Episode 149: “Respect” by Aretha Franklin

A history of folk music and 500 songs

by Andrew Hick.

Episode 149

Respect

by Aretha Franklin

Before I start this episode, I have to say that there are some things people may want to be aware of before listening to this.

This episode has to deal, at least in passing, with subjects including child sexual abuse, intimate partner abuse, racism, and misogyny.

I will of course try to deal with those subjects as tactfully as possible, but those of you who may be upset by those topics may want to check the episode transcript before or instead of listening.

Those of you who leave comments or send me messages saying, why can't you just talk about the music instead of all this woke virtue signalling, may also want to skip this episode.

You can go ahead and skip all the future ones as well.

I won't mind.

And one more thing to say before I get into the meat of the episode.

This episode puts me in a more difficult position than most other episodes of the podcast have.

When I've talked about awful things that have happened in the course of this podcast previously, I have either been talking about perpetrators, people like Phil Spector or Jerry Lee Lewis, who did truly reprehensible things,

or about victims who have talked very publicly about the abuse they've suffered, people like Ronnie Spector or Tina Turner, who said very clearly, this is what happened to me, and I want it on the public record.

In the case of Aretha Franklin, she has been portrayed as a victim by others, and there are things that have been said about her life and her relationships, which suggest that she suffered in some very terrible ways.

But she herself apparently never saw herself as a victim, and didn't want some aspects of her private life talking about.

At the start of David Ritz's biography of her, which is one of my main sources here, he recounts a conversation he had with her.

When I mentioned the possibility of my writing an independent biography, she said, as long as I can approve it before it's published.

Then it wouldn't be independent, I said.

Why should it be independent?

So I can tell the story from my point of view.

But it's not your story.

It's mine.

You're an important historical figure, Aretha.

Others will inevitably come along to tell your story.

That's the blessing and burden of being a public figure.

More burden than blessing, she said.

Now, Aretha Franklin is sadly dead, but I think that she still deserves the basic respect of being allowed privacy.

So I will talk here about public matters, things she acknowledged in her own autobiography.

and things that she and the people around her did in public situations, like recording studios and concert venues.

But there are aspects to the story of Aretha Franklin as that story is commonly told, which may well be true, but are of mostly prurient interest, don't add much to the story of how the music came to be made, and which she herself didn't want people talking about.

So there will be things people might expect me to talk about in this episode.

Incidents where people in her life, usually men, treated her badly, that I'm going to leave out.

That information is out out there if people want to look for it, but I don't see myself as under any obligation to share it.

That's not me making excuses for people who did inexcusable things.

That's me showing some respect to one of the towering artistic figures of the latter half of the 20th century.

Because, of course, respect is what this is all about.

Literally,

literally,

just a little bit.

I can tie.

You're running off food.

Just a little bit.

I ain't lying.

Just a little bit.

We got all three.

Why are you so walking

along?

Just a little bit.

One name that's come up a few times in this podcast, but who we haven't really talked about that much, is Bobby Blue Bland.

We mentioned him as the single biggest influence on the style of Van Morrison, but Bland was an important figure in the Memphis music scene of the early fifties, which we talked about in several early episodes.

He was one of the Beale Streeters, the loose aggregation of musicians that also included B B King and Johnny Ace.

He worked with Ike Turner, and was one of the key links between Blues and Soul in the 50s and early 60s, with records like Turn on Your Love Light.

I need you dying to make things alright.

Come on, baby,

come on, please.

Come on, baby,

baby, please.

Shut on the light, let it shine on me.

Shut

But while Bland was influenced by many musicians we've talked about, his biggest influence wasn't a singer at all.

It was a preacher he saw give a sermon in the early 1940s.

As he said decades later, it wasn't his words that got me.

I couldn't tell you what he talked on that day.

Couldn't tell you what any of it meant.

But it was the way he talked.

He talked like he was singing.

He talked music.

The thing that really got me, though, was this squall-like sound he made to emphasise a certain word.

He'd catch the word in his mouth, let it roll around and squeeze it with his tongue.

When it popped on out, it exploded, and the ladies started waving and shouting.

I liked all that.

I started popping and shouting too.

That next week I asked Mamma when we were going back to Memphis to church.

Since when are you so keen on church?

Mama asked.

I like that preacher, I said.

Reverend Franklin, she asked.

Well, if he's the one who sings when he preaches, that's the one I like.

Bland was impressed by C.

L.

Franklin, and so were other Memphis musicians.

Long after Franklin had moved to Detroit, they remembered him, and Bland and B.B.

King would go to Franklin's church to see him preach whenever they were in the city.

And Bland studied Franklin's records.

He said later, I liked whatever was on the radio, especially those first things Nat Cole did with his trio.

Naturally, I liked the blues singers like Roy Brown, the jump singers like Louis Jordan, and the ballad singers like Billy Eckstein.

But brother, the man who really shaped me was Reverend Franklin.

Bland would study Franklin's records and would take the style that Franklin used in recorded sermons like The Eagle Stirbeth Her Nest.

And open the door

and set the eagle free.

Oh, Lord.

He rip there and opened the door.

The eagle walks out.

Sprouted his wings.

Up and down.

They used to walk around

a little higher

and rich in the bunyard.

And you can definitely hear that preaching style on records like Bland, I Pity the Fool.

Look at the people.

I know you're wondering what they're doing.

They're just standing there,

watching you make a fool of me.

Look at the people.

I know you're wondering what they're doing!

They're just standing there!

Watchin' you make a fool!

But of course, that wasn't the only influence the Reverend C.

L.

Franklin had on the cause of soul music.

C.

L.

Franklin had grown up poor on a Mississippi farm and had not even finished grade school because he was needed to work behind the mule, ploughing the farm for his stepfather.

But he had a fierce intelligence and became an autodidact, travelling regularly to the nearest library, thirty miles away, on a horse-drawn wagon, and reading everything he could get his hands on.

At the age of sixteen, he received what he believed to be a message from God, and decided to become an itinerant preacher.

He would travel between many small country churches and build up audiences there, and he would also study everyone else preaching there, analyzing their sermons, seeing if he could anticipate their line of argument and get ahead of them, figuring out the structure.

But unlike many people in the conservative Black Baptist churches of the time, he never saw the spiritual and secular worlds as incompatible.

He saw blues music and black church sermons as both being part of the same thing, a black culture and folklore that was worthy of respect in both its spiritual and secular aspects.

He soon built up a small circuit of local churches where he would preach occasionally, but he wasn't the main pastor at any of them.

He got married at age 20, though that marriage didn't last, and he seems to have been ambitious for a greater respectability.

When that marriage failed, in june 1936, he married Barbara Siggers, a very intelligent, cultured, young single mother, who had attended Booker T.

Washington High School, the best black school in Memphis, and he adopted her son Vaughan.

While he was mostly still doing churches in Mississippi, he took on one in Memphis as well, in an extremely poor area, but it gave him a foot in the door to the biggest black city in the US.

Barbara would later be called one of the really great gospel singers by no less than Mahalia Jackson.

We don't have any recordings of Barbara singing, but but Mahalia Jackson certainly knew what she was talking about when it came to great gospel singers.

Hold

my hand,

take my hand,

prish you

and live Franklin was hugely personally ambitious, and he also wanted to get out of rural Mississippi, where the clan were very active at this time, especially after his daughter Irma was born in 1938.

They moved to Memphis in 1939, where he got a full-time position at New Salem Baptist Church, where for the first time he was able to earn a steady living from just one church and not have to tour around multiple churches.

He soon became so popular that if you wanted to get a seat for the service at noon, you had to turn up for the 8 a.m.

Sunday school or you'd be forced to stand.

He also enrolled for college courses at Le Moyne College.

