Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin

by David Ritz

  The occasion is also notable for Dr. King’s famous line in his address: “This afternoon I have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.” King was, in fact, previewing the speech that two months later he would deliver at the Lincoln Memorial, a seminal moment in the long fight for civil rights. Berry Gordy issued the speech in LP form and called it The Great March to Freedom.

  In September, Aretha went back into the Columbia studios in New York, where she met Bobby Scott, the brilliant pianist/arranger/composer who had been hired by Bob Mersey to do a number of jazz-oriented sessions.

  “My first memory of Aretha is that she wouldn’t look at me when I spoke,” Scott told me. “She withdrew from the encounter in a way that intrigued me. At first I thought she was just shy—and she was—but I also felt her reading me. I wasn’t shy about telling her my accomplishments, and it wasn’t until I rattled off my credits that I felt like I had caught her attention. What knocked me out the most, though, was when I told her I’d been Lester Young’s accompanist. ‘You play for the President?’ Only the hippest jazz aficionados knew that Lester was nicknamed ‘Pres,’ for President. That told me that she was much more than a church girl. Of course, I’d heard the stuff she’d done with Mersey. ‘Skylark’ floored me. Having done that, Mersey looked to me to put her more in a jazz bag. The truth, though, is that Aretha’s musicality knew no boundaries. The only other singer I worked with who had her feeling was Marvin Gaye.”

  Later in the sixties, Scott did a remarkable ballad session with Marvin, released posthumously, titled Vulnerable. I asked Bobby what he saw as the common link between Marvin and Aretha.

  “They each sculpted and improved any song they sang. They each came out of that holy place that breeds genius. Strange, but when I started working with Marvin, he had enjoyed a string of hits and didn’t care about commerce. He was going for art. But in that first meeting in which she called me Mr. Scott and asked that I call her Miss Franklin, Aretha did say something I’ll never forget. For all her deference to my experience and her reluctance to speak up, when she did look me in the eye, she did so with a quiet intensity before saying, ‘I like all your ideas, Mr. Scott, but please remember I do want hits.’ ”

  The Aretha/Scott sessions took place over three days in October 1963. Instead of the jazz-oriented sessions that Mersey had originally envisioned, the final repertoire, like most everything Aretha sang on Columbia, seemed to be moving in many directions at once. “Aretha wanted to sing ‘Harbor Lights,’ a song she knew from the Platters,” said Scott. “She said she thought that, in the post-doo-wop era of the early sixties, it could be a hit again. I’d been listening to the song ever since I was a kid. Everyone from Guy Lombardo to Bing Crosby had covered it. I saw the possibility of its reinvention, especially in the hands of a great blues balladeer. So we went all out. Aretha helped me arrange the female backup vocal arrangements—she was great at that—I worked up a horn chart, found a righteous groove, and thought we’d hit the charts. We didn’t.

  “As a songwriter, I’m always hustling singers to do my stuff, and I was no different with Aretha. I presented her with a lot of jazz tunes, but she wasn’t partial to any of them. Instead she was drawn to ballads—‘Tiny Sparrow,’ one of the more spiritual-metaphorical things I wrote. She said it reminded her of church. She sang my ‘Johnny,’ a motif I wrote in a Rodgers and Hammerstein vein. When I played her ‘Looking Through a Tear,’ something I also wrote in a Broadway bag, she went for it. Suddenly the notion of a jazz album went out the window. She brought in something by Sam Cooke’s brother L.C. called ‘Once in a While.’ She thought it could be an R-and-B hit; I didn’t; we cut it, and it wasn’t. Felt lame to me. I had the same reaction to ‘Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home.’ I love Jimmy Durante doing it, but Aretha Franklin? ‘I hear it with a Count Basie big-band sound behind it,’ she told me. ‘I can do that,’ I said. ‘I can write an Ernie Wilkins–Count Basie chart.’ I do admit that she sang it soulfully, but it felt like a nightclub routine to me, not suitable for an artist of Aretha’s caliber.

