Singing in a Strange Land

by Nick Salvatore

  In the summer of 1948, workers tore down the former bowling alley C. L. disliked so much and began construction of a larger, modern facility on the same site. The congregation prepared for a season wandering to different venues for services: trustee Bernard McFall’s funeral home, the Music Hall in Paradise Valley, and at other churches on Sunday afternoons following their host’s traditional morning services. Most frequently, New Bethel gathered at Brewster Center, a city-run facility in the publicly funded Brewster Homes, a few blocks from New Bethel, but even there they could be preempted, and the center was never available for Sunday evening services. C. L. was quite aware of the inherent danger that members would find other churches, the congregation weaken, and fundraising decline. This last was most serious, since New Bethel’s building fund could not cover the full cost of the construction project. That continued pressure led C. L. to ignore his initial misgivings and accept an offer, supported by his trustees, from a black minister who doubled as an insurance agent to underwrite the additional financing. The trustees “had a blind confidence” in the man, Franklin thought, and they dismissed his insistence that the insurance agent sign a written contract. Hesitant of crossing his trustees when he had no personal knowledge of the would-be financier, C. L. agreed, against his better judgment. New Bethel’s funds covered the demolition, and the framing and roofing of the new building. But when Franklin and his trustees looked for their financial backer, he never came through, kept whatever retainer he had received, and New Bethel faced a severe crisis. Prepared for a nomadic existence for a number of months, they now faced a prolonged dislocation. Franklin watched with dismay as members “drifted away” and desperately sought a radio program to keep his and New Bethel’s name before the city. But no station was interested in a pastor without a church building. Even the Michigan Chronicle, the Detroit black weekly that had given him good coverage since his arrival, seemed to forget he existed, as the paper went for nearly a year without any mention of him.24

  Franklin ultimately found the financing to complete the building, but the new church would not be ready for services until the fall of 1951. As difficult as this transition proved to be, the personal tensions C. L. simultaneously confronted were far more troubling for him and his family.

  Sometime in 1948, exactly when remains unclear, Barbara Franklin separated from her husband of twelve years and returned to Buffalo, where her mother still resided. The four children C. L. fathered with her remained with him in Detroit. Their brother, Vaughn, accompanied his mother. Neither C. L. nor Barbara left any testimony concerning the end of their marriage; Vaughn, at age fourteen the oldest child in the family when they separated, preferred not to discuss his reflections on his parents’ relationship.25

  Barbara’s two years in Detroit had generated little public attention. Unlike Victoria Banks or Pearl McNeil, she never was the subject of a feature story in the local or national black papers. Yet to the extent that Barbara’s life was private, her husband’s became even more public. What had been true in Memphis and Buffalo was now even more pronounced. Vaughn remembered that in Detroit, “Dad . . . wasn’t home that much,” and childrearing was, again, his mother’s domain. Barbara’s departure was a split, but it was not the abandonment of her children that journalists and authors later claimed. Barbara’s second daughter, Aretha, is emphatic that “despite the fact that it has been written innumerable times, it is an absolute lie that my mother abandoned us. In no way, shape, form, or fashion did our mother desert us.” The children who remained on Boston Boulevard with their father stayed with Barbara during the summer in Buffalo, and she visited them in Detroit occasionally throughout the school year. Brenda Corbett, C. L.’s niece, recalled her grandmother Rachel attributing the separation to Franklin’s schedule, especially C. L.’s traveling to give guest sermons, and the resulting strains on the marriage. Although too young to have known Barbara herself, Brenda also suggested that, given human nature, the causes of the separation “could’ve been a whole lot of other things, you know.” In fact, the absence of any credible evidence as to the emotional state of either Barbara or C. L. (the separation never proceeded to divorce and thus no legal testimony exists) leaves much obscured by time and reticence. That so devoted a mother left her children with her estranged husband, however, in an era when wives regularly received custody, hints at the tension and the unequal power that existed between husband and wife.26

  In Buffalo, Barbara reconstructed her life. She lived in her mother’s home, worked at a music store, and later trained as a nurse’s aide. Almost immediately, she rejoined Friendship, where she assisted in children’s pageants and gave private music lessons. Although Friendship’s former first lady, Barbara easily reentered the congregation as a regular member, resumed her friendships, and as was widely known in the church, entered into a serious relationship with the aptly named Trustee Young, who served as both a deacon and a trustee. Vaughn, too, returned to the congregation, and he entered high school in 1948. He would finally be told that C. L. was not his biological father in 1951.27