He didn't get a degree, but spent three years as a part-time student, studying theology, literature, and sociology, and soon developed a liberal theology that was very different from the conservative fundamentalism he'd grown up in, though still very much part of the Baptist Church.

Where he'd grown up with a literalism that said the Bible was literally true, he started to accept things like evolution and to see much of the Bible as metaphor.

Now, we talked in the last episode about how impossible it is to get an accurate picture of the lives of religious leaders, because their life stories are told by those who admire them, and that's very much the case for C.L.

Franklin.

Franklin was a man who had many, many admirable qualities.

He was fiercely intelligent, well-read, a superb public speaker, a man who was by all accounts genuinely compassionate towards those in need, and he became one of the leaders of the civil rights movement and inspired tens of thousands, maybe even millions of people, directly and indirectly, to change the world for the better.

He also raised several children who loved and admired him and were protective of his memory.

And as such, there is an inevitable bias in the sources on Franklin's life, and so there's a tendency to soften the very worst things he did, some of which were very, very bad.

For example, in Nick Salvatore's biography of him, he talks about Franklin in 1940 fathering a daughter with someone who is described as a teenager and quite young.

No details of her age other than that are given, and a few paragraphs later, the age of a girl who was then 16 is given, talking about having known the girl in question.

And so the impression is given that the girl he impregnated was also probably in her late teens,

which which would still be bad, but a man in his early twenties fathering a child with a girl in her late teens is something that can perhaps be forgiven as being a different time.

But while the girl in question may have been a teenager when she gave birth, she was twelve years old when she became pregnant by C.

L.

Franklin, the pastor of her church, who was in a position of power over her in multiple ways.

12 years old.

And this is not the only awful thing that Franklin did.

He was also known to regularly beat up women he was having affairs with, in public.

I mention this now because everything else I say about him in this episode is filtered through sources who saw these things as forgivable character flaws in an otherwise admirable human being.

And I can't correct for those biases because I don't know the truth.

So it's going to sound like he was a truly great great man, but bear those facts in mind.

Barbara stayed with Franklin for the present, after discovering what he had done, but their marriage was a difficult one, and they split up and reconciled a handful of times.

They had three more children together, Cecil, Aretha, and Carolyn, and remained together as Franklin moved on first to a church in Buffalo, New York, and then to New Bethel Church in Detroit, on Hastings Street, a street which was the centre of black nightlife in the city, is immortalized in John Lee Hooker's Boogie Chillin.

I was walking down Hazen Street.

Everybody was talking about

Henry Slang Club.

I decided I'd drop in there that night.

When I got there,

I said, Yeah, people,

there was really hell

Before moving to Detroit, Franklin had already started to get more political, as his congregation in Buffalo had largely been union members, and being free from the worst excesses of segregation allowed him to talk more openly about civil rights.

But that only accelerated when he moved to Detroit, which had been torn apart just a couple of years earlier by police violence against black protesters.

Franklin had started building a reputation when in Memphis using radio broadcasts, and by the time he moved to Detroit, he was able to command a very high salary.

And not only that, his family were given a mansion by the church, in a rich part of town far away from most of his congregation.

Smokey Robinson, who was Cecil Franklin's best friend and a frequent visitor to the mansion through most of his childhood, described it later, saying,

Once inside, I'm awestruck.

Oil paintings, velvet tapestries, silk curtains, mahogany cabinets filled with ornate objects of silver and gold, man, I've never seen nothing like that before.

He made a lot of money, but he also increased church attendance so much that he earned that money.

He had already been broadcasting on the radio, but when he started his Sunday night broadcast in Detroit, he came up with a trick of having his sermons run long, so the show would end before the climax.

People listening decided that they would have to start turning up in person to hear the end of the sermons, and soon he became so popular that the church would be so full that crowds would have to form on the street outside to listen.

Other churches rescheduled their services so they wouldn't clash with Franklin's, and most of the other black Baptist ministers in the city would go along to watch him preach.

In 1948, though, a couple of years after moving to Detroit, Barbara finally left her husband.

She took Vaughan with her and moved back to Buffalo, leaving the four biological children she'd had with C.L.

with their father.

But it's important to note that she didn't leave her children.

They would visit her on a regular basis and stay with her over school holidays.

Aretha later said, 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.

Barbara's place in the home was filled by many women.

C.

L.

Franklin's mother moved up from Mississippi to help him take care of the children.

The ladies from the church would often help out, and even stars like Mahalia Jackson would turn up and cook meals for the children.

There were also the women with whom Franklin carried on affairs, including Anna Gordy, Ruth Brown, and Dinah Washington, the most important female jazz and blues singer of the 50s, who had major RB hits with records like her version of Cold, Cold Cold Heart.

The more I learn to care for you,

the more

we drift apart.

Why can't I free your doubtful mind

and melt your

cold,

cold

heart

and melt your cold

hard.

Although, my own favorite record of hers is Big Long Sliding Thing, which she made with Aranger Quincy Jones.

Well, the first time he played,

I asked him how it was done.

He said, I blow through here,

then I work my fingers and my thumb.

I slide it, run out, then I slide it back again,

And I get a lot of win, and then I slide it back again.

Where is my daddy?

With nothing hard,

slide it back.

It's about a trombone.

Get your minds out of the gutter.

Washington was one of the biggest vocal influences on younger ether,

but the single biggest influence was Clara Ward, another of CL Franklin's many girlfriends.

Ward was the longest lasting of these, and there seems to have been a lot of hope on both her part and Aretha's that she and Reverend Franklin would marry, though Franklin always made it very clear that monogamy wouldn't suit him.

Ward was one of the three major female gospel singers of the middle part of the century, and possibly even more technically impressive as a vocalist than the other two, Sister Rosetta Thorpe and Mahalia Jackson.

Where Jackson was an austere performer who refused to perform in secular contexts at all for most of her life and took herself and her music very seriously, and Tharpe was a raunchier, funnier, more down-to-earth performer who was happy to play for blues audiences and even to play secular music on occasion.

Ward was a glamorous performer who wore sequined dresses and piled her hair high on her head.

Ward had become a singer in 1931 when her mother had what she she later talked about as a religious epiphany, and decided she wasn't going to be a labourer anymore, she was going to devote her life to gospel music.

Ward's mother had formed a vocal group with her two daughters, and Clara quickly became the star and her mother's meal ticket.

And her mother was very possessive of that ticket, to the extent that Ward, who was a bisexual woman who mostly preferred men, had more relationships with women, because her mother wouldn't let her be alone with the men she was attracted to.

But Ward did manage to keep a relationship going with C.L.

Franklin, and Aretha Franklin talked about the moment she decided to become a singer when she saw Ward singing Peace in the Valley at a funeral.

Till the Lord

comes to call

me away

where the morning

is bright

and the lamb is the light

and the night

is as fair as the day.

As well as looking towards Ward as a vocal influence, Aretha was also influenced by her as a person.

She became a mother figure to Aretha, who would talk later about watching Ward eat, and noting her taking little delicate bites, and getting an idea of what it meant to be ladylike from her.

After Ward's death in 1973, a notebook was found in which she had written her opinions of other singers.

For Aretha, she wrote, My baby Aretha, she doesn't know how good she is.

Doubts self, someday to the moon.

I love that girl.

Ward's influence became especially important to Aretha and her siblings after their mother died of a heart attack a few years after leaving her husband, when Aretha was ten.

And Aretha, already a very introverted child, became even more so.

Everyone who knew Aretha said that her later diva-ish reputation came out of a deep sense of insecurity and introversion, that she was a desperately private, closed-off person who would rarely express her emotions at all.

and who would look away from you rather than make eye contact.

The only time she let herself express emotions was when she performed music.

And music was hugely important in the Franklin household.

