Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin

by David Ritz

  Two press items from August 1961 indicate Aretha’s state of mind at the time of White’s courtship. The first is the announcement in Down Beat magazine that she had won the new-star female vocalist award in the magazine’s ninth international jazz critics poll. She had thirty votes to Abbey Lincoln’s twenty-five. The rest of the list included LaVern Baker, Helen Humes, Nina Simone, Marjorie Hendricks (Ray Charles’s fiery backup singer), Gloria Lynne, Nancy Wilson, Etta Jones, and Carol Sloane. That was stiff competition for nineteen-year-old Aretha and an indication that Hammond’s argument—that she was a critical hit, if not a commercial one—was undeniably true.

  Shortly after the August Down Beat issue hit the stands, Aretha wrote a guest column for the New York Amsterdam News, a prominent African American publication, entitled “From Gospel to Jazz Is Not Disrespect for the Lord.”

  “I don’t think that in any matter I did the Lord a disservice when I made up my mind two years ago to switch over,” she wrote. “After all, the blues is a music born out of the slavery day sufferings of my people.”

  Her position mirrors the one long held by her dad—that black music at its very root, no matter how it might branch out, contains a divine spirit.

  What’s interesting, though, is that the first single released from her second album, The Electrifying Aretha Franklin, is far more showbiz pizzazz than jazz. The arrangement for “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody” was written by Bob Mersey, soon to be an important figure in Aretha’s career at Columbia. He was the label’s musical director and a staff writer for CBS television. At the same time he began producing Aretha, he arranged “Moon River” for Andy Williams. A year later, in 1963, he would produce Barbra Streisand’s debut record, also on the Columbia label.

  Al Jolson had sung “Rock-a-Bye” in blackface in the twenties. Later, it was recorded by Sammy Davis Jr., Judy Garland, and Jerry Lewis. Though an essential American song, it seemed a strange choice for Aretha, especially at the start of the civil rights movement.

  Cecil explained to me C. L. Franklin’s love of Al Jolson and his reason for urging Aretha to include the tune.

  “My father told me how Jolson harbored great affection for black people,” said Cecil. “His entire blackface act was a way of paying tribute to our musical genius. Dad knew the history of American entertainment and had read how Jolson had hired black writers and helped bolster the career of Cab Calloway. We forget now, but back in the day, Al Jolson and black people had a mutual-admiration society.”

  In spite of Cecil’s spirited defense of Aretha’s inclusion of the song, it’s difficult for me to listen to her version without cringing. Although her vocal is enthusiastic, the strings feel anemic, the horn chart cheesy, and the rock-’em-sock-’em finale forced and false. A more generous reading would appreciate the soul piano introduction, rendered by Aretha herself, and the slightly ironic big-band flourish at the song’s grand conclusion.

  Aretha liked “Rock-a-Bye” so much that she sang it on her network television debut. On October 30, 1961, she appeared on American Bandstand, where the teen crowd seemed bewildered by her choice of a song associated with their fathers’ or grandfathers’ generation. Aretha’s selection might have seemed wildly inappropriate, but such choices would be part of her pattern in the years to come.

  “I thought the Jolson song was a mistake,” John Hammond told me. “It had no business on an Aretha Franklin album. The idea was to present her as a great jazz/blues artist, not a revisionist of show-business lore. I thought it was outrageous, but what I thought no longer mattered since I had been told Aretha was peeved at me. While I was in Europe vacationing, an A-and-R man at Epic, a Columbia subsidiary, offered a contract to Aretha’s sister Erma. Apparently there was intense sibling rivalry, and Aretha was not at all pleased. She presumed that I was the man behind the move, even though I wasn’t. I tried to explain, but by then she had withdrawn into stony silence and was not interested in hearing any explanations.”

  “It was Daddy who suggested to Columbia that they listen to me sing,” Erma told me. “One of their executives heard me at a club. At the time, I was with Lloyd Price. Actually, Lloyd had asked me to go on the road with him a year earlier, but Daddy, always protective, didn’t think I was ready. Then in 1961 I joined Lloyd for what would be nearly a five-year professional relationship. My mother-in-law, Ollie Patterson, was caring for my children, Thomas and Sabrina, back in Detroit.

