Singing in a Strange Land

by Nick Salvatore

  “Folks came from all over Detroit to attend church services,” Willa Ward, a member of the famous gospel group the Clara Ward Singers, observed. “Even nonmembers really piled in on those days” when C. L. preached. So large were the crowds, Willie Todd noted, that the police “cut the traffic off,” routing it “around another way. And the people would be standing in the streets just to hear him preach.” While the enthusiastic response was perhaps more than at first expected, the strategy to attract nonmembers from throughout the city—one C. L. first devised at New Salem in Memphis—was quite conscious.31

  Franklin was by no means the first Afro-Baptist minister in Detroit to use the radio, but he was the first to create an hour-long program specifically intended for the listening audience. And his sermons were such that Sunday evening at New Bethel quickly became an event to be seen at, a place where the faithful and the famous gathered. Over the next twenty years, pastors of other churches rescheduled their evening services so as not to conflict with those at New Bethel. Benjamin Hooks, pastor of Mt. Moriah Baptist in the 1960s, did this so that both he and his members might attend New Bethel’s evening service themselves; Reverend James Holley at Little Rock Baptist did the same. Indeed, for those ministers not put off by C. L.’s chanted, rhythmic delivery, Sunday evening at New Bethel was a special moment. Depending on the weather, they milled about before services in the church vestibule or on the sidewalk outside, the regulars as well as out-of-town visitors, greeting each other, swapping stories, and acknowledging the appreciative nods of the congregation as they filed by. “There was a fellowship,” Holley explained. “It was a coming together of a family.” When C. L. arrived in his late-model Cadillac, driven by a deacon, the ministers relished the greeting, the broad smile, the shared joke as this commanding preacher (“Big Daddy,” Holley affectionately called him) moved through them toward a hallway that led to a side entrance to the sanctuary. The ministers then processed down the center aisle to the pews at the front reserved for them. From the pulpit, C. L. would call out their names, recognizing them as he would select others in the audience. This quality endeared Franklin to many, and if it was calculated, the calculation reflected C. L.’s belief that all human beings “are imbued with the instinct or the desire for recognition.”32

  Franklin’s success with the radio program did create some tension within the congregation. The quickness with which he liquidated the debt led some of the same church officers and members “to grumble again,” Franklin remarked with laughter, “because any monies above the expenses became mine.” C. L. “was a very mean person when he wanted to be,” Sylvia Penn acknowledged of her close friend and pastor. “He could be pretty treacherous, you know, when you crossed him.” He dismissed the complaint bluntly (“It didn’t move me at all”), and he paid himself and his musical directors, program narrator, and choir soloists a weekly stipend from the profits. Thirty-seven years old, with a lifetime contract as minister of New Bethel, this determined, self-confident, and driven man could respond fiercely when he thought his prerogatives questioned.33

  In 1953, C. L. entered into another business arrangement, also beyond the provenance of the church, one whose impact would shortly secure his reputation as a preacher beyond compare, a national celebrity within black America on the level of a Sam Cooke, a Mahalia Jackson, or a Little Richard. A talent scout for a recording company approached Wynona Carr about signing a contract; at her suggestion, he also talked with C. L. Nothing came of the conversation. Soon after, Joe Von Battle, the Hastings Street entrepreneur, approached Franklin after a Sunday evening sermon and raised the idea again. “‘Reverend,’” C. L. approximated Von Battle’s words years later, “‘the thing that you’re talking about and the way you’re saying it, people will buy that. It’s just like all these people that are here tonight, they’ll buy it.’” This time, Franklin was convinced, the welcome prospect of additional income and the greater recognition that would follow if the sermons caught the public’s fancy proving too enticing. Success was not guaranteed. Franklin had, of course, recorded in 1950, but that was music, gospel hymns. Preachers simply did not make spoken recordings in the early 1950s, and sales were poor for the few who tried. Earlier, in the 1920s and 1930s, an Atlanta minister, J. M. Gates, had sold hundreds of thousands of recordings of his sermons, when the then-current technology limited his selections to approximately three minutes. Von Battle and Franklin proposed to press on vinyl nearly an entire half-hour sermon, including C. L.’s introductory rendition of “Father, I Stretch My Hand to Thee.” Technological innovation over a quarter century allowed this greater length, but the success of the project remained questionable. No minister in the black church experience to that moment had ever dared to record the main body of his sermons and offer them for sale. Most preachers, if they thought at all about such a possibility, worried that repeated listening would reveal the weakness of the message, the forced emotional appeal intended to camouflage that very problem, or, even worse, both. Undaunted, C. L. Franklin welcomed Von Battle’s taping equipment to his pulpit alongside WJLB’s microphone.34