Most preachers in the Black Church at the time were a bit dismissive of gospel music, because they thought the music took away from their prestige.

They saw it as a necessary evil and resented it taking up space when their congregations could have been listening to them.

But Reverend Franklin was himself a rather good singer, and even made a few gospel records himself in 1950, recording for Joe von Battle, who owned a record shop on Hastings Street, and also put out records by blues singers.

oh yeah,

oh climbing,

trying to get home.

The church's musical director was James Cleveland, one of the most important gospel artists of the 50s and 60s, who sang with groups like the Caravans.

What kind of man is this?

Talks like Jesus

Cleveland, who had started out in the choir run by Thomas Dorsey, the writer of Take My Hand Precious Lord and Peace in the Valley, moved in with the Franklin family for a while, and he gave the girls tips on playing the piano.

Much later he would play piano on Aretha's album Amazing Grace, and she said of him, He showed me some real nice chords, and I liked his deep, deep sound.

Other than Clara Ward, he was probably the single biggest musical influence on Aretha.

and all the touring gospel musicians would make appearances at New Bethel Church, not least of them Sam Cook, who first appeared there with the Highway QCs and would continue to do so after joining the soul stirvers.

Young Aretha and her older sister Irma both had massive crushes on Cook, and there were rumours that he had an affair with one or both of them when they were in their teens, though both denied it.

Aretha later said, When I first saw him, all I could do was sigh.

Sam was love on first hearing, love at first sight.

But it wasn't just gospel music that filled the house.

One of the major ways that C.

L.

Franklin's liberalism showed was in his love of secular music, especially jazz and blues, which he regarded as just as important in black cultural life as gospel music.

We already talked about Dinah Washington being a regular visitor to the house, but every major black entertainer would visit the Franklin residence when they were in Detroit.

Both Aretha and Cecil Franklin vividly remembered visits from Art Tatum, who would sit at the piano and play for the family and their guests.

Tatum was such a spectacular pianist that there's now a musicological term, the Tatum, named after him, for the smallest possible discernible rhythmic interval between two notes.

Young Aretha was thrilled by his technique, and by that of Oscar Peterson, who also regularly came to the Franklin home, sometimes along with Ella Fitzgerald.

Nat King Cole was another regular visitor.

The Franklin children all absorbed the music these people, the most important musicians of the time, were playing in their home, and young Aretha in particular became an astonishing singer, and also an accomplished pianist.

Smokey Robinson later said The other thing that knocked us out about Aretha was her piano playing.

There was a grand piano in the Franklin living room, and we all liked to mess around.

We'd pick out little melodies with one finger.

But when Aretha sat down, even as a seven-year-old, she started playing chords.

Big chords.

Later I'd recognized them as complex church chords, the kind used to accompany the preacher and the solo singer.

At the time though, all I could do was view Aretha as a wonder child.

Mind you, this was Detroit where musical talent ran strong and free.

Everyone was singing and harmonizing.

Everyone was playing piano and guitar.

Aretha came out of this world, but she also came out of another far-off magical world none of us really understood.

She came from a distant musical planet where children are are born with their gifts fully formed.

C.

L.

Franklin became more involved in the music business still when Joe von Battle started releasing records of his sermons, which had become steadily more politically aware.

Was a mountaintop of possibility,

was a mountaintop of adventure.

But to the Negro, when he embarked upon these shores,

America to him was a valley,

a valley of slavehood,

a valley of slavery and oppression,

a valley of sorrow.

Franklin was not a Marxist.

He was a liberal, but like many liberals, was willing to stand with Marxists where they had shared interests, even when it was dangerous.

For example, in nineteen fifty four, at the height of McCarthyism, he had James and Grace Lee Boggs, two Marxist revolutionaries, come to the pulpit and talk about their support for the anti colonial revolution in Kenya, and they sold four hundred copies of their pamphlet after their talk, because he saw that the struggle of black Africans to get out from white colonial rule was the same struggle as that of black Americans.

And Franklin's powerful sermons started getting broadcast on the radio in areas further out from Detroit, as chess records picked up the distribution for them, and people started playing the records on other stations.

People like future Congressman John Lewis and the Reverend Jesse Jackson would later talk about listening to CL Franklin's records on the radio and being inspired.

A whole generation of black civil rights leaders took their cues from him, and as the nineteen fifties and sixties went on, he became closer and closer to Martin Luther King in particular.

But CL Franklin was always as much an ambitious showman as an activist, and he started putting together gospel tours, consisting mostly of music, but with himself giving a sermon as a headline act, and he became very, very wealthy from these tours.

On one trip in the south, his car broke down, and he couldn't find a mechanic willing to work on it.

A group of white men started mocking him with racist terms, trying to provoke him, as he was dressed well and driving a nice car, albeit one that had broken down.

Rather than arguing with them, he walked to a car dealership and bought a new car with the cash that he had on him.

By 1956, he was getting around $4,000 per appearance, roughly equivalent to $43,000 today, and he was making a lot of appearances.

He also sold half a million records that year.

Various gospel singers, including the Clara Ward singers, would perform on the tours he organized, and one of those performers was Franklin's middle daughter Aretha.

Aretha had become pregnant when she was twelve, and after giving birth to the child, she dropped out of school, but her grandmother did most of the child-rearing for her while she accompanied her father on tour.

Aretha's first recordings, made when she was just fourteen, show what an astonishing talent she already was at that young age.

She would grow as an artist, of course, as she aged and gained experience.

But those early gospel records already show an astounding maturity and ability.

It's jaw-dropping to listen to these records of a 14-year-old and immediately recognise them as a fully formed Aretha Franklin.

Smokey Robinson's assessment that she was born with her gifts fully formed doesn't seem like an exaggeration when you hear that.

For the latter half of the 50s, Aretha toured with her father, performing on the gospel circuit and becoming known there.

But the Franklin sisters were starting to get ideas about moving into secular music.

This was largely because their family friend Sam Cooke had done just that with You Send Me.

Aretha and Irma still worshipped Cook and Aretha would later talk about getting dressed up just to watch Cook appear on the TV.

Their brother Cecil later said, I remember the night Sam came to sing at the Flame Show bar in Detroit.

Irma and Rhee 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 because 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.

Moving from gospel to secular music still had a stigma against it in the gospel world.

but Reverend Franklin had never seen secular music as sinful, and he encouraged his daughters in their ambitions.

Irma was the first to go secular, forming a girl group, the Cleopatrates, at the suggestion of the four tops, who were family friends, and recording a single for Joe von Battle's JVB label, No Other Love.

But the group didn't go any further, as Reverend Franklin insisted that his eldest daughter had to finish school and go to university before she could become a professional singer.

Irma missed other opportunities for different reasons though.

Barry Gordy, at this time still a jobbing songwriter, offered her a song he'd written with his sister and Mikel Davis.

But Irma thought of herself as a jazz singer and didn't want to do R and B.

And so All I Could Do Was Cry was given to Etta James instead, who had a top forty pop hit with it.

I

was losing the man

that I love.

And all

I could do

was cry.

While Irma's move into secular music was slowed by her father wanting her to have an education, there was no such pressure on Aretha, as she had already dropped out.

But Aretha had a different problem.

She was very insecure and said that church audiences weren't critics but worshipers.

But she was worried that nightclub audiences in particular were just the kind of people who would just be looking for flaws, rather than wanting to support the performer as church audiences did.

But eventually she got up the nerve to make the move.

There was the possibility of her getting sent to Motown.

Her brother was still best friends with Smokey Robinson, while the Gordy family were close to her father.

But Reverend Franklin had his eye on bigger things.

He wanted her to be signed to Columbia, which in 1960 was the most prestigious of all the major labels.

As Aretha's brother Cecil later said, he wanted Rion 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.