  C. L. faced a different dilemma as a single parent of four children aged ten or younger. From Erma’s birth in 1938 on, C. L.’s approach to fathering his young children reflected a love that found its expression through the prism of three formative relationships. The first, of course, was the absence of his own father, a rambling man who never returned after teaching his son to salute. The distance that defined his relationship with Henry Franklin did little to encourage in C. L. an appreciation of the effect paternal nurturing could have. Looming over the absent males was his mother, Rachel, both disciplinarian and nurturer, the steady force in his life. But his image of her, reinforced by broader cultural attitudes, framed his expectations of any woman he would take as a wife. In his mind, he never subordinated family concerns to his career; his very success provided the family with its foundation. Some woman would be around to take care of domestic needs.

  As Barbara’s departure did not substantially alter C. L.’s patterns within the home, of necessity he sought other solutions. Some New Bethel women, Myra Perkins recalled, “made ourselves available to look after the children,” but this was a temporary solution. A more satisfactory approach brought in housekeepers from outside the congregation to cook, clean, and take care of the children. Sylvia Penn, another New Bethel member, interviewed these women for the position in the decade after the separation. There were occasional visits from Mahalia Jackson, gospel singer Clara Ward, and two of her backup group, Frances Steadman and Marion Williams, all of whom were devoted to the family, but these arrangements lacked a steady familial presence. Soon Rachel and Henry Franklin arrived from Mississippi. Henry, taken sick, was unable to continue farming, and both Rachel (whom the children would call “Big Momma”) and her son understood the multiple advantages of the senior Franklins’ move to Detroit. In their first years, they did not live in the house on Boston Boulevard but in a home C. L. provided. Nonetheless, Rachel was a constant presence, extending her maternal care to her grandchildren as well as her son. As Brenda Corbett noted, throughout her decades in Detroit, “she pushed him and she was right there for him.” For his part “Son,” as his mother called him, fulfilled the promise he made her when, at sixteen, he vowed to both preach and “take care of you.”28

  Rachel Franklin’s love, belief in discipline, and deep religious faith stabilized the daily life of the children in Detroit. But in a few short years, all five of the children experienced another crushing blow. Walking home from his Buffalo high school one day in the spring of 1952, Vaughn, by then a junior, “stopped at this little canteen place” near his house for a soda. He and a friend saw an ambulance speeding down the street but thought nothing of it. Twenty minutes later he opened the door to his house, yelled out “hello!” to his mother—only to be told by his grandmother that Barbara had just succumbed to a heart attack. “She was sick on and off” for some time, he remembered, but he “never did know what was really wrong with her.” Va
ughn’s brothers and sisters came out from Detroit for the funeral service, accompanied by two or three adults. Their father did not attend.29

  After Barbara died, Mahalia Jackson noted that “the whole family wanted for love.” The children in Detroit were still very young, and the dual shock of separation and death within four years inevitably hurt deeply. They sought comfort from both father and grandmother, members of New Bethel, and visiting adult friends, and they forged tight bonds among themselves. In Buffalo, an older Vaughn of necessity handled his losses differently. He lived with his maternal grandmother as he finished high school and then attended the University of Buffalo for a year. In 1954, he enlisted in the Air Force, where he remained twenty years, and only infrequently had contact with his family in Detroit.30

  C. L., thirty-three when he and Barbara separated, a vitally handsome man with an ever-growing reputation as a compelling preacher, continued with his life much as he had before.

  Without a church building, a radio presence, or much press attention, Franklin sought other ways to retain his members and to keep his name before the larger public. Positive notice in the national Baptist press for his preaching at the annual convention was useful, but C. L. also needed attention closer to home. Not surprisingly, music provided him the necessary venue. Franklin’s enthusiasm for a strong musical presence in his church was not necessarily the norm among Afro-Baptist ministers in 1950. Many preachers, especially those lacking outstanding musical ability themselves, saw church singers as rivals and the music as a necessary but threatening accompaniment to their sermon. To the question of which—sermon or hymn—would have prominence, most would answer the sermon, but many a preacher harbored the suspicion that a significant number of his congregation actually felt differently. Secure in his ability as a singer and a preacher, C. L. proved a most generous supporter of talented gospel performers, the famous as well as the beginners.31

