Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin (6 page)

T
here were a score of fine trumpet players who came up in the 1920s with Louis Armstrong. But the quality of his sound—the piercing beauty of his tone, the deep humanity of his voice—profoundly altered American music. The same is true of the saxophone playing of Lester Young, Charlie Parker, and John Coltrane. These were men who had the cry. Billie Holiday was a woman who had the cry, as did Mahalia Jackson and Dinah Washington.

You hear Aretha’s cry when, as a young teenager, she steps into the spotlight at the Oakland Auditorium and sings “Take My Hand, Precious Lord.” By then Reverend Franklin and his gospel service were drawing crowds up and down California. Thomas A. Dorsey wrote the song in the thirties based on a nineteenth-century melody. His lyrics are a prayer for faith—that God will transform the raw pain Dorsey suffered by the death of his wife and infant son into fresh hope. Knowing that he can’t make it alone, he asks Jesus to take his hand and lead him on. He prays for the transformation of darkness into light. The message is among the deepest and most beloved in all black gospel, and for Aretha to approach the sacred hymn signals a readiness—even an eagerness—to stand beside the magnificent Mahalia, who performed it countless times.
Barely a teenager, Aretha embraces the most grown-up of spiritual moments—the declaration of despair before the reality of death. “ ‘When my life is almost gone,’ ” she cries, “ ‘hear my cry.’ ” The cry for a connection to the unseen source of creation is chilling. This is not a child singing, but a woman. She is singing outside the rhythm of time—there is no set groove for the song—making her way through life’s tragic maze. She stands in darkness. She sings, “ ‘As the night draws near and the day is past and gone, at the river I stand.’ ” The river is the Jordan and the river Styx, the river between life and death, sorrow and renewal. After the lyrics are sung a single time, they are no longer adequate to express the depth of her feelings. “Ain’t no harm to moan,” says Aretha, who wordlessly renders the melody. Her voice is ageless. Her art is fully formed and wholly realized. She is much more than a child prodigy or a surprisingly good singer. She is already a great artist.

“Remember Venus coming out of the sea in Botticelli’s painting?” Jerry Wexler asked me when we listened to the song together. “That’s Aretha—a goddess whose maturity and beauty cannot be explained.”

At the same time, singing before the adoring crowd at the Oakland Arena, she is also a fifteen-year-old girl who has given birth to one baby and is pregnant with another.

Listen to her sing “Never Grow Old,” also recorded live in this initial grouping of her first documented performances, and you hear her soaring even higher. The text is heaven, the subtext the movement from the finite to the infinite. The tone is serious.

The couplet she sings in “While the Blood Runs Warm”—“he bought the pain of death/while he rocked you on his breast”—is astoundingly complex. The song comes alive when Aretha explosively punctuates the word
rock
in gutbucket R&B fashion, lending the text a sensual/sexual flavor.

According to Erma, this was the period when Aretha began singing “Precious Lord” because she associated the hymn with Billy Kyles, whose Thompson Community Choir performed it often. Erma conjectured that her sister had a crush on Kyles, eight
years her senior—the same Kyles who became a leader in the civil rights movement and was standing next to Dr. King on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on that fateful April day in 1968.

“My three favorites of Aretha’s early recordings are the ones she sang to show Daddy she could compete with Clara Ward,” said Erma. “Those songs—‘There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood,’ ‘While the Blood Runs Warm,’ and ‘The Day Is Past and Gone’—were often performed by Clara during the services that featured Daddy’s sermons and the Ward Sisters. Daddy raised all of us to be our best and not shy away from competition, and Aretha was especially competitive. I learned that early on, when, right around this time, I formed a gospel quartet and asked Aretha to join. The idea was that we’d take turns singing lead. But Aretha wanted
all
the leads. Our group lasted about two weeks. Aretha’s competitive drive—the same drive that later enabled her to survive so long as a star—was not conducive to group harmony.”