They went out to New York to see Phil Moore, a legendary vocal coach and arranger who had helped make Lena Horne and Dorothy Dandridge into stars.

But Moore actually refused to take her on as a client, saying, She does not require my services.

Her style has already been developed.

Her style is in place.

It is a unique style that, in my professional opinion, requires no alteration.

It simply requires the right material.

Her stage presentation is not of immediate concern, or that will come later.

The immediate concern is the material that will suit her best.

And the reason that concern will not be easily addressed is because I can't imagine any material that will not suit her.

That last would become a problem for the next few years, but the immediate issue was to get someone at Columbia to listen to her.

And Moore could help with that.

He was friends with John Hammond.

Hammond is a name that's come up several times in the podcast already.

We mentioned him in the very earliest episodes, and also in episode 98, where we looked at his signing of Bob Dylan.

But Hammond was a legend in the music business.

He had produced sessions for Bessie Smith, had discovered Count Basie and Billy Holiday, had convinced Benny Goodman to hire Charlie Christian and Lionel Hampton, had signed Pete Seeger and the Weavers to Columbia, had organised the spirituals to swing concerts which we talked about in the first few episodes of this podcast, and was about to put out the first album of Robert Johnson's recordings.

Of all the executives at Columbia, he was the one who had the greatest eye for talent and the greatest understanding of black musical culture.

Moore suggested that the Franklins get Major Holly to produce a demo recording that he could get Hammond to listen to.

Major Holly was a family friend, and a jazz bassist who had played with Oscar Peterson and Coleman Hawkins, among others, and he put together a set of songs for Aretha that would emphasise the jazz side of her abilities, pitching her as a Dinah Washington-style bluesy bluesy jazz singer.

The highlight of the demo was a version of Today I Sing the Blues, a song that had originally been recorded by Helen Humes, the singer who we last heard of recording Be Baba Liba with Bill Duggett.

lonely feeling

Until my baby called and said we're through

Why

yesterday I sang a love song

But

today

That original version had been produced by Hammond but the song had also recently been covered by Aretha's idol Sam Cook

Hammond Hammond was hugely impressed by the demo and signed Aretha straight away and got to work producing her first album.

But he and Reverend Franklin had different ideas about what Aretha should do.

Hammond wanted to make a fairly raw-sounding bluesy jazz album, the kind of recording he had produced with Bessie Smith or Billie Holiday, but Reverend Franklin wanted his daughter to make music that would cross over to the white pop market.

He was aiming for the same kind of audience that Nat King Cole or Harry Belafonte had, and he wanted a recording standards like Over the Rainbow.

This showed a lack of understanding on Reverend Franklin's part of how such crossovers actually worked at this point.

As Etta James later said, if you want to have black hits, you got to understand the black streets.

You got to work those streets and work those DJs to get airplay on black stations.

Or looking at it another way, In those days you had to get the black audience to love the hell out of you, and then hope the love would cross over to the white side.

Columbia didn't know nothing about crossing over.

But Hammond knew they had to make a record quickly because Sam Cook had been working on RCA records, trying to get them to sign Aretha, and Reverend Franklin wanted an album out so they could start booking club dates for her, and was saying that if they didn't get one done quickly, he'd take up that offer.

And so they came up with a compromised set of songs which satisfied nobody, but did produce two RB top 10 hits: Won't Be Long, and Aretha's version of Today I Sing the blues.

This is not to say that Aretha herself saw this as a compromise.

She later said, I have never compromised my material.

Even then, I knew a good song from a bad one.

And if Hammond, one of the legends of the business, didn't know how to produce a record, who does?

No, the fault was with promotion.

And this is something important to bear in mind as we talk about her Columbia records.

Many, many people have presented those records as Aretha being told what to do by producers who understand her art and were making her record songs that didn't fit her style.

That's not what's happening with the Columbia records.

Everyone actually involved said that Aretha was very involved in the choices made, and there are some genuinely great tracks on those albums.

The problem is that they're unfocused.

Aretha was only eighteen when she signed to the label, and she loved all sorts of music blues, jazz, soul, standards, gospel, middle-of-the-road pop music, and wanted to sing all those kinds of music.

And she could sing all those kinds of music and sing them well.

But it meant the records weren't coherent.

You didn't know what you were getting.

And there was no artistic personality that dominated them.

It was just what Aretha felt like recording.

Around this time, Aretha started to think that maybe her father didn't know what he was talking about when it came to popular music success, even though she idolized

many major soul stars, including both Aretha Franklin and Etta James, James had a lot to say about White, saying, Ted White was famous even before he got with Aretha.

My boyfriend at the time, Harvey Fouquet, used to talk about him.

Ted was supposed to be the slickest pimp in Detroit.

When I learned that Aretha married him, I wasn't surprised.

A lot of the big-time singers who we idolized as girls, like Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan, had pimps for boyfriends and managers.

That was standard operating procedure.

My own mother had made a living turning tricks.

When we were getting started, that way of life was part of the music business.

It was in our genes.

Part of the lure of pimps was that they got us paid.

She compared White to Ike Turner, saying, Ike made Tina, no doubt about it.

He developed her talent.

He showed her what it meant to be a performer.

He got her famous.

Of course, Ted White was not a performer, but he was savvy about the world.

When Harvey Fouquet introduced me to him, this was the 50s, before he was with Aretha, I saw him as a super hip, extra-smooth cat.

I liked him.

He knew music.

He knew songwriters who were writing hit songs.

He had manners.

Later when I ran into him and Aretha, this was the 60s, I saw that she wasn't as shy as she used to be.

White was a pimp, but he was also someone with music business experience.

He owned an unsuccessful publishing company and also ran a chain of jukeboxes.

He was also 30, while Aretha was only 18.

But White didn't like the people in Aretha's life at the time.

He didn't get on well with her father, and he also clashed with John Hammond.

And Aretha was also annoyed at Hammond, because her sister Irma had signed to Epic, a Columbia subsidiary, and was releasing her own singles.

Haven't seen you

in the longest time.

Funny.

I was just talking about you the other day.

Aretha was certain that Hammond had signed Irma, even though Hammond had nothing to do with Epic Records, and Irma had actually been recommended by Lloyd Price.

And Aretha, while for much of her career she would support her sister, was also terrified that her sister might have a big hit before her and leave Aretha in her shadow.

Hammond was still the credited producer on Aretha's second album, The Electrifying Aretha Franklin, but his lack of say in the sessions can be shown in the choice of lead-off single.

Rock A Buy Your Baby to a Dixie Melody was originally recorded by Al Jolson in 1918.

Just hang that cradle, Mammy Mine,

on the Mason

Dixon,

and swing it from Virginia

to Tennessee with all the soul at Dennya.

Reverend Franklin pushed for the song, as he was a fan of Jolson.

Jolson, oddly, had a large black fanbase, despite his having been a blackface performer, because he had also been a strong advocate of black musicians like Camp Calloway, and the level of racism in the media of the 20s through 40s was so astonishingly high that even a blackface performer could seem comparatively okay.

Aretha's performance was good, but it was hardly the kind of thing that audiences were clamoring for in 1961.

Ride on that mason,

Dixie line,

and swing it from Virginia

to Tennessee with all the heart that's in you.

That single came out the month after Downbeat magazine gave Aretha the New Star Female Vocalist Award, and it oddly made the pop top 40, her first record to do so.

And the B-side made the RB top 10.

But for the next few years, both chart success and critical acclaim eluded her.

None of her next nine singles would make Kaya the number 86 on the Hot 100, and none would make the RB charts at all.

After that transitional second album, she was paired with producer Bob Mersey, who was precisely the kind of white pop producer that one would expect for someone who hoped for crossover success.

