Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin (13 page)

“My father was a rock,” Erma said. “Especially in the sixties, when changes were happening so quickly and great leaders began to fall, he held steadfast. He taught us all to stay the course. He believed in a future where wrong would be righted and the love of almighty God would prevail. He raised us, he nurtured us, and he comforted us in times of trouble.

“Ted White was a highly possessive husband and could be a scary character. But when the world felt shaky and fears were unloosed, Aretha lost her fear of him and went home to Daddy. No
matter how deep our past disagreements, we always reconciled with our father. Our bond with him was stronger than our bond with anyone else.”

A month later, another sudden death had a more immediate impact on the Franklin family. On December 14, Detroiters, along with the rest of the country, were shocked to learn that in their city Dinah Washington had died of a toxic combination of drugs—secobarbital and amobarbital—at age thirty-nine. Married to her seventh husband, Detroit Lions All-Pro defensive back Dick “Night Train” Lane, Dinah had appeared to be at the top of her game; in the words of her biographer Nadine Cohodas, “It was as though Dinah had been snatched from [her friends] in the fullness of life.”

“Ted and Aretha were in New York and rushed home to Detroit,” Cecil remembered. “More than anyone, Daddy was distraught. He and Dinah had been tight for years. I remember Aretha looking afraid—as though death was coming too close to all of us. Ted’s attitude was ‘The Queen is dead. Long live the Queen. Aretha is the new queen.’ ”

I
got a Dinah Washington story,” Etta James told me. “I was a young thing with a couple of jive-ass hits under my belt. I was playing a small club in Providence while Dinah was booked into the big Loew’s State Theater. When someone said she’d come to see my midnight show, I nearly fell out. Dinah was in the house! With that in mind, I decided to open with her big hit, ‘Unforgettable.’ I didn’t even get to the chorus when I heard this earth-shattering crash. Dinah had got up off her chair, swept all the glasses and plates off her table, and was pointing at me, screaming, ‘Bitch, don’t you ever sing the Queen’s songs when the Queen is right there in front of you!’

“I ran off the stage crying. Didn’t even do my set. No one could console me. Didn’t wanna see no one. But it was Dinah herself who came back to my dressing room and said, ‘Sorry, I lost it for a minute, but look, girl, you learned a valuable lesson. If a star’s around, you don’t ever sing the star’s songs.
Ever.
’ ‘Yes, ma’am’ was all I could say. She invited me to her show at the Loew’s the next day. I went and we tightened up. I loved me some Dinah, but, man, that lady was something else.”

The Dinah encounter that Aretha remembered in
From These Roots
also involved a dressing-room encounter. After her show at a Detroit club, Aretha was visited in her dressing room by Dinah Washington. Dinah criticized Aretha for the disorder—clothes and shoes were scattered everywhere. Aretha deeply resented the remarks and thought Dinah was acting like a diva.

At the time of Dinah’s death, Aretha was twenty-one and clearly not a diva. She was working jazz clubs, with occasional stints at venues like the Apollo, and building a reputation. The money was minimal. There were no royalties, and the advances from Columbia were small. Her gigs, though, were steady. She traveled with the trio put together by Ted White—Teddy Harris on piano, drummer Hindel Butts, and bassist Roderick Hicks. When Harris wasn’t available, Earl Van Dyke often took his place. They were splendid musicians. For those who listened carefully—John Hammond, Carmen McRae, Bobby Scott, Jerry Wexler—there was no doubt that Aretha’s greatness was already established. Her potential was unlimited. At the same time, her public demeanor remained almost painfully timid.

“She would talk to me,” said Ruth Bowen, the woman who, at various times, booked both Dinah and Aretha, “but never at length. I didn’t become her agent and confidante until a few years later. Before that, though, I would see her from time to time and knew she had great fears about asserting herself. She spoke through Ted—and it was Ted who suggested that she go in the studio and quickly record a tribute album to Dinah. Ted always saw Aretha as the new Dinah, and he didn’t waste a minute trying to make that happen.”

There were two memorial services for Dinah—the first in Detroit at New Bethel, where C.L. presided and Aretha sang. The second was in Dinah’s hometown of Chicago.

“I attended both,” said Ruth. “It was in Detroit, right after the service, when I saw Ted, who said something about Aretha singing a tribute record. That hardly seemed the right place to mention it, but I suppose it was because Ted knew how close I was to Dinah—she and I began the Queen Booking Agency together—and he
wanted my approval. He also wanted me to pay the kind of attention to Aretha that I had paid to Dinah. I wanted to say,
Ted, her body’s still warm. Can’t we wait to talk about business for a few weeks?
But I didn’t say anything. I was in so much pain. Losing Dinah was like losing a sister.”

