Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin (11 page)

“I thought the Jolson song was a mistake,” John Hammond told me. “It had no business on an Aretha Franklin album. The idea was to present her as a great jazz/blues artist, not a revisionist of show-business lore. I thought it was outrageous, but what I thought no longer mattered since I had been told Aretha was peeved at me. While I was in Europe vacationing, an A-and-R man at Epic, a Columbia subsidiary, offered a contract to Aretha’s sister Erma. Apparently there was intense sibling rivalry, and Aretha was not at all pleased. She presumed that I was the man behind the move, even though I wasn’t. I tried to explain, but by then she had withdrawn into stony silence and was not interested in hearing any explanations.”

“It was Daddy who suggested to Columbia that they listen to me sing,” Erma told me. “One of their executives heard me at a club. At the time, I was with Lloyd Price. Actually, Lloyd had asked me to go on the road with him a year earlier, but Daddy, always protective, didn’t think I was ready. Then in 1961 I joined Lloyd for what would be nearly a five-year professional relationship. My mother-in-law, Ollie Patterson, was caring for my children, Thomas and Sabrina, back in Detroit.

“The Columbia A-and-R man was impressed enough with my singing that he told my dad that he thought he could get me a deal. The man also said that I would be on Epic, which was a different brand than Columbia. They were part of the same company but I’d have my own producers and an identity separate from Aretha. I
thought she would be thrilled. She wasn’t. She threw a fit. She told Daddy that she didn’t want me on Epic, that it would hurt her career and that people would be confused by too many singing Franklin sisters. By then she and Daddy were having their problems because of her relationship with Ted. I wasn’t privy to their conversation, but I do know that my father took up my part and told Ree that she wasn’t the only one in this family who wanted—and deserved—a career in music. Later, when Carolyn went out there to do her own thing, she’d get the same grief from Aretha.”

While the hubbub with Erma continued, Aretha worked in the studio on her sophomore effort.
The Electrifying Aretha Franklin,
the first time we hear her with strings and a big band, lists John Hammond as its producer, but Hammond claims that was in name only. His work with Aretha was essentially over.

“I was told that I could do album cuts with her,” he said, “but the company’s producers were taking over. It was thought that they, not I, were in a better position to produce hits. They took the budget allotments that had accumulated from my sessions, which were extremely low cost, and applied them to larger productions. I found those productions vapid. I was still interested in documenting her prowess as a jazz and blues artist. The last songs I remember producing with Aretha were in the winter of 1961. They were both Ray Charles–related. The first was an instrumental written by Ray Charles called ‘Hard Times (No One Knows Better than I)’ that she played on piano and added a great vocal flourish at the end, in which she sings, ‘Ray Charles says it was hard times but I feel all right.’ It was a splendid piece of bluesy spontaneity. The company deemed it unworthy for release. The second did appear on the
Electrifying
record. This was ‘Lucky Old Sun.’ Frankie Laine, of course, had the hit on Mercury back in the forties. Louis Armstrong and Sinatra had also recorded it, but it was Sam Cooke’s version that Aretha remembered. I heard it as basically a haunting blues ballad, and she interpreted it with great feeling and intelligence. I was told by my friend Sid Feller, then producing Ray Charles, that Ray heard Aretha’s version and then decided to sing it himself on his
Ingredients in a Recipe for Soul
album that appeared a year after Aretha’s
Electrifying.
By then, the word
soul
was beginning to replace
rhythm and blues
as a code word for popular black music.”

The big soul ballad on the rhythm-and-blues charts in 1961 was Etta James’s “At Last,” the Mack Gordon/Harry Warren song that hit for Glenn Miller in 1942. While working with Etta on her book, I asked her why she thought her string-heavy jazzy standard had turned into a smash while, in that same year, Aretha couldn’t hit with a bluesy standard like “That Lucky Old Sun.”

“The answer’s easy,” said Etta. “Aretha sang the shit outta those standards—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
nigga,
but they knew us niggas 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. If you wanna have black hits, you gotta understand the black streets, you gotta work those streets and work those DJs to get airplay on black stations. Wasn’t true of everything she did on Columbia, but in general, Aretha’s Columbia shit wasn’t black enough for blacks and too black for whites. Or looking at it another way, in those days you had to get the black audience to love the hell outta you and then hope the love would cross over to the white side. Columbia didn’t know nothing ’bout crossing over.”

