by David Ritz
“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 th
e 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.”
Another quality was artistic curiosity.
“During the late fifties when everyone was R-and-B crazy, I took another route,” Cecil further explained. “While Erma and Ree went running off to the Warfield Theater to see Little Willie John, I kicked back and listened to Thelonious Monk. Monk was my man. I was deep into modern jazz.
“My pal Pete Moore, who’d later join the Miracles with Smokey Robinson, showed me how to process hair. He and I ran a little barbershop out of the first-floor bathroom of our house. Some people complained that a preacher shouldn’t have a son doing up ’dos in his house, but Daddy thought I showed initiative and encouraged me. In addition to our serious hairstyling chops, what made our shop different was the music. We played the coolest jazz out there—Charlie Mingus, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, Betty Carter. We’d sculpt those super-bad finger waves to the sound of Sonny Stitt.
“Aretha liked to hang out around our ‘shop’—not only because she was crazy, but because of the music. She also spent a lot of time in my room—I had a separate apartment-like setup in the mansion—where she’d sit in front of the hi-fi for hours on end. That’s where she first heard Sarah Vaughan, Smokey’s favorite. But she didn’t stop with Sarah. She studied Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Carmen McRae, Anita O’Day, June Christy, Dakota Staton—anyone I had on the box. She got to a point where she could imitate these singers, lick for lick. Years later, she made vocal imitations part of her act. She’d do Diana Ross, Gladys Knight, and Mavis Staples. But those were her contemporaries. It was in my bedroom where she met her jazz masters, on my Magnavox stereo. It wasn’t a conscious thing with Aretha. I don’t think she listened to harmonically complex jazz in order to enhance her style. Jazz did enhance her style—not out of design, but because she absorbed everything she heard. The same was true for blues and gospel. In her mind and heart, they all mixed and mingled together. You can’t separate them out. Call Aretha a great blues singer and you’re telling the truth. Call her a great gospel singer and no one will argue. Call her a great jazz singer and the greatest jazz artists will agree. Bottom line—she’s all three at once. And in the language of the jazzman, that’s what’s called a motherfucker.”
In 1959, C. L. Franklin thought his daughter was ready.
Aretha often spoke about being nervous when she performed anywhere but church. She considered believers the best audiences. She liked saying that they weren’t critics but worshippers. She saw nightclubs as places populated by cynics who came to see you fail, not succeed. She viewed critics as people who looked for mistakes. She realized that she required support, and if she was going to move into show business, she wanted not only her father by her side but her brother as well.
“I was ready,” Cecil told me, “but Daddy had other ideas. Just as he had insisted that Erma go to Clark College in Atlanta, he wanted me at Morehouse in that same city. I told him I didn’t want to go to college. ‘Son,’ he said, ‘there’s nothing more important than education. You have no choice. What’s more, it’s a black college, where you’ll be able to learn about the history of your own people. Martin Luther King is a Morehouse man. And you’re going to be one as well.’ I still didn’t want to go, so I put up all sorts of objections. But Daddy showed me the plane ticket he bought me and the receipt for tuition—all paid. ‘When you get there,’ he said, ‘and you decide you don’t want to stay, fine. You’re on your own. Just don’t come back here.’ I went, and I stayed, and it turned out fine. Changed my life for the better. But I still wanted to be with Ree and watch her move into the big time.”
At the conclusion of the fifties, with Aretha about to turn eighteen, she had been a professional for some five years. Her father paid her a modest salary, and her gospel work was recorded and distributed nationally. As a single mother, she retained custody of her two sons. She was not romantically attached, a situation that would soon change.
For all practical purposes, her father was her manager. He would select those advisers he felt were needed to educate both himself and his daughter about the wider world of popular entertainment.
“Daddy knew dozens of famous singers and musicians,” said Carolyn, “but he didn’t know the music business. He knew the church business. But because he was always a man who knew what he didn’t know—that was a big part of his intelligence—he was ready to rely on others. As Ree prepared to try this new thing, there were a lot of uncertainties out there. One thing, though, was for sure: Daddy had stars in his eyes, and so did Aretha. The plan was to make her a star—and make it happen quickly.”
That it didn’t happen quickly enough would be the source of dramatic frustration for years to come.
Part Two
COLUMBIA
7. THE BIGGEST AND BEST
In 1960, the year Aretha sought her first secular recording contract, Cecil Franklin’s best friend, Smokey Robinson, released the newly formed Motown Records’ first million-selling single, “Shop Around.” Because Berry Gordy was actively recruiting Detroit’s local musical talent, it made perfect sense that he’d want Aretha.
“He did,” said Cecil. “I was studying at Morehouse at the time, but Smokey and I never lost touch. Nothing
would have been easier than getting Ree signed to Motown. And of course Daddy was close to Anna Gordy, Berry’s sister, who knew all about Aretha. It made sense, but not to Daddy. He wanted Ree on Columbia, the label that recorded Mahalia Jackson, Duke Ellington, Johnny Mathis, Tony Bennett, Percy Faith, and Doris Day. Daddy said that Columbia was the biggest and best record company in the world. Leonard Bernstein recorded for Columbia.
“Berry Gordy was cool, Berry Gordy had written some good songs, Berry Gordy had signed Smokey, and Smokey and his Miracles were great, but you couldn’t begin to compare Berry to Columbia. Berry was Detroit, and Daddy was convinced that Aretha’s career couldn’t be launched from Detroit. Look at Della Reese. Della grew up in Detroit, but her career didn’t take off until she left town with the Erskine Hawkins big band. So it came down to Aretha moving to either Los Angeles or New York. California was too far away. Aretha wanted to be closer to home. Given her insecurities, she also wanted protection. Daddy would handpick her chaperones and her managers. Daddy was the general in charge of the whole operation.”
The general had to hire a sergeant—an agent/manager. In Aretha’s book, the only time she mentioned her father’s violence concerned this process. She didn’t like the man he had picked to manage her. When she refused to go along with C.L.’s plan, he slapped her across the face. But she remained adamant and got her way.
This was a critical omen of things to come. The first fissure between father and daughter would grow in the next few years. The issue would continue to be management, especially with a major break not far off, causing a seismic change in Aretha’s relationship to men, power, and control. Who would be in charge of Aretha and her career?
For the time being, she and her father compromised on a female manager, Jo King, who worked out of New York and had contacts with the major labels. It was during this trip to New York in early 1960 that C.L. took Aretha to meet the great Phil Moore.