Carolyn looked at it somewhat differently. “I’m not saying that Ree isn’t competitive,” she said, “but something else deeper happens when she sings. She goes somewhere else. She slips into the zone. That’s her gift. The zone is where she’s connected to the spirit. Doesn’t matter what she’s singing—a gospel song or a worldly song—the minute she opens her mouth, she’s off into the zone. She can’t explain the zone. Erma can’t explain the zone. I can’t explain the zone. No one can. Not even Daddy. It’s where great artists go to channel what I call the blood. I’m talking about the artistic blood that flows through certain people and has them expressing all the emotions of the world.”

Cecil agreed with Carolyn. “When you listen to the early things that Aretha recorded,” he said, “you realize that it’s all there—all her musical intelligence. Since we were all raised in the same household by the same dad, it makes sense that we’d all have that same intelligence, but we don’t. She was born with it. Later on, musicologists can try to analyze how she came to it. They can
say that she practiced harder than the rest of us, or paid more attention to the music around her, or was more motivated to learn, but I’m here to tell you that none of that is true. She didn’t practice. She didn’t pay any more attention to the music around her than Erma, Carolyn, or myself. As a child, Ree was never motivated to learn to read or write music because she didn’t need to. She had it all on her fingertips. She absorbed it and then replayed it better than the original. That’s what you’re hearing when you hear her sing the Clara Ward songs. If you hear a thirteen-year-old girl sounding older and wiser than a thirty-one-year-old woman, it isn’t because Aretha was trying to outshine Clara. It’s just what happened when my sister got up to sing.”

In 1955, the same year Aretha made these early recordings, Clara Ward found herself in the middle of a controversy that had nothing to do with her romance with Reverend Franklin. It had everything to do with the bridge that both separated and joined sacred and secular music—the same bridge over which Aretha would soon travel.

The
Chicago Defender,
a prominent black newspaper, reported Ward’s response to sharp criticism from rhythm-and-blues star LaVern Baker, who had started out as Little Miss Sharecropper and didn’t find fame until she changed record labels and cut “Tweedle Dee” for Jerry Wexler and Ahmet Ertegun at Atlantic Records. LaVern had accused Clara of stealing her grooves. Clara fired back. “If anyone is guilty of taking a beat, it’s the current R&B artists because most of them are former choir singers, including LaVern. Where else did they copy their style from except church groups?” Clara went on to say that she had turned down $2,500 to “jazz up ‘Swing Low Sweet Chariot’ with her group under an assumed name.”

The dialogue between Clara and LaVern is basically about which came first, the chicken or the egg. After Al Green, newly a
pastor in the service of the Lord, performed at James Cleveland’s Cornerstone Institutional Baptist Church in Los Angeles in the early eighties, I posed that question to Cleveland. Which came first—the spirituals or the blues?

“Aretha’s father would laugh at that question,” said Reverend Cleveland, “because he knew there was no answer. It’s a riddle that can’t be solved. You could say that the spirituals came first, but if you broke it down further you could also say that the field shouts came before the spirituals. How do we know whether someone out there picking cotton didn’t first start moaning about how tired he was, or about how much he wanted a woman? Then maybe a God-fearing woman heard that song and switched it up to where she was praying for God to save
her
. The fleshly needs and the godly needs are very close. We’re likely to use music to call out both those needs because they’re both so basic. Which comes first? You tell me.”

In the mid-1950s, things were happening fast in Aretha’s world. Her father’s prominence was growing exponentially. His sermons were a hot item in black record stores across the country. Chess, in Chicago, began distributing his records, which over the years have gone through every format—from 45s to LPs to cassettes to CDs to MP3s—and are still available today. In 1956 alone, the
Chicago Defender
reported, C.L.’s sales exceeded a half a million copies.

The Chess brothers, Phil and Leonard, were contemporaries of Jerry Wexler, white Jewish businessmen with an instinctual feel for black music in all genres. Theirs was the first national label to list Aretha Franklin as a recording artist.

That same year—1956—Aretha faced a daunting challenge: how to balance a burgeoning career in gospel music with the responsibilities of motherhood and school. A year earlier, two months before her thirteenth birthday, she had given birth to her first child,
whom she named Clarence, after her dad. By then the Franklins had moved to an even larger mansion. The home at 7414 LaSalle Boulevard on Detroit’s West Side was, according to Erma, “the most magnificent I had ever seen. It was a showplace created by European craftsmen, the same artisans who had built palaces in Italy and France. Because of his popularity, my father’s financial fortunes had turned from good to superb. He deserved all the material rewards of a great man and a great leader. He had a study worthy of the great theologian that he had become. He had also become the voice of his people in Detroit.”