Mersey was the producer for many of Columbia's biggest stars at the time.

people like Barbara Streisand, Andy Williams, Julie Andrews, Patty Page, and Mel Tor May.

And it was that kind of audience that Aretha wanted to go for at this point.

To give an example of the kind of thing that Mersey was doing, just the month before he started work on his first collaboration with Aretha, the tender, the moving, the swinging Aretha Franklin, his production of Andy Williams singing Moon River was released.

waiting on the bend,

my huttleberry friend

moved

and

me.

This was the kind of audience Aretha was going for when it came to record sales.

The person she compared herself to most frequently at this point was Barbara Streisand, though in live performances she was playing with a small jazz group in jazz venues, and going for the same kind of jazz soul crossover audience as Dinah Washington or Ray Charles.

The strategy seems to have been to get something like the success of her idol Sam Cook, who could play to soul audiences but also play the Copacabana.

But the problem was that Cook had built an audience before doing that.

She hadn't.

But even though she hadn't built up an audience, musicians were starting to pay attention.

Ted White, who was still in touch with Dinah Washington, later said, Women are very catty.

They'll see a girl who's dressed very well, and they'll say, yeah, but look at those shoes, or look at that hairdo.

Aretha was the only singer I've ever known that Dinah had no negative comments about.

She just stood with her mouth open when she heard Aretha sing.

The great jazz vocalist Carmen McCrae went to see Aretha at the village vanguard in New York around this time, having heard the comparisons to Dinah Washington, and met her afterwards.

She later said, Given how emotionally she sang, I expected her to have a supercharged emotional personality like Dinah.

Instead, she was the shyest thing I've ever met.

Would hardly look me in the eye, didn't say more than two words.

I mean, this bitch gave bashful a new meaning.

Anyway, I didn't give her any advice because she didn't ask for any, but I knew goddamn well that no matter how good she was, and she was absolutely wonderful, she'd have to make up her mind whether she wanted to be Dela Reese, Dinah Washington or Sarah Vaughan.

I also had a feeling she wouldn't have minded being Leslie Ogams or Diane Carroll.

I remember thinking that if she didn't figure out who she was, and quick, she was going to get lost in the weeds of the music biz.

So musicians were listening to Aretha, even if everyone else wasn't.

The tender, the moving, the swinging Aretha Franklin, for example, was full of old standards like try a little tenderness.

Women do get weary

wearing the same

shabby dress,

but to one who's weary

try a little,

try a little chimney.

That performance inspired Otis Redding to cut his own version of that song a few years later.

Oh, she may be weary.

Them young girls, they do get wearied

wearing

that same old shaggy dress.

Yeah, yeah.

And it might also have inspired Aretha's friend and idol Sam Cook to include the song in his own lounge set.

The tender, the moving, the swinging Aretha Franklin also included Aretha's first original composition, but in general it wasn't a very well-received album.

In 1963, the first cracks started to develop in Aretha's relationship with Ted White.

According to her siblings, part of the strain was because Aretha's increasing commitment to the civil rights movement was costing her professional opportunities.

Her brother Cecil later said, Ted White had complete sway over her when it came to what engagements to accept and what songs to sing.

But if Daddy called and said, Rhea, I want you to sing for Dr.

King, she'd drop everything and do just that.

I don't think Ted had objections to her support of Dr.

King's cause, and he realised it would raise her visibility.

But I do remember the time that there was a conflict between a big club gig and doing a benefit for Dr.

King.

Ted said, take the club gig, we need the money.

But Rhys said, Dr.

King needs me more.

She defied her husband.

Maybe that was the start of their marital trouble.

Their thing was always troubled because it was based on each of them using the other.

Whatever the case, my sister proved to be a strong soldier in the civil rights fight.

That made me proud of her, and it kept her relationship with daddy from collapsing entirely.

In part, her increasing activism was because of her father's own increasing activity.

The benefit that Cecil is talking about there is probably one in Chicago organised by Mahalia Jackson, where Aretha headlined on a bill that also included Jackson, Arthur Kitt, and the comedian Dick Gregory.

That was less than a month before her father organised the Detroit Walk to Freedom, a trial run run for the more famous March on Washington a few weeks later.

The Detroit Walk to Freedom was run by the Detroit Council for Human Rights, which was formed by Reverend Franklin and Reverend Albert Clege, a much more radical black nationalist who often differed with Franklin's more moderate integrationist stance.

They both worked together to organise the Walk to Freedom, but Franklin's stance predominated, as several white liberal politicians, like the mayor of Detroit, Jerome Kavanaugh, were included in the largely black march.

It drew crowds of 125,000 people, and Dr.

King called it one of the most wonderful things that has happened in America.

And it was the largest civil rights demonstration in American history up to that point.

King's speech in Detroit was recorded and released on Motown Records.

I have a dream this afternoon that my four little children,

that my four little children will not come up in the same young days that I came up within, but they will be judged on the basis of the content of their character, not the color of their skin.

I have a dream this afternoon that one day right here in Detroit,

Negroes will be able to buy a house or rent a house anywhere that their money will carry them.

He later returned to the same ideas in his more famous speech in Washington.

During that civil rights spring and summer of 1963, Aretha also recorded what many think of as the best of her Columbia albums, her collection of jazz standards called Laughing on the Outside, which included songs like Solitude, Old Man River, and I Wanna Be Around.

To pick up the pieces

when somebody breaks your heart,

somebody twice as smart

as I

or

somebody who

will swear.

The opening track, Skylark, was Etta James's favorite ever Aretha Franklin performance and is regarded by many as the definitive take on the song.

Oh, I don't know if you

can find these things.

Oh, but my heart, my heart is

writing on your way.

So, if you stay there

anyway,

Etta James later talked about discussing the track with the great jazz singer Sarah Vaughan, one of Aretha's early influences, who had recorded her own version of the song.

Sarah said, have you heard of this Aretha Franklin girl?

I said, You heard her do Skylark, didn't you?

Sarah said, Yes, I did, and I'm never singing that song again.

But while the album got noticed by other musicians, it didn't get much attention from the the wider public.

Mercy decided that a change in direction was needed, and they needed to get in someone with more of a jazz background to work with Aretha.

He brought in pianist and arranger Bobby Scott, who had previously worked with people like Lester Young, and Scott said of their first meeting, My first memory of Aretha is that she wouldn't look at me when I spoke.

She withdrew from the encounter in a way that intrigued me.

At first I thought she was just shy, and she was.

But I also felt her reading me.

For all her difference to my experience and her reluctance to speak up.

When she did look me in the eye, she did so with a quiet intensity before saying, I like all your ideas, Mr.

Scott, but please remember, I do want hits.

They started recording together, but the sides they cut wouldn't be released for a few years.

Instead, Aretha and Mersey went in yet another direction.

Dinah Washington died suddenly in December 1963, and given that Aretha was already being compared to Washington by almost everyone, and and that Washington had been a huge influence on her, as well as having been close to both her father and her husband manager, it made sense to go into the studio and quickly cut a tribute album, with Aretha singing Washington's hits.

What can I free

your doubt for mine

and Merior

Unfortunately while Washington had been wildly popular and one of the most important figures in jazz and R ⁇ B in the 40s and 50s, her style was out of date.

The tribute album, titled Unforgettable, came out in February 1964, the same month that Beatlemania hit the US.

Dinah Washington was the past, and trying to position Aretha as the new Dinah Washington would doom her to obscurity.

John Hammond later said, I remember thinking that if Aretha never does another album, she will be remembered for this one.

No, the problem was timing.

Dinah had died, and outside the black community, interest in her had waned dramatically.

Popular music was in a radical and revolutionary moment, and that moment had nothing to do with Dinah Washington, great as she was and will always be.

