Aretha Franklin is the Queen of Soul - she not only embodied the spirit of Soul in her
music but she lived it.
Because, very simply, she doesn't sing soul — she is soul.
Soul is rooted in gospel, a genre of music that combines rhythm and blues with church
hymns.
Aretha was exposed to those sounds her entire childhood.
She was raised in the church where her father, CL Franklin, was the most well known preacher
in the US during the golden age of gospel in the 1940s and 50s.
You could hear any one of Aretha’s hits and witness a master class in the power of
gospel music, but it’s her covers and her live performances that really reveal all the
gospel techniques she had at her disposal.
Aretha could turn any song into a gospel song.
Just take a look at these two tracks.
The top is British soul singer, Dusty Springfield’s, most iconic song “Son of a Preacher Man”
Dusty and Aretha shared the same producer, Jerry Wexler at Atlantic Records.
The song first went to Aretha, who ended up passing on it.
Dusty took it, and in early 1969 her version rose to the top of the charts.
A year later, Aretha released a cover of it and it sounded completely different.
Where Dusty started with a smooth electric guitar riff,
Aretha started on the piano.
An instrument that, along with the hammond organ, played
a central role in the sound of gospel music and her career.
The fingers and the voice are all part of that same tradition.
And she was trained by the best.
Aretha comes up during the golden era of gospel music and actually
her piano teacher is the late Reverand James Cleveland,
who became king of gospel.
Here he is, backing her on the piano.
Aretha sat behind a piano her whole career -- at any point she could speed up or slow
down, creating a spectrum of emotional moments.
Like this moment here:
There's an old saying in the black church:
This valley is there to build to that final climactic moment of the song.
In gospel music it’s often called the “special chorus” or vamp.
The vamp is almost like you take the essence of the song.
the most memorable rhythmic piece is repeated over and over.
Clara Ward and the Ward Singers, Aretha Franklin’s biggest mentors, perfected this in their gospel
recording of “Packing Up”
This key component of gospel was everywhere in the music of the 1960s.
Listen to the Rolling Stones
imitate those high notes of Marion Williams in “Sympathy for the Devil.”
Aretha carried that gospel tradition of repetition and vocal improvisation over into her music
too.
In this recording she improvises over her backup vocal group, the Sweet Inspirations.
I think in the case of the preacher man they were even saying literally Hallelujah.
You know, right on the top of the groove.
The same singers were on Dusty's version too.
But their voicing on Aretha's recording is completely different.
One of the most exciting differences is when they echo
“Sock it to me” a phrase they also sing in “Respect”.
They added "sock it to me" into that, it became like a thing.
[Repeating "Sock it to me"]
Sock it to me. Sock it to me. Sock it to me. Sock it to me.
Sock it to yourself.
Sock it to me?
Sock it to me.
Lay it on me.
Give me a high five.
Know what I'm sayin'?
Was that innocent, or..
coincidental?
Now what did you think it meant?
Well, you'd come home and give me my propers.
Son of a Preacher Man lives on vinyl as a studio recording, but Aretha’s gospel roots
really shine when she’s playing live.
Take her performance of “Dr. Feelgood," live at Fillmore West in San Francisco.
In a 1971 review, Ebony magazine said “The album captures the spirit of her
in-person performances that are never merely shows but more rituals of an almost religious nature."
This music has to be inspired of the moment.
There’s always a single moment in every single one of her live performances where
the crowd erupts.
In Dr. Feelgood it happens about 2 minutes in - almost the ending of the song.
[ Aretha Frankling performing live at the Fillmore West in San Francisco]
[Cheers and shouting erupting from the audience.]
[Aretha Franklin continues singing."
She can literally control the crowd when she's at that moment in the song.
This is a blues song, but at this moment she’s priming people for a spiritual awakening.
At the very end, where she just starts to kind of talk to the crowd,
and she said you want to sit down
and cross your arms and crossed her legs and look up to heaven.
So she's now talking about ecstasy but she's singing about it in a way that's very spiritual
and sacred. You know, she’s using gospel to get us there.
[Aretha Franklin interacting with the crowd at the Fillmore West.]
She inhabits these songs to a degree that we're not
used to seeing much anymore, that naked vulnerability.
It's coming from a church tradition. You may only have
an audience of 10, but you may have been put there to reach one person.
It was very rare that a gospel singer could go back and forth between gospel and pop so
freely, but Aretha’s voice and authenticity transcended genres.
So this is 1971 and if anyone in gospel as a performer would have done that, it would have been controversial.
Somehow Aretha was able to bounce back and forth
and stay, to the end, true to both worlds.