  The recordings were an immediate sensation. Detroiters bought them in large numbers, and Von Battle distributed them on his JVB label to other record shops in the Midwest and the South. Von Battle’s operation was small, and he could neither press enough records nor handle the bookkeeping and advertising to take full advantage of the opportunity. But there was no question that Franklin was a major success. When Von Battle put a new sermon on his sound system, flooding the Hastings Street sidewalk with the mellifluous power of that voice, crowds frequently gathered to listen. “More than once,” Marsha L. Mickens, Von Battle’s daughter, remembered her father saying, he “had to call the police to break up the crowds that would gather to hear” the recorded sermon.35

  All this attention made C. L. an even more attractive figure as he leaned across the pulpit or sauntered down Hastings Street during the course of a day’s business. This handsome, virile man, in effect single since 1948, had never been bashful about his sexuality, which he considered, along with the desire for recognition, “one of the great psychological needs” all humans experience. That some women, in and outside the church community, responded with a matching passion, C. L. considered one of life’s great delights. Kathryn Curry, a young Detroit woman, had an affair with C. L. over two years in the early 1950s. Her awe was palpable: “There is only one Lord Jesus in my life and that’s you.” She wrote “Dearest Frank” about 1953, in her handmade book, “Memories.” Curry reveled in the memory of their recently concluded relationship, which C. L. had gently ended. “Continue to have it your own way,” she chided him, “but I couldn’t wait to tell you about remembrance of things past.” There was also a handsomely dressed, beautiful, light-skinned woman, known now only as Evelyn, whose photo revealed a longing expression that belied her demurely posed hands atop crossed, well-covered knees. Her inscription was to the point: “My love for you is now and forever, my darling Frank.” Sylvia Penn, who had originally introduced Kathryn Curry to her pastor, noted that New Bethel attracted many “pretty girls ’cause he was single.” Often, she would call C. L., only to be told, “‘I got some company,’” to which she knowingly replied, “Who is it this time?”36

  Talk about C. L.’s involvements with women provided his critics, particularly those in the ministry, with additional cause to dismiss him. The critics were not necessarily innocents themselves, but the open, public manner in which C. L. squired his women about town upset them. From their perspective, C. L. was not exploring the boundary of the sacred and the secular—he had, rather, fallen over into the abyss. This, in turn, reinforced criticism of his preaching style and doubts about his recording career. Even before his appearance on the JVB label, many had dismissed him as a mere entertainer, a panderer to popular emotions, a preacher who lacked an intellectual core to his sermon. More so in 1953, following C. L.’s carefully produced radio program, his record sales, and New Bethel’s mushroom
ing membership rolls, these critics—with not a little jealousy—regarded C. L. as a celebrity hound, an embarrassment to the ministry they sought to serve. Were these charges accurate, C. L.’s stretch toward national fame would quickly falter, for no sermon so empty of meaning could withstand repeated scrutiny by the insightful if often unschooled people whose perceptive folk commentary on preachers and their messages was a staple of the black oral tradition.37

  In the three years between 1953 and 1955, JVB Records released at least sixteen sermons from among the approximately one hundred C. L. preached at New Bethel. Von Battle recorded many more, and why these sixteen were selected for distribution, and by whom, remains unclear. Also unknown is the precise date of the original delivery of any of them. Two additional major sermons, recorded on the JVB label by 1955, complete the broad framework of his thinking and public teaching at mid-decade.

