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Aretha Franklin: Soul '69 |
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Rhythm Blues & Soul
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Friday, 27 January 2006 07:10 |
Aretha Franklin
Soul 69
Atlantic / Men With Hats Records LP
By John Sinclair
There have been very, very few singers in the history of American popular music who hit with the power and impact of Ms. Aretha Franklin. Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Betty Carter: Each achieved an unprecedented level of artistry and personal expression through song and enjoyed the adoration of their legions of followers. But Ms. Ree, the undisputed Queen of Soul from the Motor City, blasted her music straight to the top of the pop charts and ruled the nation's airwaves in the mid-1960s with the unmistakable sound of her voice and her incredibly emotive delivery.
Aretha's series of masterful hit singles for Atlantic Records I Never Loved a Man, Do Right Woman, R-E-S-P-E-C-T, Chain of Fools, and a half dozen more won her millions of devoted fans and a central place in the pantheon of modern soul singers. Brilliantly produced by Atlantic's Jerry Wexler, these recordings brought Ms. Franklin's every budding musical gift to perfect fruition and established Sister Ree as the force to be reckoned with in the field of American popular song.
Aretha Franklin was in no way an overnight success, and her road to the top was a long and relatively rocky climb from its roots in her father's Hastings Street church on the near east side of Detroit. The Reverend C.L. Franklin was an exceptionally dynamic preacher of the Gospel whose message reached far beyond the confines of his pulpit when his sermons were recorded by local record man Joe Von Battle in the early 1950s and released to a national audience by Chess Records in Chicago. Rev. Franklin's 78 rpm Chess singles like The Eagle Stirreth His Nest were enormously popular with the black record-buying public, and his influence soon spread from the Motor City all across the country.
Aretha grew up singing with the New Bethel Church choir and was recognized as an outstanding soloist while still a small child. Her first recordings, a stirring set of soulful gospel performances, were made in 1954 and also released by Chess, and she toured the country with her father for the rest of the 50s, appearing in countless churches and auditoria from coast to coast as a teenage gospel singing sensation.
Outside of church, however, Aretha proved to be somewhat of a wild teenaged girl and mothered a pair of children before she was 18. She began to feel constricted by the insularity of the gospel music community and longed to follow Sam Cooke and other former gospel stars into the potentially lucrative world of popular music. Finally, at the turn of the 60s, and with her father's reluctant blessing, Aretha landed a contract with John Hammond at Columbia Records to record as a pop artist and jazz singer.
Columbia showcased Aretha in a series of elaborate pop productions which set her versatile voice against the sound of large, glossily arranged orchestras and won her a place on the abbreviated list of emerging jazz vocalists. Although these releases met with moderate success in the marketplace, the company sadly failed to fully recognize much less realize the vast musical and commercial potential Ms. Franklin represented.
Aretha labored at Columbia until the mid- 60s, increasingly dissatisfied with her musical direction and lack of popular impact, until Jerry Wexler reached out to bring her into the Atlantic Records fold and carefully crafted a new approach designed to make the most of every one of the singer's latent strengths. First he stripped away the pop-jazz veneer Columbia's production staff had been so intent on applying to her soulful delivery and cut all the way back to her roots in the gospel music of her father's Detroit church. Then he built her a new sound from the ground up, using the simplest of rhythmic configurations guitar, bass, drums and Aretha's own piano to adorn the singer's powerful voice.
Then he took Aretha way down south to Muscle Shoals, Alabama, to make her first Atlantic recordings in the company of Fame Studios deep-fried rhythm team, a bunch of hard-backed white boys whose rough stance and extra-musical attitude seem to have spooked Aretha and her husband/manager Ted White to the extent that they bolted the sessions after only one song had been cut and headed back North.. But the one tune Aretha's own composition, I Never Loved a Man (The Way That I Love You), with the singer accompanying herself on piano provided ammunition enough for Wexler to work with, and he went back to Atlantic's New York City headquarters with an acetate of the song that he had pressed up into a batch of promo copies for distribution to several key R&B deejays. Their immediate and wildly enthusiastic response brought Ms. Franklin back into the studio to cut a B side for her first Atlantic Records single, and her time of triumph had truly begun.
Aretha's star began to rise against the soul music firmament studded with such stellar performers as James Brown, Jackie Wilson, Solomon Burke, Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding and a host of other African-American singers who had smashed their way into the pop music charts to dominate the American radio airwaves. Her fellow Detroiters at the burgeoning Motown Records empire Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Smokey Robinson & the Miracles, the Temptations, the Four Tops, the Supremes, the Spinners, Martha & the Vandellas were also riding high in the nation's musical consciousness, and soul music had established itself as the eloquent voice of the current generation. But Aretha's magnificent voice and exuberant, high-spirited delivery took the music to a new level where the nascent Queen of Soul would reign supreme.