  C. L. had a powerful singing voice and, a friend explained, “a real affinity to singers.” As in his churches in Buffalo and Memphis, Franklin stressed the need for a strong choir at New Bethel and brought with him from Buffalo Thomas A. Shelby, the Lucie Campbell protégé, to serve once again as his minister of music. Both C. L. and Shelby were close with Thomas Dorsey, and Dorsey’s influence was especially evident at New Bethel in the person of James Cleveland, who arrived as choir director after Barbara’s return to Buffalo. Born in Chicago in 1931, and raised up at Pilgrim Baptist, where at age eight he was a soloist in Dorsey’s junior choir, Cleveland possessed a prodigious musical talent that would shortly earn him national renown as the “Crown Prince of Gospel.” He and C. L. were close friends. The younger man stayed with Franklin and his family on Boston Boulevard for a number of years, exerting a tremendous musical influence on the children, especially Aretha. Together with Shelby, Cleveland built the temporarily nomadic choir into a powerful instrument for giving praise. Singers such as Grace Cobb, the diminutive Sammy Bryant, and Willie Todd, whom C. L. regarded “as one of the best singers that I’ve ever heard,” were but a few of the enormously talented, if largely unknown, choir members.32

  Reverend Samuel Billy Kyles, who was a Chicago teenager in the early 1950s, had known Franklin all of his life, as C. L. and his father, Joseph Kyles, were friends, fellow Mississippians, and ministers who frequently preached from each other’s pulpits. Chicago was the “mecca of gospel singing” at this time, with Roberta Martin, Mahalia Jackson, Sally Martin, and Thomas Dorsey among the nationally prominent and most influential Chicagoans. But C. L., the younger Kyles explained, “was trying to move as much of that [as possible] to Detroit where he was. . . . I mean, he’d always have the best choir directors and nothing was too good for the choir.” It was anything but unusual, then, in February 1949, for C.L. to attend a gospel competition held on a Sunday afternoon at the Forest Club on Hastings. A Detroit group, The Flying Clouds, had invited the Harmony Kings from St. Louis and the Highway Q.C.’s from Chicago to share the billing with them. The Chicago quartet impressed C. L. and particularly the lead singer, an eighteen-year-old from Mississippi by the name of Sam Cooke. Cooke possessed a compellingly clear tenor voice and an uncanny ability to improvise within the gospel tradition. C. L. immediately invited the quartet to stay in Detroit and, when they explained the need to return home, invited them back to perform on gospel programs he organized.33

  The Highway Q.C.’s were, in effect, the apprentice group for the Soul Stirrers, one of the nation’s most famous gospel groups. Based in Chicago, and under the leadership of tenor Rebert H. Harris, the Soul Stirrers tutored the Q.C.’s between their road trips, and when an opening occurred in 1950, they elevated Cooke to fill the spot. Before Cooke joined the Soul Stirrers, audiences had responded intensely to the group within a religious context; under Harris’s leadership, the Soul Stirrers remained relatively immobile as they performed, focusing attention less on themselves than on the hymn and its Christian purpose. Cooke’s presence fundamentally transformed the particular grace of that delivery. His handsome good looks accentuated the irrepressible rhythmic motion of his body as it moved to the beat, and his voice’s passion, phrasing, and tonal quality gave a joy to these hymns that few could resist. Women especially responded viscerally, as much to Cooke’s prayerful words as to the alluring singer who delivered them. The two oldest Franklin daughters understood Cooke’s appeal immediately. “When I first saw him,” Aretha recalled, “all I could do was sigh. . . . Sam was love on first hearing, love at first sight.” “He use to pat us on our heads,” Erma expressed with delight decades later, referring to Cooke’s visits to her home. “Call us little ‘Curly Tops’. . . . Aretha and I had the biggest crushes on Sam Cooke.” The two young girls were anything but alone in these feelings. Wilson Pickett, a Detroit-reared rhythm and blues singer whose concerts proclaimed an exuberant sexuality, described Cooke’s 1950s gospel performances: “Them sisters fell like dominoes when Sam took the lead. Bang. Flat-out. Piled three deep in the aisles.” So intense was the public reaction, so pointed at the Soul Stirrers’ newest member, that it soon became evident that Cooke himself and only secondarily the sacredness of the music was increasingly the main attraction for many in the audience. It was precisely this tone in gospel music that discouraged the more traditional Harris and led him to retire from the Soul Stirrers in 1950. Under Cooke’s leadership, the group promptly developed a distinctly pop-derived orientation. Musical accompaniment replaced Harris’s a cappella sound, and the new lead singer quickly became a celebrity in his own right, much as such secular performers as T-Bone Walker, B. B. King, and Wynonie Harris. It was little comfort to Rebert Harris that what he objected to in his former group was, in fact, but a small part of a more far-reaching cultural transition.34