At this point, Columbia brought in Clyde Otis, an independent producer and songwriter, who had worked with artists like Washington and Sarah Vaughan, and indeed had written one of the songs on Unforgettable, but had also worked with people like Brooke Benton, who had a much more RB audience.

For example, he'd written Baby, You Got What It Takes for Benton and Washington to do as a duet.

to make you miss say I do

and baby

you've got what it takes

in 1962 when he was working at Mercury Records before going independent Otis had produced 33 of the 51 singles the label put out that year that had chartered Columbia had decided that they were going to position Aretha firmly in the RB market, and assigned Otis to do just that.

At first though, Otis had no more luck with getting Aretha to sing RB than anyone else had.

He later said, Aretha though couldn't be deterred from her determination to beat Barbara Streisand at Barbara's own game.

I kept saying, Re, you can outsing Streisand any day of the week.

That's not the point.

The point is to find a hit.

But that summer she just wanted straight-up ballads.

She insisted that she do People, Streisand Smash.

Aretha sang the hell out of it.

But no one's going to beat Barbara at her own game.

But after several months of this, eventually Aretha and White came around to the idea of making an RB record.

Otis produced an album of contemporary RB, with covers of music from the more sophisticated end of the soul market.

Songs like My Guy, Every Little Bit Hurts, and Walk On By, along with a few new originals brought in by Otis.

The title track, Running Out of Fools, became her biggest hit in three years, making number 57 on the pop charts and number 30 on the RB charts.

is that what

you got in touch with me

running out for

that album they recorded another album with Otis producing a live in the studio jazz album but again nobody involved could agree on a style for her.

By this time it was obvious that she was unhappy with Columbia and would be leaving the label soon, and they wanted to get as much material in the can as they could, so they could continue releasing material after she left.

But her working relationship with Otis was deteriorating.

Otis and Ted White did not get on.

Aretha and White were having their own problems, and Aretha had started just not showing up for some sessions, with nobody knowing where she was.

Columbia passed her on to yet another producer, this time Bob Johnston, who had just had a hit hit with patty page hush hush sweet charlotte

hush hush sweet charlotte

charlotte

don't you cry

hush hush sweet charlotte

he'll love you till he dies

oh hold him darling Please hold him tight

and brush the tear from your eye.

Johnston was just about to hit an incredible hot streak as a producer.

At the same time as his sessions with Aretha, he was also producing Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited.

And just after the sessions finished, he'd go on to produce Simon and Garfunkel's Sounds of Silence album.

In the next few years, he would produce a run of classic Dylan albums like Blonde on Blonde, John Wesley Harding, and New Morning, Simon and Garfunkel's follow-up Parsley Sage Rosemary and Time, Leonard Cohen's first three albums and Johnny Cash's comeback with the Live at Folsom Prison album and its follow-up at San Quentin.

He also produced records for Marty Robbins, Flatten Scruggs, The Birds, and Burr Lives during that time period.

But you may notice that while that's as great a run of records as any producer was putting out at the time, it has little to do with the kind of music music that Aretha Franklin was making then, or would become famous with.

Johnston produced a string-heavy session, in which Aretha once again tried to sing old standards by people like Oscar Hammerstein and Jerome Kern.

She then just didn't turn up for some more sessions, until one final session in August, when she recorded songs like Swanny and You Made Me Love You.

For more than a year, she didn't go into a studio.

She also missed many gigs and disappeared from her family's life for periods of time.

Columbia kept putting out records of things she'd already recorded, but none of them had any success at all.

Many of the records she'd made for Columbia had been genuinely great.

There's a popular perception that she was being held back by a record company that forced her to sing material she didn't like, but in fact she loved old standards and jazz tunes and contemporary pop.

at least as much as any other kind of music.

Truly great musicians tend to have extremely eclectic tastes, and Aretha Franklin was a truly great musician, if anyone was.

Her Columbia albums are as good as any albums in those genres put out in that time period, and she remained proud of them for the rest of her life.

But that very eclecticism had meant that she hadn't established a strong identity as a performer.

Everyone who heard her records knew she was a great singer, but nobody knew what an Aretha Franklin record really meant, and she hadn't had a single real hit, which was the thing she wanted more than anything.

All All that changed when, in the early hours of the morning, Jerry Wexler was at Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals recording a Wilson picket track.

From the timeline, it was probably the session for Mustang Sally, which coincidentally was published by Ted White's Publishing Company, as Sir Mac Rice, the writer, was a neighbour of White and Franklin, and to which Aretha had made an uncredited songwriting contribution.

Mustang satin

Guess you better slow your Mustang down

What I said now

Mustang's saddle now, baby

Guess you better slow your mustang down Whatever the session, it wasn't going well.

Percy Sledge, another Atlantic artist who recorded at Muscle Shoals,

had turned up and had started winding Pickett up, telling him he sounded just like James Brown.

Pickett hated Brown, it seems like almost every male soul singer of the sixties hated James Brown, and went to physically attack Sledge.

Wexler got between the two men to protect his investments in them.

Both were the kind of men who could easily cause some serious damage to anyone they hit, and Pickett threw him to one side and charged at Sledge.

At that moment the phone went, and Wexler yelled at the two of them to calm down so he could talk on the phone.

The call was telling him that Aretha Franklin was interested in recording for Atlantic.

Reverend Louise Bishop, later a Democratic politician in Pennsylvania, was at this time a broadcaster, presenting a radio gospel programme, and she knew Aretha.

She'd been to see her perform, and had been astonished by Aretha's performance of her recent oldest Reading single, Respect.

What you want,

well that you've got it,

And what you need,

maybe you've got it

All I'm asking

for a little bit when I got it for you

Reading will, by the way, be getting his own episode in a few months' time, which is why I've not covered the making of that record here.

Bishop thought that Aretha did the song even better than Reading, something Bishop hadn't thought possible.

When she got talking to Aretha after the show, she discovered that her contract with Columbia was up, and Aretha didn't really know what she was going to do.

Maybe she'd start her own label or something.

She hadn't been into the studio in more than a year, but she did have some songs she'd been working on.

Bishop was good friends with Jerry Wexler, and she knew that he was a big fan of her ethers, and had been saying for a while that when her contract was up, he'd like to sign her.

Bishop offered to make the connection, and then went back home and phoned Wexler's wife, waking her up.

It was one in the morning by this point, but Bishop was accustomed to phoning Wexler late at night when it was something important.

Wexler's wife then phoned him in Muscle Shoals, and he phoned Bishop back and made the arrangements to meet up.

Initially, Wexler wasn't thinking about producing Aretha himself.

This was still the period when he and the Ertigan brothers were thinking of selling Atlantic and getting out of the music business.

And so while he signed her to the label, he was originally going to hand her over to Jim Stewart at Stacks to record, as he had with Sam and Dave.

But in a baffling turn of events, Jim Stewart didn't actually want to record her, and so Wexler determined that he had better do it himself.

And he didn't want to do it with slick New York musicians.

He wanted to bring out the gospel sound in her voice, and he thought the best way to do that was with musicians from what Charles Hughes refers to as the Country Soul Triangle of Nashville, Memphis, and Muscle Shoals.

So he booked a week's worth of sessions at Fame Studios and got in Fame's regular rhythm section, plus a couple of musicians from American Recordings in Memphis, Chips Moman and Spoonam Oldham.

Oldham's friend and songwriting partner Dan Penn came along as well.

He wasn't officially part of the session, but he was a fan of Aretha's and wasn't going to miss this.

Penn had been the first person that Rick Hall, the owner of Fame, had called when Wexler had booked the studio, because Hall hadn't actually heard of Aretha Franklin up to that point, but didn't want to let Wexler know that.

Penn had assured him that Aretha was one of the all-time great talents, and that she just needed the right production to become massive.

