Aretha Franklin - A Deeper Love

© -  The Economist, August 25, 2018, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“AT POINTS in her concerts, which enthralled America for 50 years, Aretha Franklin would fling her arms out wide. Sometimes it was to shrug her strong shoulders out of some satiny or feathery dress, or to throw away her long fur coat, like any diva (though she was the ultimate diva) who by the end of her career had won 18 Grammys and sold 75m records. Sometimes it was to embrace America, all colours, as when she sang “Precious Lord” at Martin Luther King’s funeral, or gave her rapturous version of “My Country ’tis of Thee” in a big-bow-statement hat at Barack Obama’s inauguration. Or possibly those arms just demonstrated how her voice, the whispering or crying height of it and drop-jaw depth of it, seemed to pass any limit that people might imagine.

Open arms suggested love, but more often Everywoman’s frustration, black or white. For every super-sharp man she daydreamed of, Turns me right on when I hear him say/Hey baby let’s get away, there would be ten who let her down: You’re a 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. They messed with her mind, as she fumed in the Blues Brothers film in 1980, pummelling her palms into her big man’s stupid chest: Just think/Think about what you’re tryin’ to do to me. After all, it don’t take too much high IQs. Men in general didn’t begin to give her what she wanted, just a little respect when you get home…R-E-S-P-E-C-T/Find out what it means to me. This, her most famous song, wasn’t just about a put-down woman and a do-wrong man; it became the anthem of every liberation movement because of her roof-raising style. It was her personal anthem, too. She wished to be called “Ms Franklin”, to be paid cash and to be spared air-conditioning. All I’m askin’, honey.

Those wide arms also showed how her whole body sang. When she accompanied herself on the piano, big rampaging chords picked up from Oscar Peterson and Art Tatum, she sang with the stomach as well as heart and head. As a child of ten she’d understood that, hiding her chronic shyness behind the instrument while she sang “Jesus be a Fence Around Me” with the voice of an angel, or a grown woman. That was the age she decided to be a singer, when she saw the great gospeller Clara Ward cast away her hat as she performed in church. One gesture settled it; she would do the same. Some said her father, the nationally famous pastor of New Bethel Baptist Church in Detroit, forced her into it, but it wasn’t so. The musical world of the time, Smokey Robinson, Mahalia Jackson, Lionel Hampton, Marvin Gaye, blues and jazz as well as gospel, passed through their house. Music opened her out, drew her into some other place, and it was she, not her father, who went off to New York to seek record contracts and who told would-be producers, frankly, “I want hits.”

Covering the bruises

For a while she sang almost anything, but that didn’t work. She had to bear witness to what she had been through, including her mother leaving home when she was six, having babies by two different men before she was 15, and at 19 marrying a slick pimp from Detroit, later her manager, who beat her up. Pain and fame grew together. The golden decade of hits, fostered by her move to Atlantic Records and Jerry Wexler in 1967, graced by her face on the cover of Time, was miserable at home. But soul music, as it always had, let her turn both suffering and sexual yearning into one freedom cry. Between sacred and secular she moved to and fro without effort. Her biggest-selling album, “Amazing Grace” (1972) was recorded at a church service 14 years after her first album, “Songs of Faith”, when her father was her manager. On that record, her young voice scraped on the high notes. In the interim her rough life had taught her smooth soaring.

She was proud to be “The Queen of Soul”. Rivals to her crown were tartly taken down. Once she had sung a song she owned it, and that was that. Yet the last thing she wanted, offstage, was stardom. Young Aretha hid behind drinking and smoking; mature Aretha retreated to her kitchen to find comfort in banana pudding, wrapping her ballooning body in ever more satiny and sparkly gowns. She did crochet, and refused to fly. I’ve been in the storm too long. All she thought and felt was on display on stage. No one needed to climb the wall she’d built around herself.

Someone, though, could see through that wall. He knew the things about her others only kept guessing at, such as the multiple causes of her sadness. He saw the bruises she covered up. When she teased journalists that she didn’t understand when they said her songs were raunchy, she wasn’t lying. The delivery might sound sexy, but they weren’t about a man. In her music she slipped into the zone, just as she had when she began at New Bethel Baptist, wobbling on her little chair. When she sang You make me feel like/A natural woman, head arched proudly back, one hand patting her hair, she was singing to God, just as when she screamed out her passion as a sinner cleansed by the blood of the Lamb: When my soul was in the lost and found/You came along to claim it. And when she threw out her arms wide under the spotlights, it was not to thank the fans who clamoured for her as much as to say, Precious Lord, take my hand.”