The Death of Rhythm & Blues by Nelson George

Author:Nelson George
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group

THE QUEEN

Yet the one voice that spoke most directly to the aroused black psyche of the 1960s, though apolitical and preoccupied with struggles of the heart, was a woman’s. If anyone wondered what “soul” was, all they had to do was play any of Aretha Franklin’s Atlantic albums.

From 1967, when she joined Atlantic after six frustrating years at Columbia—when she recorded pop standards and traditional blues that didn’t highlight her fiery gospel style—until about 1971, Aretha Franklin was not just indisputedly the best singer in the R&B-soul world but the focus for, to use a sixties cliché, the positive spiritual energy of her listeners. As daughter of Detroit’s flamboyant and strong-voiced Reverend C. L. Franklin, Aretha was an heir to a legacy of redemption through music. At the same time, her widely publicized marital problems—Time made them an essential part of a June 1968 cover story—and her unmistakable voice made her the epitome of soul music, just as Ray Charles had been a decade before. Ah, that voice. One of the more cogent passages from the Time piece describes Franklin’s approach as a “direct natural style of delivery that ranges over a full four octaves, and the breath control to spin out long phrases that curl sensuously around the beat and dangle tantalizingly from blue notes. But what really accounts for her impact goes beyond technique: it is her fierce, gritty conviction.”

Jerry Wexler, in the wisest move of his long career, recorded Franklin at Fame Studio, in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and at Criteria Studio in Miami, with Southern session men—white and black—who gave her voice the kind of complementary musical backing that had eluded her at Columbia. The songs were written by Aretha, or specifically written for her and chosen by her, with the rhythm arrangements usually built around her gospel-style piano. In a time when popular black, and then white, slang (“Do your thing!” “Sock it to me!”) were admonitions to be loose, uninhibited, and natural, few things communicated these values better than Franklin’s vocals. Despite singing love songs, many of them quite melancholy, Franklin’s voice communicated so wide a range of emotion as to truly defy description.

“Intangible” is a word that music critics overuse daily, but listen to Franklin on “Dr. Feelgood” or “Ain’t No Way” or “Say A Little Prayer” or “Think.” One discovers not one Aretha Franklin but a cast of hundreds of women: some sweet, some mad, some cool, some sad, some angry, and a great many playful and sexy. Franklin expressed all a black woman could be, while her contemporaries (Diana Ross, Tina Turner, Dionne Warwick, Martha Reeves, even the underrated Gladys Knight) seemed trapped in one persona by the artistic decisions of male producers as well as by their own vocal limitations. Given her talent and the tenor of the times, it wasn’t surprising that Franklin became a prime example of “natural crossover.” Compared to Motown, Franklin’s music made few concessions to “white” sensibilities. She and Atlantic found that white America was, at

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