elwood Blues to the big screen. The premise of the movie: put the Blues Brothers Band back together. Along the way, the two musical misfits would cross paths with the legends of soul like Ray Charles, The MGs, James Brown, John Lee Hooker, and more.
Arguably, the show stopper was when Jake & Elwood sought to reenlist Matt “Guitar” Murphy (who sadly died just this past June), pulling him away from his short order cook’s job at the dinette. His lady in the movie, waitress Aretha, approached this with her usual feistiness and “oh, hell no” power. The movie erupts in a raucous version of “Think.” She jabs her finger into Murphy’s chest and sings, “You better think, think about what you’re tryin’ to do to me.”
It’s a perfect scene, but not a perfect execution of it. There’s no way it could have been. All involved admitted that Aretha was kind of “full of the Holy Spirit,” and there was no way that she could placidly just ape the audio playback and lip sync. Director Landis once said in an interview that it was impossible for her to do it the same way twice, much less multiple times throughout the shoot. Franklin went by feel, not by rote. Today, we watch the scene from The Blues Brothers and can clearly see where the audio and visual don’t match up – not even close – and it doesn’t matter. It’s too much fun just the way it is.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgHcsoDHqZ0
Looking back, the 1980s was a golden age for stars to shine again. Patti LaBelle stormed the charts. Tina Turner struck gold and forced the world to reckon with her considerable talent. Aretha brought us the Who’s Zoomin’ Who album in 1985 along with the smash hit “Freeway of Love.” Yet another life was born for this woman who, again and again, proved she had everything necessary to stay on top.
Aretha rode that wave up and down for many years, but as recently as 2015, she reclaimed that spotlight with force and conviction. In honoring songwriter Carole King during the Kennedy Center honors, Franklin broke out one of her first, triumphant hits, the King-Gerry Goffin-penned “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman,” and a day after the airing of the performance, it seemed that the world was in love once more.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHsnZT7Z2yQ
And here we are. So many lives wrapped in one. So many barriers broken. So many songs permanently pinned to fabric of American music. We don’t mourn the loss of Aretha Franklin nearly as much as we recognize that her special conduit from something much larger than we, to ourselves, is gone. That’s a hard realization.
I don’t like playing the “they don’t make them like that anymore” game, but in this case, I beg for indulgence. Pop music has moved on as, generationally, it must. The r&b, hip-hop, and soul of now have minimal strands of the DNA of their past. There are and will be powerful, commanding voices in the medium. There will be glass-ceiling-shatterers. There will be artists who demand your attention and, perhaps, your respect. There may yet be artists who will do all of these at once.
I suspect few will be as successful at it as Aretha Franklin.