Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin

by David Ritz

  And yet the myth of Barbara Siggers’s desertion continued. As recently as 2012, Anthony Heilbut, a prominent scholar of gospel music, wrote in his otherwise brilliant The Fan Who Knew Too Much, “Barbara left home when Aretha was ten and died a few years later without seeing her children again.” In fact, Aretha was six when her mother moved back to Buffalo in 1948, and, according to all four of the Franklin siblings I interviewed, they visited her on a regular basis.

  “My father was a different kind of man,” Aretha’s big brother Cecil Franklin told me when we spoke in the mid-1980s. “His loyalty was essentially to God, his children, and his congregation. He was never going to be a one-woman man. In contrast, Mother was certainly a one-man woman. She was totally devoted to him and did not like sharing him with the world. During those visits to Buffalo, I know she wanted us to permanently move in with her, but that wasn’t going to happen. Not only were we a handful, but she didn’t have the funds to raise five children. Dad did. All sorts of women from church were more than willing to look after us—plus we had Big Mama, who ran our household with an iron fist. It was highly unconventional in those days for a father to assume custody of his children after a marital breakup, but C. L. Franklin was a highly unconventional man.”

  “Looking back at the whole situation,” said Carolyn Franklin, Aretha’s baby sister, “I think Mother’s move impacted Aretha more than anyone. At the time I was barely four and less conscious of what was happening. Aretha was a severely shy and withdrawn child who was especially close to her mother. Erma, Cecil, and I were much more daring and independent. Aretha and I shared a room, and after Mother left I saw her cry her eyes out for days at a time. I remember comforting her, my big sister, by telling her how much fun it would be to visit Buffalo. Days before those trips to see Mother, Aretha would have her little bag packed and be ready to go. The highlight of the visits would be the toy nurse’s kit Mother gave us.”

  Aretha had specific memories about modeling herself after a nurse’s aide like her mother. She spoke about how her mom instructed her to care for patients and how she joyfully went to Buffalo General Hospital to watch her mother work. She remembered her mother as a faultlessly patient woman who neither scolded nor said a bad word about anyone, including the Reverend C. L. Franklin. In short, she saw her mother as a saint.

  Her memories were also specific when it came to her mother’s house in Buffalo on Lythe Street in a tree-lined neighborhood called Cold Springs. She recounted the furnishings: the blue-and-silver velvet chairs, the fancy couches, the upright piano. She and her mom sang together. Those were the times Aretha cherished most. Because the house was small, she and Erma slept next door at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Dan Pitman. Mrs. Pitman taught Aretha to crochet, a skill she cultivated throughout her life.

  “During those trips to Buffalo,” Erma remembered, “we were introduced to a gentleman, Trustee Young. I presumed he was Mother’s boyfriend. We loved riding in his big car. Sometimes he’d take us to Niagara Falls.”

  “As much as Aretha adored our father,” said Cecil, “she would have been thrilled to live with Mother. If she hadn’t been so wary of displeasing our dad, I’m sure she would have asked him. But that question would never be posed. Dad made it clear that wasn’t an option. So every time we had to leave Buffalo and return to Detroit, it broke Aretha’s little heart. Dad did everything in his power to make Ree feel secure, but I know insecurity invaded her spirit at an early age. For all that she has achieved in her life, I think that basic insecurity has never left her. In fact, I believe it defines her—that and her soaring talent.”

  “Onstage and in the studio no one is more confident,” Carolyn told me, “but offstage it’s been a different story. She’s changed a lot over the years, but if she acts extremely assertive now, I believe it’s to overcompensate for her doubts. It sounds crazy that someone as gifted as my sister Aretha would harbor doubts, but she does. That came as a direct result of a challenging childhood.”

  The Aretha I began working with seemed anything but insecure. That’s why I was surprised to reread the interviews I’d done with her siblings a decade earlier. Because Erma, Cecil, and Carolyn were all in agreement, I had no reason to doubt them. Aretha had been an insecure little girl.

  Ruth Bowen, her booking agent, helped me understand.