As a purely musical package,
Electrifying
is mystifying, alternating between brilliant and banal. Leslie McFarland, a journeyman writer who contributed five songs to Aretha’s first album, has four more on her second, among them “It’s So Heartbreakin’,” a slight teen-oriented vehicle with Aretha on piano; “I Told You So,” an even thinner blues ditty with big-band backing; and the shocking “Rough Lover,” whose story seems to mirror the very relationship Aretha had entered into with Ted White. She envisions someone who will take charge, and, if she gets sassy, “be a man who dares
shut me up.” She doesn’t want a meek man; she wants a “boss,” “a devil when he’s crossed.” There is conviction in her voice.

There is also greatness in her reading of McFarland’s fourth song, “Just for You,” a poignant ballad that benefits not only from a subtle string chart but also from the sensitive accompaniment of Tommy Flanagan, the great jazz artist who would go on to spend a dozen years as Ella Fitzgerald’s pianist. Here Aretha, at twenty, expresses the emotional richness of a woman decades older. Like Ray Charles, who claimed teen material never fit his aesthetic, Aretha requires the deepest dramatic material.

That material arrives in the form of two songs on
Electrifying
. One is “Blue Holiday,” by Luther Dixon, writer of “Sixteen Candles” by the Crests. Dixon’s songs for Perry Como, Bobby Darin, and Elvis Presley brought him to the attention of Florence Greenberg, the boss at Scepter Records, the label that soon would explode with Dixon-produced hits for the Shirelles.

“Blue Holiday” was, in fact, recorded by the Shirelles, who cut it in 1961. When Aretha interpreted it in New York during the Christmas season of that year, she remembered being especially homesick for her family in Detroit. She was also nearly eight months pregnant with her third son, Ted White’s child. The Shirelles’ version of the song features Doris Coley offering a heartfelt reading of a teenager longing for lost love. In contrast, Aretha renders the song as a straight-ahead jazz classic. It helps enormously that she is surrounded by sterling accompaniment—Miles Davis bandmates pianist Wynton Kelly and drummer Jimmy Cobb; Count Basie’s trumpeter Joe Newman and his trombonist Al Grey; veteran guitarist Mundell Lowe; and saxophonist/arranger Oliver Nelson.

“I didn’t really know who she was,” Joe Newman told me. “I think it was John Hammond who hired me for the session. I don’t even remember if he was in the studio that day. I was just so glad to play the date, especially because Wynton and Jimmy were on it. They’d done
Kind of Blue
with Miles for Columbia and were the hottest cats in New York. I figured Aretha Franklin was one of
those up-and-coming chicks, like Dakota Staton, who wanted to be Dinah Washington. Man, was I wrong! Aretha was the real fuckin’ deal! I mean, she cleaned our clocks. Wynton set the grooves and she floated over it like vintage Sarah Vaughan. Only—at least to my ears—she had more soul than Sarah, more church, more funk, more hurt. I remember ‘Blue Holiday’ and I remember another killer song called ‘Nobody Like You.’ It was a beautiful bluesy ballad where she played piano. I was sure it was written by someone like Ray Charles. When I asked her about the writer, she said it was James Cleveland, the gospel cat who had led her dad’s choir in Detroit. ‘You’re kidding,’ I said. ‘A churchman wrote that?’ Aretha didn’t say much in the studio—she was a shy thing who kept to herself and just focused on her music—but when I said that, she looked up to me and said, ‘Joe, it’s all church.’ That shut me up.”

“Blue Holiday” and “Nobody Like You” represent Hammond’s last and most effective effort to bring out the beauty of Aretha Franklin. She hits the sweet spot where jazz, blues, and rhythm and blues meet. As Quincy Jones—who produced Aretha in the seventies—told me, “All the greats bring the streams together. Ray Charles was as much jazz as R-and-B. Marvin Gaye had a tremendous jazz feel. Listen to his feeling for phrasing. The same is true of Stevie Wonder. Aretha fits into this category.”

I
had moved to New York,” said Erma Franklin, “when my first single on Epic—‘Hello Again’—came out. There was a flurry of activity, a good review in
Billboard
, and some prestigious gigs, including Small’s Paradise Lounge in Harlem, where I often enjoyed the company of Bettye LaVette, a wonderful singer from Detroit, and Esther Phillips, who was going through her heavy drug period. Drugs, of course, was part of those times, especially in the world of rhythm and blues. I indulged. In fact, all the Franklin children indulged. But, as a problem, that didn’t really enter the picture till later in the sixties.