Columbia was as eager as Ted to record the tribute. They saw it as a big opportunity and went for a big production. Bob Mersey and Aretha selected the songs, Mersey quickly wrote charts for horns and strings, and on February 7, 1964, eight weeks after Dinah’s death—and just a month after Aretha gave birth to Ted White Jr.—the first session kicked off at the label’s studio at 799 Seventh Avenue in New York.

“Aretha’s dedication to her career and her craft is something people underestimate,” said Erma. “No matter what she’s going through—whether it’s giving birth or mourning a death—she gets right back to work because her work, her ability to express deep, deep feelings in song, is what gets her through.”

Aretha sounds both vulnerable and powerful. The album is sweet, sassy, and sad, a fitting—and at times soaring—musical tribute to the fallen queen by the aspiring one. By any measure, it’s a classic.

“Ted wanted to call it
What a Difference a Day Makes,
” said Ruth Bowen, “but I didn’t like that. I took that to mean that in the difference of a day, Dinah’s reign was over and Aretha’s had begun. I was relieved when they changed it to
Unforgettable.
That was more like it.”

The title track is a marvel of understatement and sincerity. Aretha comes to this tribute with great respect for Dinah’s mystique. While Dinah sang Hank Williams’s “Cold Cold Heart” in a jazz vein, Aretha puts a heavy gospel-blues spin on the song, a foreshadowing of her Atlantic material. As would be the case with Atlantic, Aretha also served in the role as uncredited coproducer. The chart is built around her concept.

In her early church days, Aretha reflected the sensibility of
Clara Ward and Jackie Verdell, but her singular style was there from the get-go. Extravagant runs are an essential part of the grammar of gospel singing, yet Aretha’s trademark runs, in which she jumps octaves and forges flourishes both simple and complex, are wholly her own.

Aretha’s reading of “What a Diff’rence a Day Makes” is especially sensitive and respectful of the original. Aretha does not try to reinvent the song. She doesn’t want to forget Dinah. Dinah is on her mind. You feel Dinah’s spirit in her heart. She doesn’t attack the song; she approaches it with gentle but firm confidence. She sings it straight for the first few bars, telling a slow-moving story of the discovery of love. It isn’t until she comes to the line “My yesterdays were blue, dear” that she starts caressing the lyrics. She elongates and exaggerates the
blue
to let you know that, though this is a tribute to Dinah, she intends to make this song her own.

All the songs on
Unforgettable
are made her own. And listening to it, one has no doubt that—in spirit, technique, imagination, creativity, and pure soul—Aretha measures up to Dinah. But the album made little impact on the music world, which was caught up in two huge phenomena.

In 1964, the Beatles arrived in America, hitting pop culture harder than anyone since Elvis. Meanwhile, Motown exploded. The Supremes broke out with a string of number-one hits, starting with “Where Did Our Love Go”; Mary Wells had “My Guy”; Martha and the Vandellas had “Dancing in the Streets”; and the Temptations and the Four Tops both crossed over to top-ten pop.

Just when Ted White and the executives at Columbia wanted the world to measure Aretha by the past—by Dinah, one of the most enduring artists of the previous decade—fans were looking to the future. Black pop, geared to a white audience, was finally coming into its own, and Aretha had nothing to do with that. She was presented as a mature adult. Although Aretha was only twenty-one, the marketing men targeted her to a much older demographic.

“
Unforgettable
is probably the best thing she did on Columbia,”
John Hammond told me. “Mersey found a solid jazz footing for the project. On ‘Evil Gal Blues’ and ‘Soulville,’ he employed a Hammond B-3 organ that created a wonderfully authentic blues feeling. ‘Drinking Again’ is a marvelous evocation of a late-night bar. Dinah sang it beautifully, but Aretha put it in the Sinatra category. It’s reminiscent of his ‘One for My Baby.’ I believe it’s that good. The problem wasn’t the material or the vocals. The material was perfect and the vocals were astounding. I remember thinking that if Aretha never does another album she will be remembered for this one. No, the problem was timing. Dinah had died, and, outside the black community, interest in her had waned dramatically. Popular music was in a radical and revolutionary moment, and that moment had nothing to do with Dinah Washington, great as she was and will always be.”

“If I’m not mistaken,” said Clyde Otis, who would be the next major figure in Aretha’s musical life, “
Unforgettable
was the first time Aretha had sung one of my songs. I’m talking about ‘This Bitter Earth.’ I was on staff at Mercury when I brought it to Dinah, who recorded it in 1960. It was one of her biggest hits. I’d also been producing hits on Brook Benton, and, of course, I’d done hit duets with Brook and Dinah—‘Baby (You Got What It Takes)’ and ‘It’s a Rocking Good Way (to Mess Around and Fall in Love).’ When Bob Mersey, my neighbor in Englewood, New Jersey, mentioned that Aretha was doing a Dinah tribute, I said that I thought ‘This Bitter Earth’ would be a natural. Aretha wanted to do it before I even suggested it. I would have loved to produce it, but Bob was running the sessions for that album. When I heard what Aretha did to it, I realized there was nothing I could have added. No one loved and admired Dinah more than me. But Aretha took the song to the heavens. After her version, I knew that, from that day forward, my composition would be considered a standard. She created the standard. She set the standard. Other versions are superb—I especially love the way Nancy Wilson did it. But Aretha… that girl tore the song apart and put it back together again in a way that
had me shaking my head in wonder. I consider it her song and no one else’s.”

