Aretha Franklin: a life of heartbreak, heroism and hope
The queen of soul’s fraught personal life informed songs that will endure in the hearts of people all over the worldSean O'Hagan
Sunday 19 August 2018
I
n January 1967, Aretha Franklin, 24 years old and newly signed to Atlantic Records, left Detroit, her home city, for the small town of Muscle Shoals in Alabama. She had gone there to record at the remote Fame Studio at her producer Jerry Wexler’s insistence. “These cats are really greasy,” he told her. “You’re going to love it.”
She found, perhaps to her surprise that the “greasy cats” in question, the same musicians who had played on hits by Percy Sledge (When a Man Loves a Woman) and Wilson Pickett (Mustang Sally), were in fact, white. Initially, her shyness was matched by their reticence. Then she sat down at the piano as if lost in thought, and as songwriter Dan Penn later recalled, played “this unknown chord” that commanded everyone’s attention.
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The song they recorded was I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You), written for her by Ronnie Shannon. Wexler’s musical and commercial instincts had proved unerringly correct. At Muscle Shoals, everything came together: the effortless intensity of her gospel-soul voice, her singular piano-playing, which moved from the devotional to the stirring, and her ability to so inhabit someone else’s song that it became entirely her own.
Franklin, though, brought her own troubles with her to Alabama. The session ended abruptly when her inebriated husband, Ted White, came to blows with one of the horn players over accusations that the musician was behaving inappropriately towards the singer. Following an all-night row in their motel room, White and Franklin left separately for Detroit in the morning, leaving behind a bunch of bemused musicians and an unfinished song, written by Penn and his friend, Spooner Oldham .
That song, Do Right Woman, Do Right Man, is a soul ballad that includes the verse: “They say that’s it’s a man’s world/But you can’t prove that by me/So as long as we’re together baby/You better show some respect for me.” It could have been written for Aretha with Ted White in mind, except the defiant note of the song did not reflect the reality of their relationship.
Franklin’s fraught personal life was instinctively understood by the select few she allowed into her circle, particularly the female soul singers with whom she bonded. “There was always an unspoken understanding between us,” Etta James later confessed, “...we’d be drawn to men, the wrong men, who weren’t in love with us, but were in love with who we were.”
In Franklin’s case, the pain and heartbreak were transmuted into song, sometimes expressed with an almost casual, but paradoxically powerful, delivery that belied the traumas of her life. The cost, though, was often high, and her life was punctuated by mysterious illnesses and bouts of severe depression.
A few weeks after the Muscle Shoals incident, the southern musicians travelled at Franklin’s insistence to New York, to continue recording. Do Right Woman, Do Right Man was released as the B-side of I Never Loved A Man, which became Franklin’s first million-selling single. There followed an even more audacious cover of an already dynamic Otis Redding song, Respect, which she transformed into a demand for gender and racial equality that has now become a feminist anthem.
Respect was released in April 1967. In July, her hometown, Detroit, was the scene of a volcanic race riot that left whole neighbourhoods in flames and 43 people dead. That summer, the song sounded like a shout of hope and optimism in the face of an increasingly riven America, but it was also defiant enough to become a black power anthem.
Although she was never as explicitly or as angrily political as, say, Nina Simone, Franklin was steeped in the civil rights struggle. Having toured, aged 16, as a gospel singer with Martin Luther King, she spent at least one night in jail after a protest. She would later sing from the depths of her soul at his funeral service in 1968, distilling the pain and bewilderment of her people.
More controversially, in 1971 she publicly offered to pay bail for the black power figurehead and Communist party member Angela Davis, who had been charged with conspiracy, kidnapping and murder for her alleged role in a courtroom escape that had turned into a shootout with the police. “Angela Davis must go free,” Aretha said. “I know you got to disturb the peace when you can’t get no peace.”
In all of this, Franklin expressed her own personal struggles as well as the simmering discontent of an America in which race was – and remains – a fault line. Fifty years after she reluctantly travelled down to Alabama, the ideology of white supremacy is once again being openly expressed in parts of the American south not that distant from the studio where she recorded her first great soul song, surrounded by white musicians awed and inspired by her talent.
When people say she was the voice of America, there is an obvious truth in that, given the integrated context in which those early soul songs were created and the singular journey they precipitated. She went on, after all, to sing for presidents, her voice distilling the aspirations and hopes of the Obama era in particular, and by extension of a nation that finally seemed to be coming to terms with the legacy of slavery and segregation.
All that has happened since, though, only confirms that Franklin was even more emphatically the voice of black America, the stoicism of the blues, the emotionalism of soul, the expressiveness of jazz and, above all, the joyous spirituality of gospel, all apparent in her greatest songs. She is gone, but those songs will endure, articulating still-ongoing tribulations, injustices and discontents.
They are, above all, expressions of the black American experience, however much they touch the rest of us. Remember her then as a singer whose songs transcended politics, colour and creed, but also as someone who knew from experience that “you got to disturb the peace when you can’t get no peace”.
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