  “Dry Bones in the Valley” became enormously successful, selling widely and frequently requested by promoters of gospel programs. Like “The Eagle Stirreth Her Nest,” this sermon was among the most challenging a black preacher could deliver, and its roots also reached back to the slave experience. Some ministers shied away from it throughout their careers, unwilling to take on its complex mix of deep faith, collective self-criticism, and existential doubt in the context of their own era. C. L.’s version of “Dry Bones,” recorded when he was nearly forty years old, was a mature version of a sermon he had given before but delivered now by a man in full possession of his preaching powers.

  Where “Moses at the Red Sea” explored the issue of individual responsibility in the context of faith, the centrality of a faith that transcended the boundaries of human knowledge and reason framed “Dry Bones.” Franklin began by reading Ezekiel 37:1-4, where the Lord placed the prophet Ezekiel in a valley full of dry bones and, after surveying the valley, asked, “Son of man, can these bones live?” Ezekiel responded, “O, Lord God, thou knoweth,” to which the Lord demanded, “Prophesy from these bones, and say unto them, ‘O ye dry bones, hear the word of the Lord.’” As an anticipatory murmuring snaked through the pews, C. L. announced his theme: “the prophet and the valley of dry bones.”38

  Introducing Ezekiel, a young man trained as a priest of Israel, C. L. stressed that the meaning of Ezekiel’s vision was to convince Israel that “her God had not fallen, and her God was not dead.” Encouraged by the cries and shouts of affirmation from an already aroused audience, he painted with words Ezekiel’s vision for his people: the prophet saw “the vague outlines of a man sitting upon a chariot throne engulfed in a cloud,” with “priestly functionaries” bustling about. As Franklin told it, Ezekiel’s vision depicted “wheels that he saw in the middle of wheels,” guarded by angels, and “these wheels had eyes, and . . . did not deviate from their course.” C. L. explained that the prophet’s purpose in retelling the vision was to remind Israel of “the overruling Providence and power of God,” that God’s plans included them. The first, innermost wheel represented Israel and was ever moving. Superimposed on that was Babylon’s wheel, also in constant motion, its positioning reflective of Israel’s captivity within Babylon. A third wheel, encompassing the others, represented “God’s universal wheel and God’s universal plan.” All the wheels were in motion simultaneously, and an Israelite or a Babylonian might imagine that one or the other of their wheels dominated at a given moment; but the movement of all the wheels reflected the deeper truth that “all of God’s plans are always moving,” for “God’s plans never stand still.” The congregation cried out yet again, and C. L., tempering their emotion while drawing them yet closer, calmly asked them to “pray with me if you please,” as he shifted into his next section.

  In Ezekiel’s vision, “Babylon was a desolate place.” Considered in its day one of the world’s great cities, Babylon was to a captive Israel nothing but “a valley of depravity . . . of disfranchisement . . . of hopelessness, a valley of dry bones, a valley of lifelessness.” Amid cries from the deacons in the chairs behind the pulpit to “take your time” and pace the delivery, C. L. asked how a city as proclaimed as Babylon could yet be perceived as a valley. “Well,” he began,

  you see, a city may be one thing to one people, or a country may mean one thing to one people, and altogether another thing to another people. When the white Europeans came to this country, embarked upon these shores, America to them was a land of promise, was a mountaintop of possibilities, was a mountaintop of adventure. But to the Negro, when he embarked upon these shores, America to him was a valley: a valley of slave huts, a valley of slavery and oppression, a valley of sorrow; so that often we had to sing: “One of these days, I’m going to eat at the feasting table”; “One of these days, the chariot of God will swing low.”

  Barely five minutes into the sermon, C. L. had already presented two central, interwoven themes: the force of God’s providential plans (Israel’s “God had not fallen . . .”) and the incorporation into those plans of the African American historical experience (“One of these days . . .”). He did something else as well. In contrasting the experiences of European and African Americans in the American promised land, C. L. sketched the outlines of an alternative historical vision that acknowledged the fundamentally different histories of blacks and whites on these shores. One person’s bondage was, in fact, the basis of another person’s freedom. Although the contexts were quite different, Franklin’s sermon and Coleman Young’s testimony each proclaimed this alternative understanding of history.