  “I’ve known Aretha ever since she was a little girl,” she told me. “I met her through her daddy, whom I called Frank. Frank was great friends with Dinah Washington, my first major client. Dinah was not only her father’s girlfriend for a minute, at one point she was also Ted White’s girlfriend, the man who became Aretha’s first husband. Ted and I were close. But don’t let me get ahead of myself, honey. Let me tell you about the kind of child Aretha was. She was a traumatized child—that’s who she was. It’s one thing to have your mama move out of the house for reasons you don’t understand. But it’s another to have your mama die of a heart attack as a young woman. Aretha was ten when that happened. And it happened just like that—no preparation, no warning. Frank told me that he was afraid that Aretha wouldn’t ever recover, that she was unable to talk for weeks. She crawled into a shell and didn’t come out until many years later. What brought her, of course, was the music. Without the music I’m not sure Aretha would have ever found her way out of the shell.”

  In From These Roots Aretha devotes less than a page to the death of her mother. She simply recounts that her father called the four children into the kitchen and said that Barbara had died of a heart attack. She assures the reader that her father could not have been more understanding. In her account, there is no attempt to process the pain because, according to Aretha, pain is a most private concern.

  2. INSTABILITY

  The Franklins moved to Detroit in 1946, three years after the race riots that tore the city apart. “Hate strikes”—whites refusing to work alongside blacks in the auto industry—led to mounting tensions that exploded into full-scale rioting over two days and left thirty-five dead. Aretha remembered next-door neighbors Richard Ross and his family discussing the disturbances in dramatic detail.

  “My brother Vaughn used to talk about the discrimination he had encountered in Buffalo,” said Cecil, “but until Detroit we hadn’t experienced any real racial animus. Detroit turned out to be a hotbed of political, social, and racial unrest. The stories we heard about the riots centered on the violent anger whites were feeling for blacks who’d moved from the South looking for work—looking, in the view of many whites, for their work. When I went to college at Morehouse, I did a paper on the riots that helped me understand what, at age six, I couldn’t begin to grasp.

  “Just before the riots, Packard had put a few black workers next to white men on the assembly line. Right after that, twenty-five thousand whites walked off the job. Remember, this was the middle of World War Two, when no patriotic American wanted to slow down production. Anyway, one of the protesters got on the PA system and screamed, ‘I’d rather have Hitler win the war than work next to a nigger!’

  “There was also the housing mess. Aside from the Brewster Projects—that’s where Diana Ross grew up—public apartment buildings were white-only. Blacks were ripped off right and left, overcharged for filthy and unsafe living quarters. For a whole generation of blacks in cities like Chicago and Detroit, the Great Migration became the Great Nightmare.

  “The spark that lit the fire happened on Belle Isle, a picnic spot in the middle of the Detroit River. The incident had sexual undertones. A white man said a black man made a pass at his girl. They began fighting and soon the fight spread. Rumors started racing. Blacks heard that a white man had thrown a black woman and her baby off Belle Isle Bridge. Whites and blacks went after each other for three days. Mobs attacked mobs. It ended only when President Roosevelt called in troops. By then thirty-four people were killed. Twenty-five of those were blacks. Of the twenty-five black deaths, seventeen died at the hands of the police. It was all-out racial warfare.

  “As a college kid st
udying history, I asked Dad about how it felt back in the forties to move to a city where racial hatred ran so high.

  “ ‘I saw it as a challenge,’ he told me. ‘The NAACP was falsely being charged with instigating the trouble. And in the black community, the white establishment was being charged with neglecting our needs. My job was to tend to the spiritual needs of the black community, but I also saw the need to raise everyone’s political consciousness. Back in Buffalo, I had invited A. Philip Randolph, the president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, to speak at church. Brother Randolph eloquently and unequivocally called for equal treatment of blacks in the workplace. He energized our congregants and me as well. I saw then that the life of a true Christian cannot be restricted to interpreting scripture. Moral justice and social justice cannot be separated.’ ”

  Anna Gordy, sister of Berry Gordy and first wife of Marvin Gaye, knew C.L. well. When she and I spoke about him, she said, “Our relationship was far deeper than a mere friendship.” She remembered meeting him in the late forties when she was twenty-five and he was thirty-three. She also remembered his preaching “The Eagle Stirreth Her Nest” and relating it to the race riots of 1943.