  “The Columbia A-and-R man was impressed enough with my singing that he told my dad that he thought he could get me a deal. The man also said that I would be on Epic, which was a different brand than Columbia. They were part of the same company but I’d have my own producers and an identity separate from Aretha. I thought she would be thrilled. She wasn’t. She threw a fit. She told Daddy that she didn’t want me on Epic, that it would hurt her career and that people would be confused by too many singing Franklin sisters. By then she and Daddy were having their problems because of her relationship with Ted. I wasn’t privy to their conversation, but I do know that my father took up my part and told Ree that she wasn’t the only one in this family who wanted—and deserved—a career in music. Later, when Carolyn went out there to do her own thing, she’d get the same grief from Aretha.”

  While the hubbub with Erma continued, Aretha worked in the studio on her sophomore effort. The Electrifying Aretha Franklin, the first time we hear her with strings and a big band, lists John Hammond as its producer, but Hammond claims that was in name only. His work with Aretha was essentially over.

  “I was told that I could do album cuts with her,” he said, “but the company’s producers were taking over. It was thought that they, not I, were in a better position to produce hits. They took the budget allotments that had accumulated from my sessions, which were extremely low cost, and applied them to larger productions. I found those productions vapid. I was still interested in documenting her prowess as a jazz and blues artist. The last songs I remember producing with Aretha were in the winter of 1961. They were both Ray Charles–related. The first was an instrumental written by Ray Charles called ‘Hard Times (No One Knows Better than I)’ that she played on piano and added a great vocal flourish at the end, in which she sings, ‘Ray Charles says it was hard times but I feel all right.’ It was a splendid piece of bluesy spontaneity. The company deemed it unworthy for release. The second did appear on the Electrifying record. This was ‘Lucky Old Sun.’ Frankie Laine, of course, had the hit on Mercury back in the forties. Louis Armstrong and Sinatra had also recorded it, but it was Sam Cooke’s version that Aretha remembered. I heard it as basically a haunting blues ballad, and she interpreted it with great feeling and intelligence. I was told by my friend Sid Feller, then producing Ray Charles, that Ray heard Aretha’s version and then decided to sing it himself on his Ingredients in a Recipe for Soul album that appeared a year after Aretha’s Electrifying. By then, the word soul was beginning to replace rhythm and blues as a code word for popular black music.”

  The big soul ballad on the rhythm-and-blues charts in 1961 was Etta James’s “At Last,” the Mack Gordon/Harry Warren song that hit for Glenn Miller in 1942. While working with Etta on her book, I asked her why she thought her string-heavy jazzy standard had turned into a smash while, in that same year, Aretha couldn’t hit with a bluesy standard like “That Lucky Old Sun.”

  “The answer’s easy,” said Etta. “Aretha sang the shit outta those standards—just as good if not better than me. But Columbia didn’t know how to reach black listeners, and my company, Chess, did. Leonard Chess had a genius for feeling out the black community. Jerry Wexler was the same. They were white Jews who would never use the word nigga, but they knew us niggas better than we knew ourselves. Columbia didn’t have no one like that. They had John Hammond, but he was like a college professor up there in the ivory tower. He wasn’t street like Chess or Wexler. If you wanna have black hits, you gotta understand the black streets, you gotta work those streets and work those DJs to get airpla
y on black stations. Wasn’t true of everything she did on Columbia, but in general, Aretha’s Columbia shit wasn’t black enough for blacks and too black for whites. Or looking at it another way, in those days you had to get the black audience to love the hell outta you and then hope the love would cross over to the white side. Columbia didn’t know nothing ’bout crossing over.”

  As a purely musical package, Electrifying is mystifying, alternating between brilliant and banal. Leslie McFarland, a journeyman writer who contributed five songs to Aretha’s first album, has four more on her second, among them “It’s So Heartbreakin’,” a slight teen-oriented vehicle with Aretha on piano; “I Told You So,” an even thinner blues ditty with big-band backing; and the shocking “Rough Lover,” whose story seems to mirror the very relationship Aretha had entered into with Ted White. She envisions someone who will take charge, and, if she gets sassy, “be a man who dares shut me up.” She doesn’t want a meek man; she wants a “boss,” “a devil when he’s crossed.” There is conviction in her voice.

