Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin (2 page)

“Then it wouldn’t be independent,” I said.

“Why should it be independent?”

“So I can tell the story from my point of view.”

“But it’s not your story, it’s mine.”

“You’re an important historical figure, Aretha. Others will inevitably come along to tell your story. That’s the blessing and burden of being a public figure.”

“More burden than blessing,” she said.

When I renewed my research for this book, I did so without Aretha’s blessing, but I did have the support of three of Aretha’s closest relatives—her first cousin Brenda Corbett (who has also served as her background singer for two decades), her niece Sabrina (daughter of her sister Erma), and her sister-in-law Earline Franklin. They agreed that her story, from a perspective other than her own, needed to be told. They agreed to help me. “We trust you to write the
righteous
version,” said Brenda.

I like the word
version
. For all my voluminous research, I do not view my first Aretha Franklin book as anything more than a version. I don’t believe that there is such a thing as
the
Aretha story. I
believe there are many. My Aretha story is not objective. After my years of working with her, I know her personally and I know her well. I have love and compassion for her as a sister and a believer. I stand in awe of her artistry. But I also come to this project—as Aretha came to
From These Roots
—with a deep bias. I bring the peculiar cultural mix that has informed me. I bring to the text a lifetime of attitudes about psychology and mythology. Because it was black music—not simply gospel, but jazz, blues, and R&B—that brought me to the church where God is worshipped and praised, praise and worship remain essential elements in my approach to art. At the same time, there is no righteousness—at least to my mind—without critical scrutiny. God is to be questioned as well as worshipped; probed as well as praised.

And I bring respect. That’s why the book bears the name of her most famous hit. In the end, Aretha is all about respect—getting it and keeping it. There would be no
Respect
without
From These Roots
. I would not have written this book had I not cowritten hers. I see this second book as a companion piece to the first.

I had no choice but to begin it where all serious students of Aretha begin—with her sense of what is true. I honor that sense even as I challenge it. I respect her right to interpret her complex story even as I attempt to reinterpret and expand her interpretation. Most important, though, I thank Aretha for calling me that day at the Atheneum Hotel in Detroit. I thank her for entertaining my endless questions during the years we worked together. I thank her for feeding my spirit and responding to my enthusiasm. I thank her for her vanilla-wafer banana pudding and her lasagna à la Aretha.

Thirty-six years have passed since that fateful evening when Ray Charles introduced me to Aretha Franklin in his dressing room at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Since then, the fact that I have been able to document her life from two radically different points of view—hers and mine—is a privilege for which I am deeply grateful.

T
hough Nat Cole, Sam Cooke, and Marvin Gaye all had preacher fathers, none of those fathers were famous. None of them had national reputations or recording careers. Aretha’s dad—the Reverend C. L. Franklin—had all that and then some. He was a towering figure in the history of black America, a social activist and progressive theologian who stood beside his close friend Martin Luther King Jr. as a national civil rights leader. His fame, though, came from a remarkable rhetorical talent married to the excitement of hot rhythmic music.

The great blues singer Bobby “Blue” Bland told me about his early memories of seeing C. L. Franklin preach at the New Salem Baptist Church in Memphis.

“Couldn’t have been older than eleven or twelve when Mama and them took me to hear this new preacher man everyone was talking about. This was the early forties. We hadn’t moved to Memphis yet but we’d go there on the weekend, one of the principal reasons being church. I liked church ’cause of the exciting spirit of the music, but when the preachers got to preaching, I’d get bored and fidgety. But here comes this man with a voice like a singer. In fact, he did sing before he started into preaching—and that got my attention right off. Can’t tell you what hymn he sang, but his voice
was strong. I sat right up and my mind didn’t wander anywhere. He grabbed my attention and kept it. When he started into the preaching part, I stayed with him. Wasn’t his words that got me—I couldn’t tell you what he talked on that day, couldn’t tell you what any of it meant, but it was the
way
he talked. He talked like he was singing. He talked music. The thing that really got me, though, was this squall-like sound he made to emphasize a certain word. He’d catch the word in his mouth, let it roll around and squeeze it with his tongue. When it popped on out, it exploded, and the ladies started waving and shouting. I liked all that. I started popping and shouting too. That next week I asked Mama when we were going back to Memphis to church.

“ ‘Since when you so keen on church?’ Mama asked.

“ ‘I like that preacher,’ I said.

“ ‘Reverend Franklin?’ she asked.

“ ‘Well, if he’s the one who sings when he preaches, that’s the one I like.’

“ ‘He’s sure enough the one,’ said Mama.

“Sometimes we’d go to East Trigg Missionary, where, according to Mama, the pastor W. Herbert Brewster was Reverend Franklin’s teacher. There were two powerful voices in that church—Queen Anderson and J. Robert Bradley—who were about the baddest gospel singers you’d ever wanna hear. I know Reverend Franklin loved them because sometimes he’d show up at East Trigg for the late service after he was done preaching at New Salem. He’d sit there on the first row taking notes during Brewster’s sermons. Then he’d be up on his feet shouting and waving when Queen Anderson and Bradley started into singing.