Propelled by crack studio ensembles from New York City and the South and supported by a sympathic set of hard-punching back-up singers, Aretha set a torrid pace as each of her next several Atlantic singles charged to the top of the pop charts. She and Wexler meshed into a mighty force of nature, delivering terrific songs with immense vocal power, irresistible rhythmic impact and impeccable arrangements. Beyond her musical import, Ms. Franklin gave unmistakable voice to the universal sentiment of the nation's citizens of African descent when she released her supercharged recording of R-E-S-P-E-C-T, a compelling demand which could be heard by any American within ten feet of a radio.
Aretha ruled the charts all through 1967 and 1968, establishing herself in the hearts and minds of millions of Americans of every persuasion as the quintessential interpreter of African-American song. She toured America to great acclaim and in the summer of 1968 made her first trip to Europe, where she recorded a live album, Aretha In Paris. Before she left she cut the singles I Say a Little Prayer and The House That Jack Built with the Muscle Shoals rhythm section, and at the same time began work on what she and Jerry Wexler called the jazz album the one that would be released the following January as Soul 69.
By this time Ms. Franklin was so firmly established as the chart-topping Queen of Soul that she and Wexler felt confident in taking the singer back to her jazz roots and making an album that would enable her cash in on the substantial musical investment she d made with her series of Columbia albums. These LPs had garnered approval from the jazz critics but never managed to rack up the kind of sales Aretha's Atlantic singles enjoyed in the pop marketplace, and Wexler was now determined to show off his star's considerable skills as a gospel-jazz stylist her hard-won pop audience.
For these initial Soul 69 sessions in April 1958, Wexler brought the Muscle Shoals rhythm section Spooner Oldham (organ), Jimmy Johnson (guitar), Jerry Jemmott (bass), Tommy Cogbill (electric bass) and Roger Hawkins (drums) to Atlantic's studios in New York City and added three percussionists to the mix. Abetted by Aretha's soulful piano, they recorded Smokey Robinson's Tracks of My Tears and one of Ms. Franklin's long-time favorites, Today I Sing the Blues, a Helen Humes number from 1948 which had been the singer's first Columbia single back in 1960.
After Aretha returned from Europe, she and Wexler returned to the Atlantic studios for a five-day session to complete the album Wexler thought of as Aretha's Jazz Album. With engineer Tom Dowd as co-producer and the slick, skillful arrangements of Arif Mardin, Wexler fashioned a program of jazz-drenched pop tunes and R&B standards that showcased Ms. Franklin's trademark gospel-jazz style and musically sophisticated delivery to exceptional effect.
The band assembled for these dates was first-class in every respect. The rhythm section comprised pianist Junior Mance, guitarist Kenny Burrell, bassist Ron Carter, and drummers Bruno Carr and Grady Tate, aided by Latin percussion and backing singers on the pop chestnuts Crazy He Calls Me, Elusive Butterfly and John Hartford's Gentle on My Mind. The horn ensemble interpreting Mardin's charts included top New York players on every instrument: saxophonists Frank Wess, George Dorsey, David Fathead Newman, King Curtis, Seldon Powell and Pepper Adams; Joe Newman, Ernie Royal, Richard Williams, Bernie Glow and Snookie Young on trumpets; and trombonists Jimmy Cleveland, Benny Powell, Urbie Greene and Thomas Mitchell.
The inspired repertoire included a set of four R&B classics arranged for Aretha and jazz orchestra, including a pair of songs associated with Big Maybelle ( Ramblin and Pitiful ), Percy Mayfield's exquisite River's Invitation, and Bring It on Home to Me, a masterpiece by Sam Cooke, who was one of Ms. Franklin's central influences and a dear friend from back in her gospel music days. Also receiving the full Arif Mardin treatment were the venerable pop chestnuts If You Gotta Make a Fool of Somebody, I ll Never Be Free and the Russ Morgan theme So Long.
Punctuated by the expressive trumpet of Joe Newman and the telling tenor solos of King Curtis ( Pitiful ) and David Fathead Newman (all others), and beautifully borne on the flying carpet of sound laid down by the large ensemble, Aretha's performance throughout is a tour-de-force of soul and intelligent presentation. Her voice soars to its accustomed heights and drops down into a sea of pure feeling, delineating the disparate material with supreme grace and power and illuminating Mardin's masterful jazz arrangements with all the unleashed force of her distinctive personality.
One listen to this remarkable album is enough to place it irrefutably in the pantheon of Ms. Franklin's finest work. But one listen will never be enough, and you are bound to return to this musical program again and again to marvel at the consummate artistry of Aretha Franklin. She would go on from here to notch additional soul hits for Atlantic, cut powerhouse albums like Live at the Fillmore West and her intense gospel collaboration with the Rev. James Cleveland and his choir, and contribute an entire lifetime's worth of unforgettably great recordings. But Soul 69, Aretha's jazz album for Jerry Wexler, will stand out forever as a high point in her long and incredibly fruitful career.
New Orleans, March 7, 2002/
Los Angeles, March 18, 2002
Note: David Nathan's liner notes for the Rhino/Atlantic CD reissue of Soul 69 were a valuable source of information for these notes.
(c) 2002, 2006 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.
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