9/13/2023 0 Comments Aretha franklin columbia recordsBut the facts can’t convey the momentousness of her work. So do the awards: youngest person at the time to be honored by the Kennedy Center, first woman inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, 18 Grammys. The statistics - 73 songs on the Billboard Hot 100, including 17 top 10s, in a career that spanned six decades - provide evidence of her significance. You don’t want to just belt along to Aretha’s songs you want to dance. It was then, under the guidance of producer Jerry Wexler and arranger Arif Mardin, that she truly figured out how to interlace an astute sense of rhythm with her multivocal range and gospel-trained emotive force. “She transformed her extreme pain to extreme beauty,” her sister Erma Franklin told Ritz.Ĭolumbia released 11 Franklin albums, but it wasn’t until she moved to Atlantic Records in 1967 that she became a household name. After all, we heard everything we needed to know about the lived intensity of her feelings in her voice. Her troubles were worth noting only because, as the classic spiritual says, she overcame them. At a time when people post intimate details of their lives publicly, Franklin’s insistence on privacy can seem refreshing - a statement, even. In fact, the co-writer of her autobiography, David Ritz, wrote a second, unauthorized book in an effort to tell her real story. Her death on Aug. 16 marks a mighty loss.Īretha refused to address, let alone dwell on, her personal troubles. The only peer of similar import and impact is Bob Dylan, and I would argue that as the voice of the struggle for equal rights for blacks and for women, Franklin embodied her generation more. She was one of the towering figures whose talents expressed the seismic cultural shifts of a decade of momentous change. In addition to possessing astonishing vocal talent, she was a pianist, songwriter, arranger and performer. ![]() This was a woman who could sing disco, gospel, rock, opera and, of course, soul. Her talent and her impact transcended gender, race, genre and geography. Aretha - an original one-named diva - was one of the greatest artists, period. To say that Franklin was one of the greatest female singers of all time is to miss the point. Franklin’s music profoundly touched and changed the world, because over and over it offered that bridge to salvation, to freedom - laid, as she also sang in one of her most famous covers, over troubled waters. Realistically, the singer might also have been contemplating not the bliss of a healed union but liberation from a bad relationship - the path her own life would take. It proffers a powerful idea, a moral philosophy that Aretha might have learned from one of her father’s legendary sermons: In the act of consciously and conscientiously loving one another, people attain the transcendent state of freedom. Ironically, her husband and manager Ted White, whom she later accused of abuse, is credited as a co-writer, but the singer’s sister Carolyn has said the song was all hers. The Radical Poet Who Perfectly Captured Aretha FranklinĬontextually, this proclamation is a bit of a non sequitur - an abstract step away from the command tense of the rest of the song, in which Franklin tells her man what he needs to do to keep their relationship together: namely, “think.” “Think” has rightly been interpreted as one of the artist’s definitive feminist anthems. “FREEDOM!”Īnd then she repeats the whole thing one more time, for good measure. It’s everything that needs to be said, the word made an exclamation point in a way that only a woman born into the church and nursed by gospel could deliver it. That fourth “freedom” is a shout, a declaration, a testimonial, an exaltation. And then she lets that great big voice of hers loose, returning to the tonic but lifted an octave higher. ![]() ![]() She pitches a half step up on the third line, holding the note perilously, like a proposition or a promise. The Queen of Soul takes the delivery up a notch on the second “freedom,” raising the scale and the stakes. The first “freedom” is a statement, a tonic note, posed. But oh, how Aretha Franklin sang the bejesus out of the bridge to her 1968 hit “Think.” She built the stairway to the song’s climactic crescendo step-by-step. It’s one word, really, repeated four times with interjections, echoed by a choir of women.
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