“Wasn’t long after that when I started fooling with singing myself. I liked whatever was on the radio, especially those first things Nat Cole did with his trio. Naturally I liked the blues singers like Roy Brown, the jump singers like Louis Jordan, and the ballad singers like Billy Eckstine, but, brother, the man who really shaped me was Reverend Franklin.

“Years later, when I started driving for B.B. King, it turned out B. felt the same way about Reverend Franklin. By then, Reverend had gone from Memphis to Buffalo to Detroit, where me and B. would go to the New Bethel Church to see him.”

“I sat under his sermons for many years,” B.B. King told me. “I’d like to say that he was the bluesman’s preacher because he’d come to the clubs to see us, but that wouldn’t be fair. Frank—that’s what his friends called him—was everyone’s preacher. Because those sermons he recorded were selling in the same little stores as our blues records, we also looked at him as a fellow artist. He was one of us. Unlike other men of the cloth, he never called our music devilish—and we loved him for that. But he did more than that. He let us know that he admired what we were doing. He called us true artists and had no qualms about telling the world just how he felt. That made us feel like royalty.”

The fact that Reverend was a liberal—even a radical—in the severely conservative black church culture shaped Aretha’s story on every level. To take on that culture required an unusually strong character and conviction. Reverend had both.

“He possessed rhetorical genius,” said Jesse Jackson, who preached at C.L.’s funeral in 1984. In the discussion I had with him in 2008, Jackson described his mentor as the model of the modern black preacher. “He not only infused his messages with great poetry and startling metaphors, but he imparted significant social meaning, pointing out that, as children of God, we were no more or less beloved than any other people. C.L. preached the say-it-loud-I’m-black-and-I’m-proud message generations before James Brown. Along with Dr. King, he was far ahead on the curve of civil rights. He was an assertive intellectual, not an apologist, a beacon of strength and hope for the millions of the transplants who’d come from the South in the forties and fifties to find work in the great industrial cities of the North.”

“I saw Aretha’s daddy as one of the few preachers powerful enough to dispel that old myth that says gospel and blues are mortal
enemies,” James Cleveland told me. “He had the courage to say that they actually go together as proud parts of our heritage as a people.”

The creative tension between secular and sacred music is one of the enduring mysteries of African American culture. For those raised in the church, the bias against reconciling the spirit and the flesh runs deep. Singers praising God on a Sunday morning while using those same artistic passions—rhythms and riffs—to extol sensual pleasures on a Saturday night have faced angry rebuke.

In Jewish culture, a similar story is told in
The Jazz Singer,
the first talkie, a groundbreaking film released in 1927 in which Al Jolson plays Jakie Rabinowitz, son of a cantor—a singer of sacred songs. The boy defies his ultrareligious dad by singing popular songs and leaving the synagogue for the stage.

Ironically, Reverend C. L. Franklin was, along with his daughter Aretha, an Al Jolson enthusiast. And doubly ironic is the fact that it was Franklin, a pure product of the black church, who defied this strict separation of gospel and jazzy blues.

In the twentieth century, the sacred/secular split begins with Thomas A. Dorsey, the former barrelhouse pianist known as Georgia Tom, who invented modern black gospel music in the thirties by infusing blues into songs of worship. His first hit, “Precious Lord, Take My Hand,” was sung by his student Mahalia Jackson at the funeral of Martin Luther King Jr. Aretha sang it countless times. Yet the black church community was slow to warm to Dorsey’s music. They considered it too jazzy. Even when it was adopted into the repertory, old-timers complained that it was tainted with fleshly harmonies.

The Jazz Singer archetype—the singer caught between the church and the world—persisted in the black community throughout the forties and fifties. The Jazz Singer dramas vary but are linked by the same essential story line: a terrible tension between singing for God and singing for sex.

Superstition in the black community ran deep.

Remembering the death of Jesse Belvin in Arkansas in 1962,
Ray Charles told me, “Jesse used to talk about how he directed the choir in some church in LA. His people warned him about leaving the church. But, like most of us, Jesse had stars in his eyes. When he started singing R-and-B, you could hear the church in his voice. He was the cat who wrote ‘Earth Angel.’ That always felt like a religious song to me. Well, when Jesse and his old lady were killed in a car wreck, folks started talking much shit. They said he was dead because he’d left the church. They were sure that God was punishing him. A lot of church singers were plain scared to cross over to the pop side, including Mahalia. Not me. When I caught hell for turning gospel songs into R-and-B, I couldn’t have cared less. I don’t believe in no superstitions. Besides, I knew why Jesse was killed. His driver had been my driver first. I’d fired that guy for drinking and falling asleep at the wheel. He’s the cat who killed Jesse and Jesse’s wife. God didn’t have shit to do with it.”

The shooting death of Sam Cooke, murdered by a female hotel manager in Los Angeles in 1964, sent shock waves through the gospel/blues community.

“I remember my dad saying one word to me after we learned that Sam was shot,” said Marvin Gaye. “He said, ‘
See?
’

“ ‘See what?’ I asked.

“ ‘See what happens when you displease God.’