“It was still the early sixties when Aretha was downtown while I was playing uptown. That’s maybe only ten miles but it might have been ten thousand. We would see each other, but when we did, there was a bit of a chill. Some of our friends—like Mary Wells or Smokey—had enjoyed big hits. And because Aretha still had not put out what could be considered a smash, she worried that I might have one before her.”

On February 20, 1962, Aretha appeared at the Village Gate, a jazz club, where she shared the bill with fellow Columbia artist
Thelonious Monk. According to Robin D. G. Kelley, Monk’s superb biographer, almost five hundred people crowded into the small club. Monk’s young nieces and nephews were there, as excited to see Aretha as they were to see their uncle.

“I was there,” said Erma. “Cecil also came into the city that night because Monk was one of his heroes. In the company of the great master, Aretha more than held her own.”

“I’m a jazz freak,” Cecil told me, “and if I had to name my three favorite pianists they’d be Erroll Garner, Oscar Peterson, and Thelonious Monk. I wasn’t gonna miss seeing Monk on the same bill as Ree. It was an amazing night. Monk had just signed with Columbia—I guess that’s why he and Ree were costarring—and he had his man Charlie Rouse on tenor. I don’t know if he had started recording that first album he did for Columbia—
Monk’s Dream
—but I know he played ‘Body and Soul’ and ‘Just a Gigolo,’ songs that turned up on that record—a record I listened to over a hundred times.

“ ‘You seem more interested in hearing Monk than me,’ Ree said before the show.

“ ‘I’m excited to see you both, sis. Excited to see you with him.’

“Because of Monk’s presence, I think Aretha directed more of her show toward jazz. She wanted to show the jazz crowd that she was one of them—and she was. I believe that’s one of the first times she sang ‘Skylark,’ a song she’d soon cut for Columbia. Same thing for ‘Just for a Thrill’ and ‘God Bless the Child.’ We all heard Ray Charles do ‘Just for a Thrill’ on his
Genius
album, and we’d been hearing Billie Holiday’s ‘Child’ ever since we were children. She smashed them both. Monk had his fans, and Monk got his respect that night. But Sister Ree, who had learned how to tear down a church, tore down that club. We knew she was on the verge of having that monster breakthrough hit we’d all been waiting for.”

The monster hit didn’t arrive then—and wouldn’t for five more years. Meanwhile, Bob Mersey took over Aretha’s recording career.

“Mersey was a pure product of the Columbia culture,” said Bobby Scott, who, in another year, would become a major music figure in Aretha’s life. “I worked with Bob a long time. We were both producers and arrangers, but with much different backgrounds. Goddard Lieberson, who ran the company, saw Mersey as the Pasha of Pop. The great pasha before him was Mitch Miller, the man who defined fifties pop music, and he made a fortune for the label and set the tone for Columbia for years to follow. Mitch was a first-class musician and superb oboist—he played oboe on the famous
Charlie Parker with Strings
session—but his thing was sales. If you wanna sell music, dumb it down. He was all about Rosemary Clooney doing ‘Come On-a My House’ and Sinatra singing ‘Mama Will Bark’ with Dagmar. Lieberson had made a fortune for the label with the soundtrack of
My Fair Lady,
and Lieberson had put Bob Mersey with Andy Williams, another moneymaking move. When it became clear that Aretha was not happy with Hammond, Mersey was Lieberson’s logical go-to guy. If she wouldn’t sell as an R-and-B artist, turn her pop. But because she had established some solid credentials as a jazz artist, the label felt she couldn’t abandon jazz entirely. That’s where I came in. I’m a jazz piano player. I was Lester Young’s piano when I was still a teenager. I can also play gospel and blues when I wanna. I’m also a writer—the Beatles covered my ‘A Taste of Honey’ and the Hollies and Neil Diamond had hits with my ‘He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother.’ For years I worked as Bobby Darin’s musical director. Back when I first met Aretha, though, I was seen as a jazzy auxiliary to Mersey. Mersey became her main man. I was on the set, but, metaphorically speaking, I was an intermission pianist. Goddard pinned all his hopes on Mersey, and if you listen to those albums he did with her, you’d have to think that Goddard had the right idea.”

Mersey contributed three seminal albums to the Franklin oeuvre:
The Tender, the Moving, the Swinging Aretha Franklin,
from 1962;
Laughing on the Outside,
from 1963; and
Unforgettable: A Tribute to Dinah Washington,
in 1964. Each has moments of singular grace and even immortality.

