Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin (7 page)

“Babies are blessings,” Erma explained. “That was always Big Mama’s attitude. The idea of an abortion was unthinkable. The circumstances of our pregnancies made no difference. It was understood that our babies would be welcomed into the world and cared for with limitless love. It was also understood that our future as women—our education and our career—would not be compromised because of these early births. Daddy recognized our ambition as a psychological force we had inherited from him. He did everything in his power to encourage that ambition. He did not see his daughters as housewives. He saw us as stars, and that’s how we saw ourselves.”

“Ree dropped out of school after the birth of her second son,” said Erma. “At the same time, he didn’t want her to stop doing his
out-of-town services. She was one of his main attractions. Word got round that Reverend Franklin had a daughter who could sing. He told her that she could continue her formal education at a later time, but that never happened. The business got hold of Aretha and never let go.”

“One of the reasons I believe Aretha has this insecurity,” said Cecil, “is that she’s the only one of us who didn’t pursue her education. Erma, Carolyn, and I all wound up in college at some point in our lives and Ree never did. The reason is obvious. All concentration was on her career. But I think being a high-school dropout, combined with having super-smart, super-educated siblings, did nothing for her confidence. I don’t think there was any rivalry between me and Ree—I was her biggest supporter—but between her and her sisters, it got a little loony.”

“I’d been singing in my father’s choir since I was seven,” said Erma. “I didn’t have what I consider the high art and dramatic delivery of Aretha, but I was certainly an effective and emotional performer. My father encouraged me, as he encouraged all his children. I don’t think I had reached age thirteen when I formed a girl group called the Cleo-Patrettes. They came about because the Four Tops, who lived in our neighborhood, encouraged me to get out there with an act of my own. Levi Stubbs, Obie Benson, Duke Fakir, and Lawrence Payton have always been close to the Franklins—including my dad, my sisters, and my brother—and are beautiful guys. Back then they were called the Four Aims and had a deal on Chess Records. They wanted to take me to Chess but Daddy was already connected to Joe Von Battle. In 1953, when I was fourteen, JVB Records put out a single—‘No Other Love’ on one side and ‘Say Would You Baby’ on the other. I was ready to quit school and go on the road. This was before the appearance of the Chantels and the Shirelles. This was a chance for me to be a pioneer in the field of girl groups.

“I was ready but my father wasn’t. He had no intention of allowing me to leave school. He was insistent that I not only complete
high school but eventually get a college degree as well. So that’s what happened. I put education first, finished high school with honors, and went to Clark College in Atlanta, where I majored in business. That served me well for the rest of my life. But music would never leave my heart. I had many more musical adventures ahead of me.”

T
he last half of the 1950s, the years when Aretha grew from a thirteen-year-old girl to an eighteen-year-old woman, was intense for working-class blacks struggling for a piece of America’s Cold War prosperity. For members of Reverend Franklin’s New Bethel Baptist Church, the majority of whom had come to Detroit from the rural South, the goal was economic betterment—better jobs, better housing, better education. The goal was to move up the social ladder. The bottom rung was no longer acceptable.

African Americans looked to leaders like Walter White, who headed the NAACP during the
Brown v. Board of Education
decision in 1954, and Adam Clayton Powell, the first black congressman from New York State, as avatars of the new middle class. In Detroit, Reverend C. L. Franklin embodied the qualities his people admired most: he was articulate, forward-thinking, grounded in God, proud of his ethnicity, and successful as a promoter of his own spiritual talents. The fact that women found him attractive only added to his aura.

“When you have a congregation comprised of former sharecroppers from the South,” said James Cleveland, speaking of New Bethel, “and their pastor is a former sharecropper himself, his
improvement in life becomes your improvement. Maybe you can’t live in a fine mansion, but your pastor—a man you can relate to—well, he can. And you can be proud of belonging to a church with a pastor smart enough to make his way into the wider world with style, dignity, and intellect. Even if you don’t ever make enough to move into the middle class, he has. And part of you goes along with him.”