  “By then, in terms of theme or cohesion of style, we had lost our way. But Aretha and her husband, Ted, didn’t seem concerned. They were both so knocked out by her singing that they were certain that every song we cut—even ‘Moon River’ or ‘I May Never Get to Heaven’—was gonna be a hit. I understood their enthusiasm, and I shared it, but there was no communication between the studio and sales forces. When the sales guys heard what we’d done, they said, ‘What are we supposed to do with this stuff?’ It was great, but it was neither fish nor fowl. Listening to it decades later, it still sounds strong. Aretha is always Aretha. She got on top of the chart I wrote for ‘I Won’t Cry Anymore’ and absolutely crushed it. Tony Bennett had sung it. So had Charles Brown and Big Maybelle and Dinah Washington and Joe Williams. But Aretha owned it in a way I never thought anyone could approach it again. It wasn’t until I rewrote the chart, added strings, and gave it to Marvin Gaye that I saw I was wrong. When it came to melodic reinvention and fearless interpretation, Marvin and Aretha were locked in a dead heat. It killed me that they never sang together.”

  On November 22, 1963, Aretha was seven months pregnant with her third son and in the Broadway Market in Detroit, a gourmet-food outlet, when she heard news of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. In her book, she recalls that among her strongest memories of that day were the powerful smells of hanging hams, salamis, and cheeses. On other occasions, she reflected that, in the aftermath of the president’s death, she found comfort in the presence of her father.

  “My father was a rock,” Erma said. “Especially in the sixties, when changes were happening so quickly and great leaders began to fall, he held steadfast. He taught us all to stay the course. He believed in a future where wrong would be righted and the love of almighty God would prevail. He raised us, he nurtured us, and he comforted us in times of trouble.

  “Ted White was a highly possessive husband and could be a scary character. But when the world felt shaky and fears were unloosed, Aretha lost her fear of him and went home to Daddy. No matter how deep our past disagreements, we always reconciled with our father. Our bond with him was stronger than our bond with anyone else.”

  A month later, another sudden death had a more immediate impact on the Franklin family. On December 14, Detroiters, along with the rest of the country, were shocked to learn that in their city Dinah Washington had died of a toxic combination of drugs—secobarbital and amobarbital—at age thirty-nine. Married to her seventh husband, Detroit Lions All-Pro defensive back Dick “Night Train” Lane, Dinah had appeared to be at the top of her game; in the words of her biographer Nadine Cohodas, “It was as though Dinah had been snatched from [her friends] in the fullness of life.”

  “Ted and Aretha were in New York and rushed home to Detroit,” Cecil remembered. “More than anyone, Daddy was distraught. He and Dinah had been tight for years. I remember Aretha looking afraid—as though death was coming too close to all of us. Ted’s attitude was ‘The Queen is dead. Long live the Queen. Aretha is the new queen.’ ”

  10. WHAT A DIFFERENCE A DAY MAKES

  I got a Dinah Washington story,” Etta James told me. “I was a young thing with a couple of jive-ass hits under my belt. I was playing a small club in Providence while Dinah was booked into the big Loew’s State Theater. When someone said she’d come to see my midnight show, I nearly fell out. Dinah was in the house! With that in mind, I decided to open with her big hit, ‘Unforgettable.’ I didn’t even get to the chorus when I heard this earth-shattering crash. Dinah had got up off her chair, swept all the glasses and plates off her table, and was pointing at me, screaming, ‘Bitch, don’t you ever sing the Queen’s songs when the Queen is right there in front of you!’

  “I ran off the stage crying. Didn’t even do my set. No one could console me. Didn’t wanna see no one. But it was Dinah herself who came back to my dressing room and said, ‘Sorry, I lost it for a minute, but look, girl, you
learned a valuable lesson. If a star’s around, you don’t ever sing the star’s songs. Ever.’ ‘Yes, ma’am’ was all I could say. She invited me to her show at the Loew’s the next day. I went and we tightened up. I loved me some Dinah, but, man, that lady was something else.”

  The Dinah encounter that Aretha remembered in From These Roots also involved a dressing-room encounter. After her show at a Detroit club, Aretha was visited in her dressing room by Dinah Washington. Dinah criticized Aretha for the disorder—clothes and shoes were scattered everywhere. Aretha deeply resented the remarks and thought Dinah was acting like a diva.