I was reluctant to ask Aretha about a rumor that had circulated through the black community and entertainment industry for decades—that C. L. Franklin was the father of Aretha’s first child. I first heard about it through John Hammond, who had also told Jerry Wexler. When I questioned Hammond about his source, he simply said, “It was a well-established fact in the black community,” and pointed to the scandal of C.L. impregnating twelve-year-old Mildred Jennings in Memphis as evidence of his predilection for young girls. Wexler often quoted Hammond and, with little discretion, spread the incest story for years. The rumor was prominent enough to be addressed by C.L.’s biographer Nick Salvatore, who found it completely unsubstantiated.

When I mentioned the rumor to Erma, she was quick to say, “It’s an ugly and utterly false statement.”

Carolyn and Cecil had told me the same thing, and given their extreme candor in discussing their father and sister, I saw no reason to doubt them. My own research, like Salvatore’s, had not produced a shred of evidence.

In
From These Roots,
Aretha characterizes her pregnancy as noneventful. Her father was understanding, not scolding. She was grateful for the presence of Big Mama, who mothered everyone—her son, his children, and his children’s children. Erma, for instance, was sixteen when she gave birth to her son, Thomas. Thus Big Mama was already busy raising babies.

Aretha refused to name the father of her baby, referring to him only as Romeo.

According to Brenda Corbett, who moved into the Franklin home when her mother, Louise, C.L.’s sister, died in 1954, Donald Burk was the father of Aretha’s first child. There was no talk of marriage.

“He was just a guy Ree knew from school,” said Cecil. “She wasn’t at all that interested in him and I don’t think he had any deep interest in her. Ree told me before she told Daddy, and I thought he’d explode. But he didn’t. He understood that these things happen. He did, however, call us all together to discuss the consequences of having kids at a young age. He took me aside and mentioned birth control and the importance of condoms. Back then in the fifties, I’m not sure many other fathers had that kind of discussion with their sons. He said that daughters were more difficult. They were harder to speak to about sex. He worried a lot about his girls.”

“Daddy was a prince of his people,” said Carolyn, “and we were certainly his princesses. Because we had cooks and housekeepers and many ladies from the church eager to help our household run smoothly, we couldn’t help but be a little spoiled. Daddy was aware of this, and that’s why he made sure we did our share of sweeping and mopping. His children were going to know the meaning of hard work. And his children were also going to be educated. From the time we were small, it was understood that college was part of our future. Given my father’s insistence that we all have a broad intellectual outlook, it could be no other way. I think that’s what worried Daddy most about Aretha’s pregnancy—how it would impact her education. Would she have to leave school? And if she left, would she return?”

“Aretha went right back to school after having Clarence,” said Erma. “She was an excellent student who did well in all her classes. After school, she’d fly over to the Arcadia, our local roller-skating rink. The Arcadia is where she first ran into Donald Burk. Aretha could skate up a storm.”

Aretha’s first memory of indulging herself with money earned from her gospel appearances was the purchase of Raybestos skates, the Cadillac of wheels.

After the birth of Clarence, she was on her feet in no time, back on the road with Daddy and back at the Arcadia on weekends. If there was heartbreak, she brushed it off as the lessons of life learned by young girls everywhere. Aretha’s picture of herself as a normal youth could not be shattered, not even by her own facts.

In her book, she calls the father of her second child, born two months short of her fifteenth birthday, Casanova. She says only that her son Eddie was named after him. Brenda Corbett identified him as Edward Jordan. Cecil called him a player, as did Aretha. Like Clarence, Eddie would bear the Franklin family name and be raised in the Franklin compound principally by Big Mama and the army of women eager to fulfill the family’s needs.

Aretha described her father’s reaction to this second teen pregnancy as one of complete acceptance. According to Aretha, he was not upset or scolding.

“I don’t want to go into graphic details about what happened when Ree told Daddy that she was expecting another child from still another man,” said Cecil. “It’s enough to say that he wasn’t at all happy and he made his unhappiness quite clear.”