C. L. Franklin rode the wave of upward mobility. Along with his friends Clara Ward and Sam Cooke, he had passionate ambitions that drove him to break through barriers. Prompted by Mother Gertrude, Clara took gospel into nightclubs while Sam transformed gospel into pop. From C.L.’s point of view, all this was done without sacrificing his artistic integrity. He envisioned ever-expanding markets for his ministry and his daughter’s music. Every day was a new opportunity for progress and self-betterment.

At the same time, the musical vehicles used by the minority culture to capture a majority audience were changing. Following Billy Eckstine, Nat Cole represented the great black crossover dream of the era. When Cole’s national TV show debuted on NBC in the spring of 1956, it was one of the first for an African American. Hazel Scott and Billy Daniels had hosted smaller shows earlier in the decade but they were short-lived. Unlike Nat, Scott and Daniels lacked the status to host major white stars. As a consummate jazz pianist and, more to the point, a masterly pop vocalist, Nat stood apart. His rendering of ballads like “Mona Lisa,” “Nature Boy,” “Too Young,” and “Unforgettable” endeared him to white audiences. His enunciation, while idiosyncratic, was exemplary. He spoke as he sang, with subtle refinement and infallible taste. He became a touchstone for generations to follow. From Johnny Mathis to Clyde McPhatter to Marvin Gaye to Aaron Neville, the most gifted singers viewed Nat as the highest expression of vocal art.

One of Cole’s most ardent admirers, a man who began his career as a Nat imitator, would radically change the crossover equation, thus paving the way for Aretha’s eventual breakthrough. In
the late forties, Ray Charles left Florida’s state school for the blind, worked local clubs, moved to Seattle, and finally settled in Los Angeles, all the while making his way with a Nat Cole–inspired trio that sang Nat Cole–sounding songs.

“I might have done it forever,” Ray told me, “if it hadn’t been for a record-company owner who said, ‘The world already has one Nat Cole. Maybe people in the clubs get a kick outta hearing someone who sounds so close to Nat, but you’re never gonna sell any records or make any real money until you find your own sound.’ ”

The sound that Ray found was backwoods country, raw, and unapologetically black. Its roots were field hollers, spirituals, gospel, and deep blues. Because, like Nat, Ray was an accomplished jazz pianist, he could adapt his voice to the jazz medium. In fact, while retaining the coarse cry of his people, he could adapt his voice to any medium. Thus in 1956, the same year that the Franklins watched Nat Cole singing with Peggy Lee and Julius La Rosa on their Emerson television, they were also listening to Ray Charles’s “This Little Girl of Mine,” a gospel song—“This Little Light of Mine”—that he had reworked into hot rhythm and blues. In less than three years, “What’d I Say” would move Ray’s style of church-rooted call-and-response sexy dance grooves to the top of the pop charts.

“Jazz is the intellectual expression of the black musical expression,” Oscar Peterson, the great jazz pianist, told me in discussing Nat Cole and Ray Charles. Peterson idolized Nat and, in fact, had unsuccessfully tried to follow Cole’s pop vocal success. “Jazz is also visceral and emotional, and of course jazz is based on the blues. But in the fifties, when Ray came along, jazz had been moving away from its blues base. Ray’s down-home honesty changed that. If you talk about jazz’s return to soul in the fifties, if you listen to what Charles Mingus and Art Blakey and Horace Silver were doing, you hear Ray’s direct influence. Nat Cole was a giant in terms of pianistic virtuosity and vocal perfection, but he was more an interpreter than innovator. Ray changed the game for everyone.”

While 1956 was also the year of “Please, Please, Please” by
James Brown—the same singer who two years earlier had abandoned his Ever Ready Gospel Singers—Brown’s enormous cultural influence would not be felt until the sixties.

Aretha’s own upwardly mobile dreams, inherited from her father—the dream of triumphing, like Nat Cole, in the white world as well as the black—would paradoxically stall Aretha’s triumph for many long and difficult years. There was great confusion about how to sell black music to the majority market. Motown would cloud the issue, as would Ray Charles’s country-and-western hits. But as the fifties wound down and Aretha prepared to leave gospel and enter the pop arena, one thing was clear—she would go for the gold, the big, broad crossover market.