  Then C. L. suddenly seemed to be reminded of some unfinished business before the congregation that demanded attention. “What is a prophet anyway,” he asked, and responded that the terms prophet and preacher are interchangeable, “for a prophet is a preacher, and a preacher ought to be a prophet.” A prophet, he was quick to say, was “not a funny person . . . selling luck or anything like that,” a reference undoubtedly to one Detroit religious figure whom C. L. had publicly criticized, the self-appointed Prophet (James) Jones.39 The prophet he had in mind instead was sent from God and possessed “sight, insight, and foresight.” What began as a sidebar and just skirted claiming for himself a prophet’s status, now brought C. L. back to his theme, for when considering “a real prophet . . . such a man was Ezekiel.”

  The valley of “Israel’s Babylonian situation” was a symbol, he explained, a metaphor. A valley is, by definition, “a low place between mountains.” In this case, those mountains represented the various barriers—economic, social, political, and religious—to freedom. But C. L.’s point was not a crude application of a sacred text to a secular context. The prophet was “in the Spirit,” possessed by God, when he envisioned the valley; the prophet remained in the Spirit as the Lord “led him to the midst of the valley and sat him down” to ponder “the heart of Israel’s problems, and Israel’s situation in Babylon.” When the survey of Israel’s problems, that “valley of dry bones,” was complete, “the Lord posed a question” to the prophet. “‘Son of man,’” the preacher intoned, thumping his hand rhythmically on the pulpit and stretching out his words as he incanted, “I wish you could hear him say that. ‘So-on of ma-an, ca-an the-ese bo-ones live?’” A controlled pandemonium engulfed the pews, people shouting out “Amen” and “Yes, sir!” Deep, appreciative laughter—the result, perhaps, of a sharp recognition of the challenge, the immediacy in Franklin’s words—broke out near the microphone, and cries of anticipation for what was yet to come traveled down from the balcony to the main floor and back. Simultaneously, one could hear again from the deacon’s chairs behind the preacher the caution, reflecting a desire to prolong the moment as well as the preacher’s energy, to “Take your time, sir.”

  As he waited for the emotion to pass, Franklin turned his attention to a fundamental problem of human existence. That phrase, “son of man,” he told his audience, ached with the weight of humanity’s limitations. Any “son of man” might be a scholar, a doctor, a psychologist, or a psychiatrist, well versed in human “drives and reaction
s and responses and tendencies,” Franklin suggested, with a melodic emphasis on certain words anticipating the whoop yet to come. Human knowledge has explored the physical and psychological world, achieving much good in the process. But the central question remained: “I want to know, with all of this knowledge, can you tell me: Can the-ese bo-ones live? Can these bo-o-nes live?” With all of human knowledge at hand, neither the prophet nor humanity, past nor present, could respond, and the prophet “had to give up.” Before the presence of evil, embedded deep in the human soul and reflected here in the image of Babylon as a valley of death and desiccation, mankind was powerless to do more than diagnose the case. “What we can’t do is write a prescription,” the preacher taught by familiar analogy. “So the prophet had to say, ‘Lord, thou knoweth. Lord, thou knoweth,’” and trust that “ultimately, if we have faith, he’ll give us the answer.”

  That power and pervasiveness of evil, the human suffering it entails, and mankind’s blindness in the face of it raised fundamental questions for those in the pews. If God’s providence toward his people was real, how could he allow such suffering? There was no simple answer. As he transitioned into his whoop, Franklin recalled his thinking regarding the starkness of the prophet’s existential dread: “The loneliness of it. The frustration of it.”40

  “If you want the answer,” God told the prophet, the answer to the multiple aspects of the “Babylonian problem,” then “you go out . . . and preach to those dry bones.” C. L., with droplets of sweat glimmering against his dark face, shaped the prophet’s protestations to convey his own experience: “Some of the living souls that I preach to don’t respond to me, and what could I expect from dry bones?” “What can I preach to dry bones about,” Ezekiel implored his God from the depths of his fear and isolation. “What kind of text can I use?” The answer was immediate: “Tell those dry bones / to hear the word of the Lord, / to hear the word of the Lord.” The prophet preached day and night in the valley, growing increasingly discouraged and despondent as the bones remained inert. Through that central paradox that wrests salvation from suffering, the faith of Franklin’s Old Testament prophet grew stronger from the very pain he bore. Thus the prophet preached again and yet again, although “not able to see what the results would be.” But then: