Aretha Franklin

Aretha Franklin, 1967.

Aretha Franklin (1942-2018), the Queen of Soul, is easily one of the best singers in living memory in the US, if not the best.

She has 20 number-one hit songs on the US R&B chart:

• 1967: I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)
• 1967: Respect
• 1967: Baby I Love You
• 1968: Chain of Fools
• 1968: (Sweet Sweet Baby) Since You’ve Been Gone
• 1968: Think
• 1969: Share Your Love with Me
• 1970: Call Me
• 1970: Don’t Play That Song (You Lied)
• 1971: Bridge Over Troubled Water
• 1971: Spanish Harlem
• 1972: Day Dreaming
• 1973: Angel
• 1974: Until You Come Back to Me (That’s What I’m Gonna Do)
• 1974: I’m in Love
• 1976: Something He Can Feel
• 1977: Break It To Me Gently
• 1982: Jump to It
• 1983: Get It Right
• 1985: Freeway of Love

No one has more. Stevie Wonder is tied with her at 20. Drake, now at 19 in 2018, looks set to pass her – a half century later.

There was no one like her. Music critic Nelson George:

“Franklin’s voice communicated so wide a range of emotion as to truly defy description …

“Franklin expressed all a black woman could be, while her contemporaries (Diana Ross, Tina Turner, Dionne Warwick, Martha Reeves, even the underrated Gladys Knight) seemed trapped in one persona by the artistic decisions of male producers as well as by their own vocal limitations.”

On top of that, unlike Dionne and Diana, her music in the late 1960s was made for Black people, not made to cross over. (Clive Davis, he of Whitney Houston fame, would later try to put a stop that in the 1980s.)

She sang with such emotion that people wondered if the songs were about her. She said some were, some were not. Despite her youth and amazing talent, she had experienced enough of life’s aches and pains that by 1967 she felt like she was “26 goin’ on 65!”

In 1960 at age 18 she arrived in New York to make it big. She had been on the road as a gospel singer with her father, C.L. Franklin, a well-known Detroit pastor. Mavis Staples was a roadmate. In New York, Aretha was “discovered” by John Hammond of Columbia Records. Just as Hammond would later try to make Bruce Springsteen into another Bob Dylan, he tried to make her into another Billie Holiday. Meanwhile her husband, who had become her manager, wanted her to sing at swanky White supper clubs because that is where he thought the money was. Both Hammond and her husband saw her as becoming a White-oriented jazz and pop singer – in spite of her powerful gospel music roots.

In 1966 she left Columbia Records and New York for Atlantic Records and Muscle Shoals, Alabama. Jerry Wexler, the co-owner of Atlantic, was a huge fan. As he tells it, he “urged Aretha to be Aretha.” Atlantic at that time was mainly interested in making music for ordinary Black people, not swanky White people. Instead of forcing her into a box, the music was built around her.

In 1967 she blazed forth. Mightily. In that year alone she had five songs that sold at least a million copies each.

– Abagond, 2018.

Source: mainly “The Soulful Divas” (1999) by David Nathan; “The Death of Rhythm & Blues” (1988) by Nelson George. 

See also:

• In memoriam: Aretha Franklin – has videos of some of her songs
• soul music
  • Diana Ross
• Billie Holiday
• John Hammond
• Jerry Wexler
• Clive Davis
  • Whitney Houston
  • Phyllis Hyman
  • Alicia Keys
  • Monterey Pop Festival
• Jimi Hendrix – born the same year. Compare and contrast.
• being universal

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