  At the time of Dinah’s death, Aretha was twenty-one and clearly not a diva. She was working jazz clubs, with occasional stints at venues like the Apollo, and building a reputation. The money was minimal. There were no royalties, and the advances from Columbia were small. Her gigs, though, were steady. She traveled with the trio put together by Ted White—Teddy Harris on piano, drummer Hindel Butts, and bassist Roderick Hicks. When Harris wasn’t available, Earl Van Dyke often took his place. They were splendid musicians. For those who listened carefully—John Hammond, Carmen McRae, Bobby Scott, Jerry Wexler—there was no doubt that Aretha’s greatness was already established. Her potential was unlimited. At the same time, her public demeanor remained almost painfully timid.

  “She would talk to me,” said Ruth Bowen, the woman who, at various times, booked both Dinah and Aretha, “but never at length. I didn’t become her agent and confidante until a few years later. Before that, though, I would see her from time to time and knew she had great fears about asserting herself. She spoke through Ted—and it was Ted who suggested that she go in the studio and quickly record a tribute album to Dinah. Ted always saw Aretha as the new Dinah, and he didn’t waste a minute trying to make that happen.”

  There were two memorial services for Dinah—the first in Detroit at New Bethel, where C.L. presided and Aretha sang. The second was in Dinah’s hometown of Chicago.

  “I attended both,” said Ruth. “It was in Detroit, right after the service, when I saw Ted, who said something about Aretha singing a tribute record. That hardly seemed the right place to mention it, but I suppose it was because Ted knew how close I was to Dinah—she and I began the Queen Booking Agency together—and he wanted my approval. He also wanted me to pay the kind of attention to Aretha that I had paid to Dinah. I wanted to say, Ted, her body’s still warm. Can’t we wait to talk about business for a few weeks? But I didn’t say anything. I was in so much pain. Losing Dinah was like losing a sister.”

  Columbia was as eager as Ted to record the tribute. They saw it as a big opportunity and went for a big production. Bob Mersey and Aretha selected the songs, Mersey quickly wrote charts for horns and strings, and on February 7, 1964, eight weeks after Dinah’s death—and just a month after Aretha gave birth to Ted White Jr.—the first session kicked off at the label’s studio at 799 Seventh Avenue in New York.

  “Aretha’s dedication to her career and her craft is something people underestimate,” said Erma. “No matter what she’s going through—whether it’s giving birth or mourning a death—she gets right back to work because her work, her ability to express deep, deep feelings in song, is what gets her through.”

  Aretha sounds both vulnerable and powerful. The album is sweet, sassy, and sad, a fitting—and at times soaring—musical tribute to the fallen queen by the aspiring one. By any measure, it’s a classic.

  “Ted wanted to call it What a Difference a Day Makes,” said Ruth Bowen, “but I didn’t like that. I took that to mean that in the difference of a day, Dinah’s reign was over and Aretha’s had begun. I was relieved when they changed it to Unforgettable. That was more like it.”

  The title track is a marvel of understatement and sincerity. Aretha comes to this tribute with great respect for Dinah’s mystique. While Dinah sang Hank Williams’s “Cold Cold Heart” in a jazz vein, Aretha puts a heavy gospel-blues spin on the song, a foreshadowing of her Atlantic material. As would be the case with Atlantic, Aretha also served in the role as uncredited coproducer. The chart is built around her concept.

  In her early church days, Aretha reflected the sensibility of Clara Ward and Jackie Verdell, but her singular style was there from the get-go. Extravagant runs are an essential part of the grammar of gospel singing, yet Aretha’s trademark runs, in which she jumps octaves and forges flourishes both simple and complex, are wholly her own.

  Aretha’s reading of “What a Diff’rence a Day Makes” is especially sensitive and respectful of the original. Aretha does not try to reinvent the song. She doesn’t want to forget Dinah. Dinah is on her mind. You feel Dinah’s spirit in her heart. She doesn’t attack the song; she approaches it with gentle but firm confidence. She sings it straight for the first few bars, telling a slow-moving story of the discovery of love. It isn’t until she comes to the line “My yesterdays were blue, dear” that she starts caressing the lyrics. She elongates and exaggerates the blue to let you know that, though this is a tribute to Dinah, she intends to make this song her own.

  All the songs on Unforgettable are made her own. And listening to it, one has no doubt that—in spirit, technique, imagination, creativity, and pure soul—Aretha measures up to Dinah. But the album made little impact on the music world, which was caught up in two huge phenomena.