As Hall put it in his autobiography, Dan tended in those days to hate anything he didn't write, so I figured if he felt that strongly about her, then she was probably going to be a big star.

Charlie Chalmers, a horn player who regularly played with these musicians, was tasked with putting together a horn section.

The first song they recorded that day was one that the musicians weren't impressed with at first.

I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You was written by a songwriter named Ronnie Shannon, who had driven from Georgia to Detroit, hoping to sell his songs to Motown.

He'd popped into a barber's shop where Ted White was having his hair cut to ask for directions to Motown, and White had signed him to his own publishing company and got him to write songs for Aretha.

On hearing the demo, the musicians thought that the song was mediocre and a bit shapeless.

But everyone there was agreed that Aretha herself was spectacular.

She didn't speak much to the musicians, just went to the piano and sat down and started playing.

And Jerry Wexler later compared her playing to Thelonius Munk,

who was indeed one of the jazz musicians who had influenced her.

While Spooner Oldham had been booked to play piano, it was quickly decided to switch him to electric piano and organ, leaving the acoustic piano for Aretha to play, and she would play piano on all the sessions Wexler produced for her in future.

Although while Wexler is the credited producer, and on this initial session Rick Hall of Fame is accredited co-producer, everyone involved, including Wexler, said that the musicians were taking their cues from Aretha rather than anyone else.

She would outline the arrangements at the piano, and everyone else would fit in with what she was doing, coming up with head arrangements directed by her.

But Wexler played a vital role in mediating between her and the musicians and engineering staff, all of whom he knew and she didn't.

As Rick Hall said, after her brief introduction by Wexler, she said very little to me or anyone else in the studio, other than Jerry or her husband, for the rest of the day.

I don't think Aretha and I ever made eye contact after our introduction, simply because we were both so totally focused on our music and consumed by what we were doing.

The musicians started working on I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You, and at first found it difficult to get the groove.

But then Aldham came up with an electric piano lick, which everyone involved thought of as the key that unlocked

You're no good,

heartbreaker.

You're a liar, and you're a cheat.

And I don't know why

I let you do these things to me.

My friends keep telling me

that you ain't good.

Oh, oh, but they don't know.

After that, they took a break.

Most of them were pleased with the track, though Rick Hall wasn't especially happy.

But then Rick Hall wasn't especially happy about anything at that point.

He'd always used mono for his recordings until then, but had been basically forced to install at least a two-track system by Tom Doward, Atlantic's chief engineer, and was resentful of this imposition.

During the break, Dan Penn went off to finish finish a song he and Spooner Oldham had been writing, which he hoped Aretha would record at the session.

If you wanna do

right

home

days

on

You gotta be

They had the basic structure of the song down, but hadn't quite finished the middle eight, and both Jerry Wexler and Aretha Franklin chipped in uncredited lyrical contributions.

Aretha's line was, As long as we're together, baby, you'd better show some respect to me.

Penn, Oldham, Chips Mowman, Roger Hawkins, and Tommy Cogbill started cutting a backing track for the song, with Penn's singing lead initially, with the idea that Aretha would overdub her vocal.

But while they were doing this, things had been going wrong with the other participants.

All the fame and American rhythm section players were white, as were Wexler Hall and Dowd.

And Wexler had been very aware of this, and of the fact that they were recording in Alabama, where Aretha and her husband might not feel totally safe.

So he'd specifically requested that the horn section at least contain some black musicians.

But Charlie Chalmers hadn't been able to get any of the black musicians he would normally call when putting together a horn section, and had ended up with an all-white horn section as well, including one player, a trumpet player called Ken Laxton, who had a reputation as a good player, but had never worked with any of the other musicians there.

He was an outsider in a group of people who regularly worked together and and had a pre-existing relationship.

As the two outsiders, Laxdon and Ted White had at first bonded, and indeed had started drinking vodka together, passing a bottle between themselves, in a way that Rick Hall would normally not allow in a session.

At the time, the county the studio was in was still a dry county.

But as Wexler said, a redneck patronizing a black man is a dangerous camaraderie, and White and Laxton soon had a major falling out.

Everyone involved tells a different story about what it was that caused them to start rowing, though it seems to have been to do with Laxton not showing the proper respect for Aretha, or even actually sexually assaulting her.

Dan Penn later said, I always heard he patted her on the butt or something, and what would have been wrong with that anyway, which says an awful lot about the attitudes of these white southern men, who thought of themselves as very progressive, and were for white southern men in early 1967.

Either way, White got very, very annoyed, and insisted that Laxton get fired from the session, which he was, but that still didn't satisfy White, and he stormed off to the motel, drunk and angry.

The rest of them finished cutting a basic track for Do Right Woman, but nobody was very happy with it.

Holdham said later, She liked the song, but hadn't had time to practise it or settle into it.

I remember there was Roger playing the drums, and Cogbill playing the bass, and I'm on these these little simplistic chords on organ, just holding chords so the song would be understood.

And that was sort of where it was left.

Dan had to sing the vocal, because she didn't know the song, in the wrong key for him.

That's what they left with.

Dan singing the wrong key vocal and this little simplistic organ and a bass and a drum.

We had a whole week to do everything, we had plenty of time, so there was no hurry to do anything in particular.

Pen was less optimistic, saying, But as I remember, I went home that night and I was so dejected.

I thought you ain't going to make any money on that, kid, because all it was was cockbill going boom-bum, and Spooner had his little organ holding there, and me screaming at the top of my voice.

It sounded pitiful.

Hall thought it was pitiful as well, and he was also not at all impressed with I Never Loved a Man.

He thought the session was a total loss, and he went back with Wexler to the motel room where Wexler was staying, in the same motel as White and Franklin were, and got very drunk.

And then he had one of those great ideas drunk people get.

He decided he was going to go and talk to Ted White and straighten everything out.

He was going to be the great diplomat and save the day.

Wexler begged him not to, but Hall knew better.

He went up and knocked on the door of the room where White and Franklin were staying, and White started complaining to him, saying he should have known better than to let his wife record with a bunch of rednecks.

After a couple of minutes of White using terms like redneck and whitey, Hall had had enough and said that if White called him a redneck once more, he would call White the N-word, except that Hall used the actual word in question.

The two started exchanging blows, and according to various of the Moll Yorid accounts, either tried to push each other off a fifth-floor balcony or even exchanged gunshots.

Most accounts of these altercations tend to blame White, Laxon and Hall about equally, and that's largely because White had a generally unpleasant reputation and was not easy to get along with.

In this particular instance, though, given that he'd first seen his wife sexually assaulted, and then been woken up by a drunk man who used racial slurs at him, I don't think he deserves much of the blame.

Hall then had a screaming row with Jerry Wexter, still on the fifth floor balcony, then went down to the hotel lobby and used a payphone to call White's room and scream more abuse at him, threatening him that he had better get out of town if he knew what was good for him.

Meanwhile, Aretha and Ted also had a row, which ended with her leaving the motel in the middle of the night and phoning Wexner in tears from a diner saying they had split up.

The walk would be for both of them.

They met in the airport the next day as they both decided to get out of town.

Aretha and Ted did eventually reconcile, though their marriage didn't last that much longer.

But Wexner and Hall would never work together again, and Aretha did another of her disappearing acts for a couple of weeks, with nobody able to find her.

Wexler had a single usable track from the session, I Never Loved a Man, and when he gave a couple of DJs acetate copies of that, he found it became a turntable hit, but he couldn't find a singer to record a B-side.

Eventually, Aretha turned up, and Wexler got her into the studio to finish Do Right Woman.

To the backing track cut at fame, Aretha added lead vocals and piano, and backing vocals by her sisters Irma and Carolyn, and their friend Cissy Houston, the aunt of Dion Warwick and mother of Whitney Houston.