  “I felt he was the most dynamic man in the city,” said Anna. “His sheer brilliance attracted many people who were not regular churchgoers. The man was a poet and a healer. When I first heard him, we were still feeling the aftershocks of the riots. Everyone in Detroit was still on edge. Reverend Franklin helped take off the edge by explaining how God uses history for man’s good. If I understood him correctly, God was the eagle, and history was the nest. Reverend pointed out how disturbances can lead to progress. That’s the eagle stirring the nest. When the status quo is exploded, change is possible—change for the good. At a time when Detroit was filled with animosity and uncertainty, this minister reassured us that out of chaos can come a higher and more just order. Later, in the fifties and sixties, he would prove to be a great civil rights leader, but even as a young man we felt that Reverend was wise beyond his years.”

  Cecil, who heard the “Eagle Stirreth Her Nest” sermon countless times, said he never tired of the message.

  “That was Dad’s favorite metaphor,” he said. “When he invoked that eagle, he really soared. If you look at the language closely, you’ll understand that he’s using it to show that, no matter how circumstances seem to be disrupting our lives, God is in control. And God is directing us to a better path. When we’re moving in the direction that God wants us to move, when we’re doing His will, we’re flying high like the eagle. Dad’s style was a combination of speaking, shouting—we called it whopping—and then singing. He’d go back and forth between those three modes until his message was hammered home and all the saints in church were up and praising God.”

  No doubt, after the loss of her mother, Aretha gravitated to the strength of her father.

  “We all did,” said Cecil. “And because Dad was a natural patriarch—both of his church and [of] our family—we were drawn to his side. He was our great protector. The difference between Aretha and the rest of his children, though, was this: Early on, she became his partner. She became part of his service and also part of his traveling ministry. Later on, I learned to preach, and I did preach in his church. Later on, Erma sang and sang beautifully in his church and on records. So did Carolyn and cousin Brenda. We realized we were all anointed with talent. We were blessed with the precious genes of our musical ancestors. But Aretha manifested that talent at an ungodly early age.”

  Smokey Robinson was another eyewitness. “Cecil and I were kids when we met,” he told me. “We grew up on the same love of music—not just gospel, but jazz. The first great voice that influenced me was Sarah Vaughan. I don’t think Cecil and I were ten when we started digging progressive jazz.

  “Aretha was always around, a shy girl who came alive when we started playing records. I heard her singing along with Sarah in a way that scared me. Sarah’s riffs are the most complex of any singer, yet Aretha shadowed them like it was the most natural thing in the world.

  “The other thing that knocked us out about Aretha was her piano playing. There was a grand piano in the Franklin living room, and we all liked to mess around. We’d pick out little melodies with one finger. But when Aretha sat down, even as a seven-year-old, she started playing chords—big chords. Later I’d recognize them as complex church chords, the kind used to accompany the preacher and the solo singer. At the time, though, all I could do was view Aretha as a wonder child. Mind you, this was Detroit, where musical talent ran strong and free. Everyone was singing and harmonizing; everyone was playing piano and guitar. Aretha came out of this world, but she also came out of another far-off magical world none of us really understood. She came from a distant musical planet where children are born with their gifts fully formed.”

  Charlie Parker was blessed to be born in Kansas City when a variety of rich musical currents were converging. Dinah Washington came as a child to Chicago, a city whose impassioned gospel, jazz, and blues nourished her soul and informed her singular style. Aretha was a providential product of Detroit, a vibrant urban center, like Chicago, whose culture in the forties and fifties was shaped by the Great Migration of southern blacks looking to move up to greater income and status in a city largely hostile to their aspirations.