For Aretha, the highlight of her Mersey association came on
The Tender
with “Without the One You Love,” her own song. It was the first time she had fashioned a melody, written a lyric, and watched it all transform into a huge string orchestration.

The blues ballad, modeled after “The Masquerade Is Over,” was a harbinger of even bolder Aretha compositions to come. There was no doubt that she had the compositional gift. (A stringless and far more moving version of the song would be recorded live, with Aretha herself on piano, on her 1965
Yeah!!!
album.)

There are missteps on
The Tender
—a mediocre Berry Gordy song, “I’m Wandering”; a heavy-handed cover of Billy Eckstine’s 1949 hit “I Apologize”; a cheesy chart of “Look for the Silver Lining”—but Aretha redeems it all with her otherworldly reading of three songs: “God Bless the Child,” “Just for a Thrill,” and “Try a Little Tenderness.” According to Jerry Wexler, Aretha’s version of “Tenderness” inspired Otis Redding to record it in his singular style. (Redding’s biographer Scott Freeman suggests it was Phil Walden, Otis’s manager, who urged him to sing it, but when I spoke with Walden in the nineties, he confirmed Wexler’s story.)

“Otis had Aretha’s Columbia album where she sings ‘Tenderness’ and ‘God Bless the Child,’ ” Walden told me. “No doubt that Otis’s take on ‘Tenderness’ became iconic because of the double-time transition. But I know he was trying to channel Aretha. He also wanted to cut ‘God Bless the Child’ but never got the chance. It was Aretha, along with Sam Cooke, that got Otis Redding into standards, which is ironic since it was Aretha’s redo of his ‘Respect’ that turned his little R-and-B tune into an enduring standard.”

The Tender, the Moving, the Swinging Aretha Franklin
was recorded in April and May of 1962. In July, she appeared at the Newport Jazz Festival on the same bill as her father’s friends Clara Ward and Oscar Peterson. The lineup also included Sonny Rollins, Count Basie, Basie’s former blues belter Jimmy Rushing, Thelonious Monk, and Duke Ellington.

Jazz critic Jack Maher wrote the
Billboard
review: “During the Ellington time on stand, Thelonious Monk showed off his unique
abilities as composer and soloist in a performance of ‘Monk’s Dream,’ especially written for the band. Duke conducted. Also a show stopper with Ellington was the appearance of Aretha Franklin, whose gospel-like vocals brought screams of ‘more’ from the crowd.”

Later that same month Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was jailed for participating in an Albany, Georgia, demonstration.

“I remember Daddy telling me about how he and Martin were talking about working up a demonstration in Detroit,” said Cecil. “They spoke often, and Dr. King knew he could count on my father. I’d say they were twin souls with the same mission.”

In August,
Billboard
reviewed “Just for a Thrill” and “Try a Little Tenderness,” saying, “Here are a pair of the best sides that Aretha ever cut and that’s saying a lot. She shows off some of her best vocal work yet on the two standards, and either or both could turn into her biggest seller to date.”

On August 2, Aretha appeared on
American Bandstand
for the second time. She sang “Don’t Cry, Baby” as well as “Try a Little Tenderness.” But neither song made the charts.

“We all were listening to Barbara Lynn’s ‘You’ll Lose a Good Thing,’ ” said Erma. “It was a hit, and we loved it. We loved Little Eva’s ‘Locomotion’ and Gene Chandler’s ‘Duke of Earl’ and Ray Charles’s ‘Unchain My Heart.’ They were all hits, they were all great, but were they any greater than the songs Aretha was singing at Columbia? I don’t think so. Ree felt like there was water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink.”

On September 27, the United States Department of Justice filed suit to end public segregation. Three days later, Mississippi governor Ross Barnett blocked James Meredith from enrolling at the state university.

In mid-October, the Cuban missile crisis traumatized the nation for two weeks. Aretha had little memory of the crisis but specific memories of the comics who opened for her. She spoke about Buddy Hackett and his Chinese-waiter routine, and Professor Irwin Corey, with his frizzled hair and crazy expertise on everything and
nothing. She had special regard for the intellectual Dick Gregory, with whom she worked at the Playboy Club in Chicago.

The gigs got bigger, to the point where Aretha was ready to make a management change. In November,
Jet
reported that “Aretha Franklin’s split with her manager, Jo King, may end up in court because the rising young star wants out of their contract and the manager wants to settle for $9,000.”