“C.L. wanted everything for his daughter,” said James Cleveland. “He wanted megasuccess on every level. He knew all these people—Mahalia Jackson, Sarah Vaughan, Dinah Washington, Della Reese—and he felt like Aretha could outsing all of them. So there was no material she couldn’t handle, and the idea was to get her to handle it all.”

“We loved Ray Charles,” said Erma, “and we knew he was making church songs sexy. We saw nothing wrong with that and we played his music all the time. But we were young girls with stars in our eyes. We couldn’t help but fall in love with Sam Cooke. He was irresistible. When ‘You Send Me’ came out in the winter of 1957, I was eighteen and Ree was fifteen. We were already mothers. We were already professional singers. We had been on the road and seen something of life. We were hardly giddy groupies—that is, until we heard that song. When it came on the radio, we were on the road and made our driver pull over so we could catch our breath. Then we told him to speed to the nearest record store so we could buy it. We played nothing else for a week. Daddy liked the song but said if he heard it again he’d come at the forty-five with a hammer. Didn’t matter. We kept playing it. Just before Christmas, Sam came on
Ed Sullivan.
That’s all we needed to know. I went out
and bought an evening gown for his appearance. Mind you, I didn’t wear the dress to the theater in New York but to the little lobby of our hotel in Atlanta—that’s how seriously I took the occasion. Watching Sam on TV, I couldn’t wear just anything. I imagined him looking through the screen and seeing how I had dressed up just for him.”

“You Send Me,” Cooke’s own composition, topped not only the R&B charts but the pop charts, and it stayed number one for three weeks. This was the ultimate crossover dream: black gospel’s matinee idol became an American matinee idol. As the Nat Cole TV show was winding down due to weak ratings and nervous sponsors, Sam Cooke was revving up. In his perfect blend of gospel fire and silk-smooth cool, he would turn out a string of classic hits and eventually start his own record empire that included a label, a publishing firm, and a roster of singers, among whom were his protégés Bobby Womack and Johnnie Taylor.

“Sam was the cat who got Aretha to hurry up and make the switch,” Johnnie Taylor told me in his office in Dallas, Texas, in the late seventies. “When I took Sam’s place in the Soul Stirrers—that was in ’57—we appeared on the same bill as her dad and Clara Ward and the Ward Singers. Her daddy had gone off somewhere with Clara and we were all just sitting around the lobby. The topic was Sam. The topic was always Sam. Aretha was a different kind of chick. You wouldn’t call her a church girl, even with her daddy being who he was. She was more a party girl—a shy one, but a fox nonetheless. I didn’t even know she had two babies back then until years later. She didn’t act like no mother. Like her papa, she wanted to hang out with the stars. And why not? She was the best singer I’d heard since Jackie Verdell. Jackie, who was in the Davis Sisters, sang so hard she’d go around saying that she’d peed on her robe. I thought Jackie was gonna be the next big thing after Dinah. Don’t know why that never happened, except that Aretha caught Jackie’s thunder the way I caught Sam’s. Turned out that we peed harder than anyone. Took me and Aretha a while to switch tracks and catch on,
but soon as we heard ‘You Send Me,’ we knew we weren’t long for the gospel world. Wherever Sam was going, we was following.”

Brother Cecil backed up Johnnie Taylor when he told me, “When Aretha came off tour with Daddy, all she talked about was Sam’s crossover. I remember the night Sam came to sing at the Flame Show Bar in Detroit. Erma and Ree said they weren’t going because they were so heartbroken that Sam had recently married. I didn’t believe them. And I knew I was right when they started getting dressed about noon for the nine o’clock show. Because they were underage, they put on a ton of makeup to look older. It didn’t matter ’cause Berry Gordy’s sisters, Anna and Gwen, worked the photo concession down there, taking pictures of the party people. Anna was tight with Daddy and was sure to let my sisters in. She did, and they came home with stars in their eyes.”