  There is also greatness in her reading of McFarland’s fourth song, “Just for You,” a poignant ballad that benefits not only from a subtle string chart but also from the sensitive accompaniment of Tommy Flanagan, the great jazz artist who would go on to spend a dozen years as Ella Fitzgerald’s pianist. Here Aretha, at twenty, expresses the emotional richness of a woman decades older. Like Ray Charles, who claimed teen material never fit his aesthetic, Aretha requires the deepest dramatic material.

  That material arrives in the form of two songs on Electrifying. One is “Blue Holiday,” by Luther Dixon, writer of “Sixteen Candles” by the Crests. Dixon’s songs for Perry Como, Bobby Darin, and Elvis Presley brought him to the attention of Florence Greenberg, the boss at Scepter Records, the label that soon would explode with Dixon-produced hits for the Shirelles.

  “Blue Holiday” was, in fact, recorded by the Shirelles, who cut it in 1961. When Aretha interpreted it in New York during the Christmas season of that year, she remembered being especially homesick for her family in Detroit. She was also nearly eight months pregnant with her third son, Ted White’s child. The Shirelles’ version of the song features Doris Coley offering a heartfelt reading of a teenager longing for lost love. In contrast, Aretha renders the song as a straight-ahead jazz classic. It helps enormously that she is surrounded by sterling accompaniment—Miles Davis bandmates pianist Wynton Kelly and drummer Jimmy Cobb; Count Basie’s trumpeter Joe Newman and his trombonist Al Grey; veteran guitarist Mundell Lowe; and saxophonist/arranger Oliver Nelson.

  “I didn’t really know who she was,” Joe Newman told me. “I think it was John Hammond who hired me for the session. I don’t even remember if he was in the studio that day. I was just so glad to play the date, especially because Wynton and Jimmy were on it. They’d done Kind of Blue with Miles for Columbia and were the hottest cats in New York. I figured Aretha Franklin was one of those up-and-coming chicks, like Dakota Staton, who wanted to be Dinah Washington. Man, was I wrong! Aretha was the real fuckin’ deal! I mean, she cleaned our clocks. Wynton set the grooves and she floated over it like vintage Sarah Vaughan. Only—at least to my ears—she had more soul than Sarah, more church, more funk, more hurt. I remember ‘Blue Holiday’ and I remember another killer song called ‘Nobody Like You.’ It was a beautiful bluesy ballad where she played piano. I was sure it was written by someone like Ray Charles. When I asked her about the writer, she said it was James Cleveland, the gospel cat who had led her dad’s choir in Detroit. ‘You’re kidding,’ I said. ‘A churchman wrote that?’ Aretha didn’t say much in the studio—she was a shy thing who kept to herself and just focused on her music—but when I said that, she looked up to me and said, ‘Joe, it’s all church.’ That shut me up.”

  “Blue Holiday” and “Nobody Like You” represent Hammond’s last and most effective effort to bring out the beauty of Aretha Franklin. She hits the sweet spot where jazz, blues, and rhythm and blues meet. As Quincy Jones—who produced Aretha in the seventies—told me, “All the greats bring the streams together. Ray Charles was as much jazz as R-and-B. Marvin Gaye had a tremendous jazz feel. Listen to his feeling for phrasing. The same is true of Stevie Wonder. Aretha fits into this category.”

  9. WATER, WATER EVERYWHERE

  I had moved to New York,” said Erma Franklin, “when my first single on Epic—‘Hello Again’—came out. There was a flurry of activity, a good review in Billboard, and some prestigious gigs, including Small’s Paradise Lounge in Harlem, where I often enjoyed the company of Bettye LaVette, a wonderful singer from Detroit, and Esther Phillips, who was going through her heavy drug period. Drugs, of course, was part of those times, especially in the world of rhythm and blues. I indulged. In fact, all the Franklin children indulged. But, as a problem, that didn’t really enter the picture till later in the sixties.

