by David Ritz
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 wa
s 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.”
“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.”
6. MOVING ON UP
The 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.