“I didn’t argue,” Marvin continued. “You couldn’t argue with my father. But he was one of the ministers who thought if you sang the devil’s music, you wound up going down with the devil himself. I like to tell myself that I don’t have that attitude—that I’m liberated from the old way of thinking. In the deepest part of me, though, those thoughts are there. To survive this world, I’m pretty sure that one day I’ll have to follow Saint Francis and devote myself to singing for the birds and the God who created them.”

“One of the most astounding things about C.L.,” said James Cleveland, “is that although his liberal attitudes about music seem like they should be coming from someone educated in the North, he was a farm boy from the Deep South.”

Born January 22, 1915, in rural Mississippi to sharecroppers,
Franklin was raised by his mother, Rachel, who would, in turn, raise Aretha. Big Mama, as the family called her, was the prominent maternal figure in Aretha’s life. C.L.’s dad disappeared when the boy was four.

“According to Big Mama,” Aretha’s baby sister, Carolyn, told me, “Daddy had the voice of a grown man when he was only ten. They saw him as prophetic. As a preteen, he was already delivering sermons.”

“Big Mama worshipped her son,” said Aretha’s brother Cecil. “She used to talk about how he was years ahead of the other kids when it came to reading. She’d talk about how the nearest town with a library was thirty miles away, and how they had to ride a horse-drawn wagon to get there. By the time he was thirteen, he had read novels by Charles Dickens and Nathaniel Hawthorne and could name the books of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation—not only name them, but write commentaries on them. In deep backwoods Mississippi, he was considered a phenomenon, a wonder child.”

At fourteen, C.L. experienced what he called “my born-again baptism” in the Sunflower River. Despite not completing grade school, at eighteen he was preaching on a circuit of churches from Cleveland to Clarksdale, Mississippi. Before turning twenty-one, he enrolled at Greenville Industrial College, an unaccredited Afro-Baptist school surrounded by sharecropper plantations.

“I had lived and worked in Greenville,” said B.B. King. “That’s part of the reason Frank and I got along so well. We knew the territory of each other’s upbringings. We had both been treated like dogs and called dirty niggers. We had both witnessed lynchings. Yet our mamas taught us to believe in a God of justice.

“Frank told me that his college had taught him to believe every word of the Bible. You had to read it literally. He told me that when he challenged one of the teachers by mentioning the theories of Charles Darwin, the teacher slapped him across his face. But even then, Frank understood that, although there’s deep truth in the Bible, there’s also poetry, and that all poetry is open to interpretation.”

“Daddy’s college was all about Booker T. Washington’s go-slow
accommodation approach to the racial question,” said C.L.’s son, Cecil. “Washington stressed technical colleges for blacks while W.E.B. DuBois, his adversary, argued for a liberal arts education that would increase our ability to think deeply and critically. Ironically, in spite of his fundamentalist indoctrination at Greenville Industrial, Daddy ultimately rejected fundamentalism. In sentiment and philosophy, he was closer to DuBois than Washington. His deep intellectual curiosity led him to read with not only his heart, but his head. He swam against the cultural tide of his times and, by the natural force of his native intelligence, became a progressive. Daddy loved the Lord as passionately as any fundamentalist, but he understood that God’s word was often not self-explanatory. God’s word required informed and loving explanation on the part of man.”

By age nineteen, C.L. was married to Alene Gaines. By twenty-one, he had divorced Alene and married Barbara Siggers, who had a young son, Vaughn. When C.L. was twenty-three, Barbara gave birth to their first child, Erma Vernice. By then they were living in Memphis, where, at age twenty-four, Reverend preached his first sermon at the New Salem Baptist Church, where Bobby Bland first heard him. That was 1939. Barbara and C.L.’s son, Cecil, was born in 1940.

That same year Franklin fathered another child, not with Barbara but with Mildred Jennings, who was twelve years old when she became pregnant with C.L.’s daughter Carol Allan. The scandal was kept secret from his other children until he sat them down in 1958 and revealed the truth to them.

On March 25, 1942, Aretha Louise, named after his father’s two sisters, was born in Memphis at 406 Lucy Avenue to C. L. Franklin and his wife, Barbara.

C.L. made his first foray into the media world in Memphis in the early forties. He hosted his own radio show,
The Shadow of the Cross,
whose mission, according to C.L., was “to offer hymns of inspiration, messages to unify the Negroes of the Mid-South, assuage racial animus, and acquaint white listeners with the Negro’s
loyalty and accomplishments.” It was in Memphis where he began crafting his most famous sermon—“The Eagle Stirreth the Nest.” Eighty years after Franklin employed the graphic and highly complex metaphor, the sermon is included in several academic anthologies of literature, is taught in colleges, and remains one of the essential texts of African American history.

In 1944, the family moved to Buffalo, New York, where C.L. preached at the Friendship Baptist Church. That same year, the last of the four Franklin/Siggers children—Carolyn Ann—was born.

As a media presence, C.L. grew increasingly comfortable. In Buffalo he became the first black preacher to utilize radio. According to his biographer Nick Salvatore, “Franklin’s ‘Voice of Friendship’ program highlighted religious worship (including at times a brief sermon by C.L.), gospel music, and commentary on current events.”