  “It was still the early sixties when Aretha was downtown while I was playing uptown. That’s maybe only ten miles but it might have been ten thousand. We would see each other, but when we did, there was a bit of a chill. Some of our friends—like Mary Wells or Smokey—had enjoyed big hits. And because Aretha still had not put out what could be considered a smash, she worried that I might have one before her.”

  On February 20, 1962, Aretha appeared at the Village Gate, a jazz club, where she shared the bill with fellow Columbia artist Thelonious Monk. According to Robin D. G. Kelley, Monk’s superb biographer, almost five hundred people crowded into the small club. Monk’s young nieces and nephews were there, as excited to see Aretha as they were to see their uncle.

  “I was there,” said Erma. “Cecil also came into the city that night because Monk was one of his heroes. In the company of the great master, Aretha more than held her own.”

  “I’m a jazz freak,” Cecil told me, “and if I had to name my three favorite pianists they’d be Erroll Garner, Oscar Peterson, and Thelonious Monk. I wasn’t gonna miss seeing Monk on the same bill as Ree. It was an amazing night. Monk had just signed with Columbia—I guess that’s why he and Ree were costarring—and he had his man Charlie Rouse on tenor. I don’t know if he had started recording that first album he did for Columbia—Monk’s Dream—but I know he played ‘Body and Soul’ and ‘Just a Gigolo,’ songs that turned up on that record—a record I listened to over a hundred times.

  “ ‘You seem more interested in hearing Monk than me,’ Ree said before the show.

  “ ‘I’m excited to see you both, sis. Excited to see you with him.’

  “Because of Monk’s presence, I think Aretha directed more of her show toward jazz. She wanted to show the jazz crowd that she was one of them—and she was. I believe that’s one of the first times she sang ‘Skylark,’ a song she’d soon cut for Columbia. Same thing for ‘Just for a Thrill’ and ‘God Bless the Child.’ We all heard Ray Charles do ‘Just for a Thrill’ on his Genius album, and we’d been hearing Billie Holiday’s ‘Child’ ever since we were children. She smashed them both. Monk had his fans, and Monk got his respect that night. But Sister Ree, who had learned how to tear down a church, tore down that club. We knew she was on the verge of having that monster breakthrough hit we’d all been waiting for.”

  The monster hit didn’t arrive then—and wouldn’t for five more years. Meanwhile, Bob Mersey took over Aretha’s recording career.

  “Mersey was a pure product of the Columbia culture,” said Bobby Scott, who, in another year, would become a major music figure in Aretha’s life. “I worked with Bob a long time. We were both producers and arrangers, but with much different backgrounds. Goddard Lieberson, who ran the company, saw Mersey as the Pasha of Pop. The great pasha before him was Mitch Miller, the man who defined fifties pop music, and he made a fortune for the label and set the tone for Columbia for years to follow. Mitch was a first-class musician and superb oboist—he played oboe on the famous Charlie Parker with Strings session—but his thing was sales. If you wanna sell music, dumb it down. He was all about Rosemary Clooney doing ‘Come On
-a My House’ and Sinatra singing ‘Mama Will Bark’ with Dagmar. Lieberson had made a fortune for the label with the soundtrack of My Fair Lady, and Lieberson had put Bob Mersey with Andy Williams, another moneymaking move. When it became clear that Aretha was not happy with Hammond, Mersey was Lieberson’s logical go-to guy. If she wouldn’t sell as an R-and-B artist, turn her pop. But because she had established some solid credentials as a jazz artist, the label felt she couldn’t abandon jazz entirely. That’s where I came in. I’m a jazz piano player. I was Lester Young’s piano when I was still a teenager. I can also play gospel and blues when I wanna. I’m also a writer—the Beatles covered my ‘A Taste of Honey’ and the Hollies and Neil Diamond had hits with my ‘He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother.’ For years I worked as Bobby Darin’s musical director. Back when I first met Aretha, though, I was seen as a jazzy auxiliary to Mersey. Mersey became her main man. I was on the set, but, metaphorically speaking, I was an intermission pianist. Goddard pinned all his hopes on Mersey, and if you listen to those albums he did with her, you’d have to think that Goddard had the right idea.”