“When Ted took over,” said Erma, “the man
took over
. He had a scorched-earth policy. Jo King was history. Anyone in Jo’s circle was history. Anyone who had previously been involved with Aretha’s career—including her own father—was marginalized. Ted demanded and got total control.”

“Why would Aretha permit that?” I asked Erma.

“I think she was more frightened of the outside world than the rest of us,” Erma answered. “I think she felt the need for protection. Our father had been extremely protective of Aretha. Maybe even overprotective. He led her to the world of show business, but then he had to return to his church world. He could no longer play the role he had been playing since she had begun traveling with him. He could no longer be her day-to-day protector. When that became clear, she looked for a substitute protector. I know it sounds far-fetched, but Ted White had many of our father’s attributes—he was self-assured, he was charismatic, definitely a woman’s man, highly intelligent, highly organized, and able to deal with the cold cruel world effectively. Daddy helped Aretha attain fame in sacred music. Aretha looked to Ted to do exactly that in secular music. You don’t need a PhD in psychology to realize that there’s a reason why we gals often call our lovers and husbands ‘Daddy.’ ”

For Aretha’s biological daddy, 1963 was a milestone. Reverend C. L. Franklin had watched as, a few years earlier, an urban renewal project had torn down Hastings Street—the bars, the clubs, and the New Bethel Baptist Church—for what would become the Chrysler Freeway. Franklin’s congregation found temporary
quarters elsewhere, while the minister spent increased time on the road. According to his biographer Nick Salvatore, this was a period when Los Angeles became his home away from home. His guest sermons in churches around the country increased, along with his involvement in local Detroit politics. C.L. became founding president of the Metropolitan Civic League for Legal Action. As a progressive politician, his time had come. His sermons stressing ethnic pride and self-worth, long his signature message, had become touchstones as the national civil rights movement gained strength and wider exposure.

On March 10, he gained a new and more prominent pulpit when the
new
New Bethel opened its doors on Linwood and Philadelphia. Once a theater, the building had been transformed into a twenty-five-hundred-seat sanctuary by—as C.L. was quick to tell people—an all-black construction company. The minister pointed out that this was not reverse racism. He said it was proof of what “as a race we can do for ourselves if we take advantage of opportunities to qualify ourselves.”

By May, Franklin was in the final stages of formulating his plan to hold a massive freedom march in Detroit with his close friend Dr. King as the main speaker. The conservative/establishment Baptist Ministerial Alliance opposed the march—or at least a march led by Franklin. C.L.’s national stature had excited jealousy among many of his peers. When he came to the Alliance meeting to argue his case and was told by the organization’s president that he couldn’t speak because his Alliance fees were in arrears, C.L. exploded and went after his adversary. Franklin’s colleagues held him back, and the physical fight was averted. In the end, C.L. prevailed because of his close relationship to Dr. King. If Franklin could get King to lead a Detroit freedom march, that march would go forward, no matter how vehement the opposition to Franklin’s involvement.

On May 27, Mahalia Jackson sponsored a fund-raising rally for Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference at McCormick Place in Chicago. The Freedom Fund Festival featured Al
Hibbler, Mayor Richard Daley, Dick Gregory, Eartha Kitt, and Aretha Franklin.
Jet
reported that “gospel-turned-blues singer Aretha Franklin came on last in a tough spot after all the preachers and big stars at Mahalia Jackson’s benefit for Martin Luther King and literally broke up the show by sending the crowd home shouting when she closed with a back home rendition of ‘Precious Lord.’ The daughter of Detroit’s Rev. C.L. Franklin, Aretha then plunked down four $100 bills in Mahalia’s hands for being on the show.”

“The other area where Daddy still held sway over Aretha,” said Cecil, “was performing her civic duty. He drummed that into all of us. Ted White had complete sway over her when it came to what engagements to accept and what songs to sing. But if Daddy called and said, ‘Ree, I want you to sing for Dr. King,’ she’d drop everything and do just that. I don’t think Ted had objections to her support of Dr. King’s cause, and he realized it would raise her visibility. But I do remember the time that there was a conflict between a big club gig and doing a benefit for Dr. King. Ted said, ‘Take the club gig. We need the money.’ But Ree said, ‘Dr. King needs me more.’ She defied her husband. Maybe that was the start of their marital trouble. Their thing was always troubled because it was based on each of them using the other. Whatever the case, my sister proved to be a strong soldier in the civil rights fight. That made me proud of her and it kept her relationship with Daddy from collapsing entirely.”