Aretha felt the composition’s intrinsic drama. One of the finest of all blues ballads, “This Bitter Earth” goes from despair to hope. Just as the truest blues are transformational—the very act of singing or hearing the blues lets you lose the blues—“This Bitter Earth” takes us on a journey out of the depths of depression. It is the crowning achievement of
Unforgettable,
the most forgotten and underrated of Aretha’s many grand achievements.

When the record was released in February, the initial single was “Soulville,” an up-tempo romp aimed at the R&B market. For the first time Aretha provides self-styled backups; she overdubs her vocals with her own harmonies, a technique that, at the end of the decade, Marvin Gaye would perfect in his
What’s Going On.

“I thought putting out ‘Soulville’ was a mistake,” said Hammond. “Bob Mersey had produced a classic album for the ages. Why not promote it as such? Instead, Columbia went for the youth market, when, in fact, it wasn’t a youth-oriented project. Sam Cooke had done a marvelous tribute album to Billie Holiday, and in the same spirit Aretha was evoking the spirit of Dinah. In a desperate attempt for a hit, they misrepresented the album. Ironically, while the sales force was trying to break her on the R-and-B charts, the publicists were also booking her on Steve Allen’s TV show, where she sang the more adult material, like ‘Skylark.’ A week later, I looked up and saw they had also booked her on
Shindig!
singing ‘Soulville.’ It was amazing how much demographic confusion surrounded her promotion.”

In March,
Ebony
ran its first feature on Aretha. The article began by mentioning that “she has become the top female interpreter of a gospel-tinged blues idiom pioneered by the old ‘blues preacher’ himself, Ray Charles.” It went on to say that she had “several fast-selling single records and four Columbia albums behind her… a number of TV guest spots, and a tight schedule of night club and theater dates that ought to net her at least $100,000 this
year.” Elsewhere the article stated that John Hammond “signed her as one of Columbia’s ‘five-percent artists’—a choice deal which guaranteed the then 18-year-old singer high royalties for five years.” The writer concluded with a litany of Aretha’s complaints: that her former personal manager disrespected her; that her booking agents didn’t attend to her needs; and that Columbia didn’t give her the “same big build-up” that they gave Robert Goulet or Barbra Streisand.

In response to the booking-agent disputes, Ruth Bowen said, “I can’t tell you how many times over the course of several decades that I have been fired and rehired by Aretha. That’s simply her way. If something didn’t go right at a gig, her first reaction is to blame the booking agent. The circumstances didn’t matter. A sudden snowstorm might result in a small audience, but it was my fault for booking her at a club who didn’t really appreciate her style of singing. I was used to moody artists because, after all, I had worked with Dinah. But Aretha was moodier than most. After a while I stopped taking it personally. When a gig went well, as many of them did, I was praised to the sky. When a piano was slightly out of tune or the dressing room was too small, I got hell. I simply shrugged my shoulders and took it in stride. This was what it meant to be working with genius.”

Aretha’s genius is evident on her appearances on Steve Allen’s TV show, first in March, then again in May. Each time, Allen calls her “one of the most exciting young singers in the business today” and holds up the just-released
Unforgettable
album. Oddly enough, only one of the four songs she sings during her several appearances is from the Dinah album. She rips through a ferocious “Lover, Come Back to Me,” goes to the piano and bangs out a “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody,” stays at the keyboard for a down-and-dirty “Won’t Be Long,” eviscerates “Skylark,” and returns to the piano to knock out a gutbucket “Evil Gal Blues,” a Dinah favorite. On camera, Aretha looks fabulous—svelte and sexy. Her gowns are elegant. As a performer, she’s on fire.

Twenty-five years after she appeared on his show, Steve Allen
told me, “A jazz pianist myself, I recognized her jazz chops. They were tremendous. But I also saw that she had enough poise and experience to sing standards. My motivation to have her on the show was simply to introduce her great talent, but I wanted to get her to sing some of my songs. Fortunately, she did. With the help of my friend Clyde Otis, a year later I was able to convince her to record two of my songs, thus bolstering their status as standards—‘This Could Be the Start of Something Big’ and ‘Impossible.’ ”

In spite of good reviews,
Unforgettable
languished on the shelves, and, once again, Columbia executives tried to figure out a way to sell Aretha to a wider audience.