There was a slight problem which Moman would later point out, saying, The only thing I found wrong, and I still find wrong.

Obviously, Rick Hall's machine and the machine in New York were travelling at a slightly different speed.

The piano is out of tune on that record, and it bothered me immensely.

The piano is sharp to the track.

If you listen to the piano, you hear it.

It's almost a quarter-tone sharp to the track.

But that didn't stop the B-side becoming a top 40 RB hit and one of the old-time country soul classics.

Show some respect for me

if you wanna do

The A-side, meanwhile, made the top ten on the pop chart and number one on the RB charts.

But Wexler had a problem.

He wanted a full album to go with the single, and he wanted the same musicians playing on it, with the exception, of course, of Ken Laxton.

But many of those musicians were employed more or less full-time by Rick Hall.

He knew that if Hall knew they were going to be working on an Aretha Franklin album without him, Hall would realise that he'd been cut off by Wexler and not let them go.

So instead, he invited them all up to New York to record an album by the great RB saxophone player King Curtis.

King Curtis plays Great Memphis hits.

A quick set of instrumental cover versions of records several of them had played on at Stacks or American for Atlantic, so it wouldn't arouse suspicion.

And then, once they were there in the studio, he casually suggested to them that, you know, while you're here, you might want to do some more tracks with Aretha as well.

This time there would be a more relaxed atmosphere and a more integrated group of people in the studio.

As well as the white musicians, Aretha's sisters and Cissy Houston were there, and King Curtis stayed around to add saxophone.

Hall found out what was happening after about three days and called the musicians back.

But in that time, they managed to cut most of what became a classic album, and Wexelwood, a couple of years later, helped some of the famed musicians start their own Muscle Schools studio in competition with Halls, giving them some of the start-up capital they needed.

The highlight of the album and second single was Respect,

the song that had so impressed Bishop when she'd heard Aretha perform it live.

You know I got it too.

All I'm asking you is for a little respect when you cut a little bit, babe, baby, just a little bit.

I ain't gonna do you wrong.

Why you gotta?

Aretha had been working on the song for a year at this point, honing it live, and had come up with several changes to the arrangement.

For a start, there were the backing vocals, where her sisters sang Re, Re, Re, Re, Respect.

Re was her family's nickname for Aretha, and several people have pointed out that this effectively makes Aretha herself the embodiment of the concept of respect.

But even in the studio, they would still make changes.

One was to introduce a key change for Curtis's saxophone saxophone solo and create a bridge to do that in.

According to Wexler, they took the bridge from When Something Is Wrong With My Baby by Sam and Dave.

We've been at one another

And that's what makes it better

when something is wrong

with my baby

and turn that into the solo.

Arif Mardin, who was assisting Wexler at the session, said later, We thought, how could we lift this song up?

Respect is in C, but that bridge, Curtis's saxophone solo, is in F sharp.

A totally unrelated key, but we liked it.

We liked those chords, so we put it in.

And then from the F sharp, Respect starts with a G chord, the five of the G.

I think he means the five of the C here.

So from the F sharp, we went to the G.

It sounded like a half-tone modulation, but it wasn't.

It was a very interesting solo construction, and we did it right there.

There was nothing haphazard on Aretha's part, but the way we came up with that strange key change, which led back naturally, it was done there on the spot.

Now, everyone involved with that session talks about that that change as something we did, without specifying whose idea it was.

But I have a strong suspicion it was Aretha's, and I think I know what inspired her.

Because that quote of Mardin's reminded me of something Paul Simon said in an interview about the change to the bridge in his much later song, Still Crazy After All These Years.

all these years

four in the morning, tapped up and yawning,

longing my life away.

I'll never worry,

why should

I?

In an interview from the 80s, Simon was asked about that key change, and replied, Yeah, I used to do that.

It was something I noticed in Antonio Jobeam's music.

In fact, I once mentioned that to him, and he said that he wasn't aware of it at all.

It was kind of an exercise that I did, which was to try and get every note from a twelve tone scale into the song.

So what would happen is that I would cover most of the notes in the song, and there would be maybe three notes that you couldn't get into the scale of the key of the song.

And those three notes were really the key to the bridge.

Usually it would be a tritone away from whatever key you were using.

If you were in the key of C, the farthest away you can go is F-sharp.

That's the key that's the least related to C.

Now, I would just think this was an interesting coincidence, except that a few days after reading that Mardin quote, while researching this episode, I found a quote by Luther van Dross talking about another song on the I Never Loved a Man album.

When I produced Aretha in the 80s, the first thing I told her was how much I loved Don't Let Me Lose This Dream.

It had this bottanovaish, silky groove that was pure heaven.

I asked her where the song came from.

She said she'd been listening to Astrude Gilberto, the girl who sang with Stangoetz, and she wanted to write something with the feel of Latin soul.

Now, Gilberto became famous for recording the songs of Joe Beam, the very same person that Paul Simon cited as doing this same kind of key change.

that we have in respect.

So while she never spoke about it, I would put money on it having been Aretha who came up with that key change, and on it having been inspired by Joe Beam.

Other changes were made to tie the song into Aretha's other songs.

She'd already added the line about respect to Do Right Woman, but on the tag she sang You're Running Out of Fools and I Ain't Lyin', referencing her last hit on Columbia of any size.

And in Doctor Feelgood, one of the songs she'd written herself for the album, she sang Taking care of business is really this man's game.

And so in the most famous edition to the song, she sang Take Care of T C B, T C B being a slang abbreviation for take care of business.

You're running out out of food.

We stop the breath.

We come home.

Another bit of slang was that backing vocal phrase, sock it to me, which Aretha's sister Carolyn had heard someone say and had decided would make a good background line.

Respect popularized the phrase, and it soon became a national catchphrase, becoming a running gag on the comedy show Rowan and Martin's Laughing, to the extent that even Richard Nixon joined in with it in a desperate attempt to seem down with the kids prior to his election as president.

Oh,

hello, Governor Rockefeller.

Oh, no, I don't think we could get Mr.

Nixon to stand still for a socket to me.

Socket to me?

Several people have, rather fancifully in my opinion, credited that appearance with Nixon winning the election two months later, and it wouldn't have happened without respect.

When he heard Aretha's version of Respect, Otis Redding jokingly asked Jerry Wexler to burn the tape, before saying, it's her song now.

But in becoming Aretha's song, it became everyone's song.

He went to number one on the pop charts, and this song, which had originally been a rather macho piece, a man demanding respect from his wife, became an anthem of both black civil rights and the burgeoning feminist movement.

This song, recorded in the aftermath of racial violence and drunken machismo, became a rallying cry for black people wanting civil rights, for women wanting to be treated as human beings, and for queer people wanting to be free from oppression.

And while I haven't talked much about queerness compared to those other aspects here, it is important to note for context that the two biggest musical influences on Aretha's life, Clara Ward and James Cleveland, were both queer.

Cleveland was gay and Ward was bay

and that Carolyn Franklin, who helped Aretha arrange the song, was lesbian.

Aretha's music was profoundly shaped by those queer influences, just as it was shaped by her being a black woman.

1967 was the start of Aretha's reign as the Queen of Soul, a title she took on at a ceremony towards the end of the year.

But it was also the start of a dramatic turn in black politics as it related to culture.

The day before respect hit the charts, Mohammed Ali had his heavyweight title taken from him after refusing to be drafted into the Vietnam War, saying No Viet Cong ever called me and then using that same slur that Rick Hall used to Ted White.

Marginalized people of all kinds were starting to demand the respect they were owed, and which was long overdue, and to do so without the ambiguity and euphemisms they had previously used to make themselves acceptable in the eyes of respectable moderates.

And we will see how that plays out in Soul and RB

as we look at the rest of the 60s and early 70s.

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