  The tension caused by that hostility only intensified artistic expression. Blues singers—such as John Lee Hooker, who, like C. L. Franklin, had made the move from Mississippi to Detroit—were excited by the hope of social mobility. Down south, John Lee had sung on street corners and flatbed trucks. In Detroit, he sang in bars. It was also in Detroit that John Lee—as well as C.L.—started making records.

  “When I first saw John Lee in Detroit,” B.B. King told me, “he said that the white man had raised the rent on a couple of the bars where he’d been playing. When the bars closed down, John Lee went looking for nightclubs—which is how he wound up on Hastings Street.”

  Hastings Street is ground zero for the Aretha Franklin story. Her father’s New Bethel Baptist Church was at 4210 Hastings, steps from the heart of the black entertainment district. It was the point where Saturday night merged into Sunday morning and sin met salvation at the crossroads of African American musical culture. High on the Holy Ghost, dancing in the aisles of New Bethel, the saints celebrated the love of Christ. High on wine and weed, the party people celebrated the love of the flesh. Was it the grinding grooves of the club that got into the church, or was it the sensuous beat of the church that got into the club? Did C. L. Franklin get his blues cry from Muddy Waters the same way Bobby Bland borrowed his blues cry from C.L.?

  On Hastings Street, heavy commerce moved in both directions—saintly blues at night, bluesy gospel in the morning.

  “When I first visited Detroit from Chicago,” said Buddy Guy, “it was later in the fifties. I had to see two people. The first was Reverend C. L. Franklin, ’cause B.B. had told me he could preach better than Howlin’ Wolf could sing. B. was right. Then I had to go to Hastings Street to see John Lee Hooker. The song that turned me into an aspiring bluesman was ‘Boogie Chillen’.’ It was the big hit in 1948 when I was still on the plantation in Louisiana. John Lee sang about ‘walkin’ down Hastings Street where everyone was talking about the Henry Swing Club.’ In Louisiana, I imagined Hastings Street as something glamorous. I imagined big fancy cars and fine women, music blasting and couples grinding on each other to John Lee’s sex blues. When I got to Hastings and saw it in person, though, it was even more amazing than what I’d imagined. The churches and the clubs were right next to each other. You’d see church singers singing in a jazzy style while jazz groups used the church organist in their rhythm sections. In both cases, the job was the same. Gospel music made folks happy. Blues made folks lose their blues. I didn’t see that much difference between the two, even if preachers did claim it was the difference between Jesus and the devil. B.B. King loved C. L. Franklin because he didn’t say that. He didn’t pit one
against the other. He said all good music came from God.”

  Aretha stressed that her father was interested in the good life and taught that goodness was not restricted to the church. In the late forties, C.L. also concluded that the good life required a grand house.

  “Daddy’s demand before moving to Detroit,” said sister Erma, “was that the church construct a new sanctuary and buy him a parsonage. The old New Bethel, a reformed bowling alley, was a sight for sore eyes. The new one, built on the same plot on Hastings, was modern and attractive. Our parsonage, at six forty-nine East Boston Boulevard, was really a stately mansion. This was on the city’s north end, a few miles from New Bethel but a different world altogether. The neighborhood was integrated, but there were more black families than whites. The blacks were mainly light-skinned professionals—doctors and lawyers and political leaders. If Daddy hadn’t been an up-and-coming minister with a large congregation, his dark skin would have kept him off Boston Boulevard. But there was no denying Daddy. He knew his place was among the city’s elite.”

  Describing the home on Boston Boulevard, Aretha said that she felt like a fairy-tale princess living in a castle. The house was situated on the corner of Boston and Oakland, the major street that divided the neighborhood into economic/social classes. The Boston class was the highest. Boston was a genuine boulevard, not a street, with an island in the center filled with beautiful plants and shrubs. She spoke proudly of her neighbors—Charles Diggs Sr., a congressman, and Dr. Harold Stitts, a physician. She remembered the color of the drapes in her living room (dark purple) and of the plush wall-to-wall carpeting (emerald green). The grand piano sat by the window. She was the first of her friends to have a television—a large Emerson on which she and her dad watched the boxing matches sponsored by Gillette razor blades.