  In 1964, the Beatles arrived in America, hitting pop culture harder than anyone since Elvis. Meanwhile, Motown exploded. The Supremes broke out with a string of number-one hits, starting with “Where Did Our Love Go”; Mary Wells had “My Guy”; Martha and the Vandellas had “Dancing in the Streets”; and the Temptations and the Four Tops both crossed over to top-ten pop.

  Just when Ted White and the executives at Columbia wanted the world to measure Aretha by the past—by Dinah, one of the most enduring artists of the previous decade—fans were looking to the future. Black pop, geared to a white audience, was finally coming into its own, and Aretha had nothing to do with that. She was presented as a mature adult. Although Aretha was only twenty-one, the marketing men targeted her to a much older demographic.

  “Unforgettable is probably the best thing she did on Columbia,” John Hammond told me. “Mersey found a solid jazz footing for the project. On ‘Evil Gal Blues’ and ‘Soulville,’ he employed a Hammond B-3 organ that created a wonderfully authentic blues feeling. ‘Drinking Again’ is a marvelous evocation of a late-night bar. Dinah sang it beautifully, but Aretha put it in the Sinatra category. It’s reminiscent of his ‘One for My Baby.’ I believe it’s that good. The problem wasn’t the material or the vocals. The material was perfect and the vocals were astounding. I remember thinking that if Aretha never does another album she will be remembered for this one. No, the problem was timing. Dinah had died, and, outside the black community, interest in her had waned dramatically. Popular music was in a radical and revolutionary moment, and that moment had nothing to do with Dinah Washington, great as she was and will always be.”

  “If I’m not mistaken,” said Clyde Otis, who would be the next major figure in Aretha’s musical life, “Unforgettable was the first time Aretha had sung one of my songs. I’m talking about ‘This Bitter Earth.’ I was on staff at Mercury when I brought it to Dinah, who recorded it in 1960. It was one of her biggest hits. I’d also been producing hits on Brook Benton, and, of course, I’d done hit duets with Brook and Dinah—‘Baby (You Got What It Takes)’ and ‘It’s a Rocking Good Way (to Mess Around and Fall in Love).’ When Bob Mersey, my neighbor in Englewood, New Jersey, mentioned that Aretha was doing a Dinah tribute, I said that I thought ‘This Bitter Earth’ would be a natural. Aretha wanted to do it before I even suggested it. I would have loved to produce it, but Bob was running the sessions for that album. When I heard what Aretha did to it, I realized there was nothing I could have added. No one loved and admired Dinah more than me. But Aretha took the song to the heavens. After her version, I knew that, from that day forward, my composition would be considered a standard. She creat
ed the standard. She set the standard. Other versions are superb—I especially love the way Nancy Wilson did it. But Aretha… that girl tore the song apart and put it back together again in a way that had me shaking my head in wonder. I consider it her song and no one else’s.”

  Aretha felt the composition’s intrinsic drama. One of the finest of all blues ballads, “This Bitter Earth” goes from despair to hope. Just as the truest blues are transformational—the very act of singing or hearing the blues lets you lose the blues—“This Bitter Earth” takes us on a journey out of the depths of depression. It is the crowning achievement of Unforgettable, the most forgotten and underrated of Aretha’s many grand achievements.

  When the record was released in February, the initial single was “Soulville,” an up-tempo romp aimed at the R&B market. For the first time Aretha provides self-styled backups; she overdubs her vocals with her own harmonies, a technique that, at the end of the decade, Marvin Gaye would perfect in his What’s Going On.

  “I thought putting out ‘Soulville’ was a mistake,” said Hammond. “Bob Mersey had produced a classic album for the ages. Why not promote it as such? Instead, Columbia went for the youth market, when, in fact, it wasn’t a youth-oriented project. Sam Cooke had done a marvelous tribute album to Billie Holiday, and in the same spirit Aretha was evoking the spirit of Dinah. In a desperate attempt for a hit, they misrepresented the album. Ironically, while the sales force was trying to break her on the R-and-B charts, the publicists were also booking her on Steve Allen’s TV show, where she sang the more adult material, like ‘Skylark.’ A week later, I looked up and saw they had also booked her on Shindig! singing ‘Soulville.’ It was amazing how much demographic confusion surrounded her promotion.”