  Franklin, of course, reacted quite differently. From the first time he heard Cooke until long after the completion of the new church building, he brought Cooke and the Soul Stirrers back to Detroit and to New Bethel. In its way, C. L.’s preaching galvanized audiences much as Cooke’s singing did, and he appreciated empathetically the young man’s desire for celebrity status. Franklin realized now, more than ever before, how permeable were those borders between sacred and secular, how he might create a compelling public persona in the space where the religious and the social, the gospel hymn and the blues, mingled. The prospect that fame—being recognized as somebody—might follow, was not, he thought, disturbing.

  His house on Boston Boulevard could not have been better located to support this expectation. The young local talent alone was astounding. Whether they lived in the neighborhood or first connected with family members at school or church, an impressive group of future national artists who would transform popular American musical culture came through Franklin’s home. Smokey Robinson, soon to be the lead singer of the Miracles, lived nearby, as did Diana Ross, the future lead singer of the Supremes. Mary Wilson, another founding member of that group, first met the Franklin children at New Bethel, where her family worshiped, and then
later became Carolyn’s classmate in elementary school. Other friends were Jackie Wilson, the future rhythm and blues star, and most of the youngsters who a few years later would form the Miracles, the Four Tops, the Temptations, and the Spinners. And then, of course, there were the Franklin children. All three daughters had piano lessons, and music of every description—from the young pianists and singers, from brother Cecil’s growing record collection, and from the radio—permeated the Franklin home. All three daughters would become outstanding writers and interpreters of songs, and Aretha would become, in time, one of the most creative inventors of a distinctly American musical style. But for C. L., the new popular music already evident in the enthusiasms of his children and their friends was not the cultural force he had felt so absent during his Buffalo years.35

  One afternoon in the early 1950s, Aretha came home from school and heard “an especially brilliant style of music” coming from the grand piano in the living room. A heavyset man, head tilted to avoid the smoke of the cigarette dangling from his lips, sat at the piano. At a break, C. L. introduced his daughter to his friend, Art Tatum, a jazz pianist so respected that trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie once said of him: “First you speak of Art Tatum, then take a deep long breath, and you speak of the other pianists.” Tatum spent considerable time in Detroit in the early 1950s, playing regularly at Baker’s Keyboard Lounge at Livernois and Eight Mile, and was a frequent visitor to the Franklin home. He was, however, only one of many musicians and singers to enjoy C. L.’s friendship and hospitality during these years. The great blues singer Dinah Washington was a close friend who stayed at the Franklin home, cooking meals and coaching the older daughters in their singing. Sarah Vaughn, Oscar Peterson, Nat “King” Cole, Dorothy Dandridge, and many other black performers regularly found a welcome and often a party on Boston Boulevard when they played Detroit. Arthur Prysock, the jazz singer, a professed Christian and a close friend to C. L., was a frequent guest. The pastor usually brought him to New Bethel on Sunday morning to sing during services. Jazz great Lionel Hampton also was a particularly good friend and, when in town, a New Bethel regular. Two gospel women became like family to C. L. and his children. Clara Ward, the lead singer of the Ward Singers, was quite close to C. L. and immensely comfortable in the house. Along with James Cleveland and Mahalia Jackson, Ward had the most profound musical influence on Aretha, but her relationship with C. L. and her engaging personality won her the affection of the other children as well. Smokey Robinson recalled that when he came into the Franklin house to play “with Cecil or [flirt] with Aretha, I might actually hear Clara Ward herself singing in their kitchen” as she prepared a meal. Then, of course, there was Mahalia Jackson. A family friend since Memphis days, she remained close with C. L. through his separation from Barbara and his involvement in the more secular world. Jackson herself refused to sing blues or, in nightclubs, even gospel, despite offers of enormous amounts of money. In 1958, she recorded the song “I’m Going to Live the Life I Sing about in My Song,” which affirmed her faith commitment for all to hear. C. L. had already chosen a different approach in understanding his faith’s relation to the secular world, yet he and Mahalia remained very close, “like sisters and brothers,” Erma remembered. A visitor to the house whenever in Detroit, within a short time after arriving Jackson would enter the kitchen, put a pot of collard greens on the stove, and prepare dinner.36