In 1958, at age sixteen, Aretha traveled back out to California with her father. At the Watkins Hotel, she ran into Nat Cole, whose dark skin and handsome demeanor reminded her of her dad. On that same trip, Sam Cooke invited her to his home, where he gave her a fringed suede jacket he had once worn. She said she wore it to sleep that night and was dismayed when several weeks later it went missing.

She and her father’s troupe went home by way of Florida, where she filled in for the Caravans’ new lead singer, Shirley Caesar, and, for a night, became a Caravan herself. Given her love for all the Caravans, especially Albertina Walker and Inez Andrews, she called this “one of the great highlights of my gospel career.” She also saw it as something of a finale. “Once I sang with the Caravans,” she said, “I knew I had reached the top of the mountain. There were other super-talented gospel ladies—Dorothy Love, Edna Gallmon Cooke, Bessie Griffin, Gloria Griffin, Delois Barrett—the list goes on and on. I admired them all. They are the equivalent—and then some—of grand-opera divas. But the Caravans, like the Ward Singers, have their own special place. They were more than stupendous individual singers. They were harmonizers. They were
church wreckers. And, to me, they were among the greatest artists of our time.”

For all Aretha’s genuine admiration of her gospel idols, both she and her father knew that, in light of Sam Cooke’s triumph, it was time to move past them. If Sam could win the hearts of black R&B fans and top the white charts as well, why not Aretha?

While Aretha was preparing to fulfill her crossover dream, Berry Gordy had dreams of his own. He had gone from Golden Gloves boxer to assembly-line worker to jazz-record-store owner to composer of Jackie Wilson hits—“To Be Loved,” “Lonely Teardrops,” “Reet Petite.” Gordy was the son of energetic entrepreneurs—his father was a contractor; his mom owned her own insurance agency—and his talents were matched by his ambition. When he turned thirty, in 1959, he began a record label that would soon become Motown. Before that, though, his concentration had been songwriting. One tune in particular—“All I Could Do Was Cry”—composed with his sister Gwen, fell into the hands of Erma Franklin.

“Everyone knew Berry Gordy,” said Erma. “He was smart and many levels above your average street hustler. Not that he wasn’t hustling himself—in those days, the music business was nothing but a hustle. Berry hustled with class and verve. I liked him. I started singing demos for him in the little house where he was living with his lady at the time, Raynoma Singleton. He had one song that was especially good, ‘All I Could Do Was Cry.’ The story was about a gal who watched her man marry another woman. That wasn’t my story, but I could sure relate to the crying part, since my own marriage had fallen apart. I loved helping out Daddy when he went on tour, and in Detroit I was working as a nurse’s aide, but my heart was in music. So I was tempted to make this demo for Berry. At that point, though, I saw myself as a jazz singer in the Sarah Vaughan/Ella Fitzgerald style. I wasn’t willing to do R-and-B. Well, Berry
took the song to Chess Records, where Etta James sang it and had the hit. I realized then that I had made a mistake.”

“It’s difficult when everyone in the family has talent,” said Cecil. “Daddy had raised us all to achieve on the highest level. We all wanted to confirm his faith in us. Had Erma recorded ‘All I Could Do Was Cry,’ she would have had the first hit in the family. I’m not sure Aretha would have liked that. But Erma didn’t live her life to please Aretha or her father. She lived her life according to her own lights.

“Erma was no shrinking violet. She was as determined as any of us. When Aretha was younger, she was unwilling to challenge Daddy. Aretha worked in Daddy’s shadow until she finally stepped out of the shadow into her own. Not so with Erma and not so with Carolyn. They were feisty girls and independent thinkers. Erma had a brilliant mind and read all the time. Daddy got to calling her Madame Queen because of her self-assurance. It’s a quality we all admired, but Erma’s assertiveness concerned Aretha. She worried she might steal her thunder. Later Aretha had the same problem with Carolyn. When it counted, the sisters were there for each other. But that didn’t mean Aretha didn’t feel them nipping at her heels. She didn’t like that. Aretha had to be out front—and also first. That’s the quality that helped make her a star.”