The New Yorker is much better on the arts than on the sciences; one example is David Remnick’s article on Aretha Franklin, “Soul Survivor,” which appeared in the April 4 issue. It’s largely about the Queen’s gospel roots, but one of its best features is simply calling attention to some of Aretha’s great performances. Here are two, with Remnick’s descriptions driving me to YouTube in April. (This post has been gestating for few months.)
This is one thing we can do now that we couldn’t before the Internet: stop reading and simply look up the phenomenon under discussion. Some day, perhaps, e-books will have this stuff embedded in them. It’s particularly good when you’re reading about music, comme ça:
By 1971, Franklin was at her peak, with a string of hits and Grammys, but she was also preparing for a return to gospel. In March, she played the Fillmore West, in San Francisco, the ultimate hippie venue. The film of that date is on YouTube, and you can hear her singing her hits, fronting King Curtis’s astonishing band, the Kingpins. She wins over a crowd more accustomed to the Mixolydian jams of the Grateful Dead. And her surprise duet with Ray Charles on “Spirit in the Dark” is far from the highlight.
A few songs into the set, Franklin plays on a Fender Rhodes the opening chords of Paul Simon’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” weaving hypnotic gospel phrases between her backup singers (“Still waters run deep . . .”) and the B-3 organ lines of Billy Preston, a huge figure in gospel but recognized by the white audience as the “fifth Beatle,” for his playing on the “Let It Be” album. Just as Otis Redding quit singing “Respect” after hearing Aretha’s version (“From now on, it belongs to her”), Simon and Art Garfunkel forever had to compete with the memory of this performance. Simon, who wrote the song a year before, was inspired by a gospel song, Claude Jeter and the Swan Silvertones’ version of “Mary, Don’t You Weep.” Jeter included an improvised line—“I’ll be your bridge over deep water if you trust in my name”—and Simon was so clearly taken with it that he eventually gave Jeter a check. Daphne Brooks, who teaches African-American studies at Yale, aptly describes the Fillmore West performance as a “bridge” to the “Amazing Grace” concerts that were just a few months away.
And the second, from a concert on January 14, 1972, at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles:
Franklin enlisted her Detroit mentor, the Reverend James Cleveland, to sing and play piano, and the pastor Alexander Hamilton to conduct the Southern California Community Choir. The gospel concert in Los Angeles opens with “Mary, Don’t You Weep,” a spiritual based on Biblical narratives of liberation and resurrection, and recorded, in 1915, by the Fisk Jubilee Singers. It is possibly the most wrenching music on the album. Countless performers have recorded the song—the Soul Stirrers, Inez Andrews, Burl Ives, James Brown, Bruce Springsteen—but Franklin, who was never in better voice, seems possessed by it. She delivers a pulsing, haunted version, taking flights of lyrical improvisation, note after note soaring over single syllables. In her reading, the blues always resides in gospel, and somehow this is her version of grace.
sock it to me, sock it to me
Weird thing was that Respect was originally about a male musician on the road who knew that his wife had a man on the side. The song is a meek request that his wife show him the simple respect of hiding her lover’s stuff so that he can maintain the necessary illusion of a viable relationship before he goes on the road again.
Aretha changed the key and beat to make it what we know today.
Interesting when looking at the lyrics, the word “propers” is mentioned, which I guess is an early form of “props” that’s often used today.
The post-war gospel sound has had an incredible impact on popular music, and is powerful and majestic in it’s own right. Chess records has a wonderful compilation called “None But The Righteous: Chess Gospel Greats”. On that set you can hear not only a 14 year old Aretha Franklin singing gospel before she embarked on her career in popular music, but also her father, Rev. C.L. Franklin.
Here is a very young Aretha:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-KnUhVoJRI
And here’s her Dad:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkcZmRfvpJk
I think it would have been harder to leave the church if I grew up with music like this as part of Sunday services!
Thanks for those! I had never heard of her father–what a sweet heritage. It’s impossible to believe she was only 14 in that first recording!
I’ve long said that Sister Aretha was training to scale the peaks of gospel’s K2 where Mahalia Jackson reigned when the Sherpas at Muscle Shoals delivered her gear instead to the base camp of Rock ‘n’ Roll Everest, whence she sailed past the crevasses and seracs and icefalls to become the undisputed Queen of Rock & Soul.
That’s pretty damn impressive.
Re “Bridge”–I loved it except for the very end. Too abrupt. But maybe I felt that way because of my feelings for S & G’s rendition.
I don’t know if it would suit your tastes but for a different take on Bridge have a listen to this new cover by Disturbed.
Disturbed is a heavy metal band but while their cover of Bridge does build to an intensity beyond, for example, the S & G version it is not typical of their normal sound and it is not heavy metal. I rather like it. Emotional intensity is generally a plus for me in music.
Pretty cool. Even the whores on Seventh Avenue couldn’t beef about that cover of S&G.
Kinda reminds me, in its own fashion, of Johnny Cash’s cover of Nine Inch Nails’ Hurt.
Yeah, it does have a similar feel to Johnny Cash’s cover of Hurt.
Thanks for the links. Both performances were simply outstanding.
Franklin was arguably the finest female voice of her generation. Power, nuance, phrasing and a deep blues and gospel emotion defined her singing.
Much of her excellent earlier work on Columbia is lesser known. One of my all time favorites is her version of the Dionne Warwick signature song “Walk On By”.
Franklin’s phrasing of this song is awesome and IMHO is far superior to Warwick:
Thanks for the links. Both performances were simply outstanding.
Franklin was arguably the finest female voice of her generation. Power, nuance, phrasing and a deep blues and gospel emotion defined her singing.
Much of her excellent earlier work on Columbia is lesser known. One of my all time favorites is her version of the Dionne Warwick signature song “Walk On By”.
Franklin’s phrasing of this song is awesome and IMHO is far superior to Warwick:
The New Yorker’s overrated fact-checking department screws up yet again: Otis Reddind did NOT quit singing “Respect” after hearing Aretha’s version. He continued singing it right up to the day before he died. You can see the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9dBHWTejiU
Otis also sang “Respect” during his 1967 European tour (as heard on the amazing album “Live in Europe”) and in his epochal appearance at the Monterey Pop Festival.
Aretha’s version is great, but it’s been played so often that I prefer Otis’s original.