Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin (5 page)

“Was she exploited? If she hadn’t been, she would have been furious. She would have seen that as a betrayal on the part of her father. After her talent was manifest, she wanted to be with Frank every minute of her life—in church, on the road, and finally at those parties where he presented her to the best entertainers in the world. It was her living room where she met Dinah Washington.”

In 1954, Dinah Washington was a huge star, and Aretha, a preteen, was sitting at the top of the staircase watching the party below. That’s when she first saw Ted White. He was the man who would, in the sixties, become Aretha’s first husband, her first
important manager, and a figure strong enough to whisk her away from her father’s domain. White had the reputation of a gentleman pimp. That night, Aretha watched him scoop up and carry off an inebriated Dinah Washington, whose musical path from gospel to blues to jazz to rhythm-and-blues to pop was the very route Aretha would soon seek to travel.

R
ay Charles and Billy Preston used the same expression to describe the gospel circuit in the fifties. They called it “a sex circus.”

Ray told me that when he started out on the R&B circuit in the early fifties, he’d often run into the gospel groups that were playing in the same city.

“Because hotels wouldn’t take blacks, we’d wind up in rooming houses run by some local lady,” said Ray. “Cats like the Blind Boys of Alabama and the Dixie Hummingbirds would be there, along with bluesmen like T-Bone Walker or Lowell Fulson. I loved the church singers ’cause of their harmonies and rhythms. I’d come out of a country church and could relate to the excitement of their music. Sometimes late at night we’d jam on some old hymn that brought me all the way back home. When it came to pure heart singing, they were motherfuckers. When it came to pure sex, they were wilder than me—and that’s saying something. In those days I had a thing for orgies, but I had to be the only cat in a room with two or three chicks. The gospel people didn’t think that way. The cats liked it with the cats and the chicks liked it with the chicks and no one minded mixing it up this way or that. I wasn’t judging no one, and I got a kick outta seeing how God’s people were going for
it hard and heavy every which way. I was just surprised to see how loose they were. Someone told me that the ministers in the churches where they were singing didn’t know about those going-ons, but, hell, more than one time I heard about a minister showing up at the rooming house ’cause he wanted in on the action.”

“It wasn’t the R-and-B crowd that turned me out,” said Billy Preston when we were discussing his autobiography. (Unfortunately, Preston died before we had a chance to complete the work.) “It was the church crowd where the vibe was wide open. It was anything goes. Many times the ‘anything’ involved men-and-men and women-and-women hookups. That almost seemed the norm. In the community outside the church, gay men were called sissies. There was zero tolerance. But inside the church, a lot of the music was created by gay men. It was almost a tradition. Everyone knew that my mentor James Cleveland, who became the King of Gospel, was gay. He wasn’t just a great singer, piano player, choir arranger, and writer—he really invented big-choir modern gospel. James had his own church and a national following. So many of the other major figures—like Professor J. Earle Hines out of Los Angeles and Professor Alex Bradford out of Chicago—were gay. Mahalia surrounded herself with gay men her entire life. In the neighborhood, they made you ashamed of being gay, but in the church you were almost proud to be part of the gay elite of musicians. Along with the preachers, we were the people who kept the church going. The people came for the sermons and the music. In black churches, the word is always musical. God is in the grooves.”

Aretha’s father was an established star on the gospel circuit in 1954, when she went on the road with him at twelve years old. A year before, C.L. had begun recording his sermons for Joe Von Battle, the black owner of Joe’s Record Shop at 3530 Hastings Street, close to the New Bethel Baptist Church. A man who understood both sides of Hastings Street, Von Battle also released records by bluesman John Lee Hooker. C.L.’s sermons sold briskly in Detroit, and
then, after Von Battle acquired distribution, they found an audience in Chicago and New York. The sermons were also played on a powerful radio station in Gallatin, Tennessee, WLAC-AM. The gospel program was sponsored by Randy’s Record Store, whose mail-order business helped boost C.L.’s sales. Music markets opened—before long Los Angeles was in the mix—and by the mid-1950s Franklin had a national audience. He put together a “traveling religious service,” as Aretha called it, to both earn additional income—ministers at the churches where he performed solicited a “love offering” from the assembled congregants—and sell records of his sermons.

C.L. had three opening performers—Sammy Brant, a female little person with an enormous voice; Lucy Branch, another powerhouse vocalist; and Aretha herself, who would sing a solo either with the choir or while accompanying herself on piano. The centerpiece of the program was, of course, Reverend’s fiery sermon. As he spoke, Aretha punctuated his remarks with pianistic flourishes.

Never a passionate student, she was happy to leave school for these tours. She not only loved being with her father but was thrilled to be part of C.L.’s spreading popularity. She was equally thrilled to skip from childhood to adulthood.

“Aretha couldn’t wait to become a woman,” said Ruth Bowen. “She didn’t like being a little girl. She wanted to be a lady—and her talent let her make that leap before she was a teenager.”

Interviewers have always found Aretha reluctant to discuss the fact that she was pregnant at thirteen. Neither has she been willing to talk about the sexual component to the gospel circuit.

“I can understand Aretha not wanting to talk about that,” said Etta James when I asked her about her early road experience. “Who wants to admit that you’re praising the Lord at the eight p.m. service and servicing some drop-dead gorgeous hunk of a singer an hour later? Both Aretha and I started out before we were teenagers. We were out of our homes for the first time, and we wanted to experience it all. I wouldn’t use the expression
sexually active.
I’d say
sexually overactive.
We couldn’t wait to give it up ’cause that’s
what it meant to be grown. Aretha was as anxious as anyone. I know for a fact that Aretha gave it up often and easily. In that respect, she was just like most of us young singers out there. The fact that she was the daughter of a famous preacher made no difference. In truth, PKs—preachers’ kids—were known for promiscuity. Because they were expected to act one way, they rebelled and acted another.”

“You’re wanting to know if Aretha was promiscuous?” asked Ruth Bowen. “Well, it was a promiscuous culture. She was a product of that culture. She was a child prodigy of that culture. Prodigies tend to feel big-time entitlement. I think that’s true of everyone from Mickey Rooney to Judy Garland to Elizabeth Taylor to Dinah Washington. Their gifts are so big they feel as though they have the right to do what they want, especially in the sexual arena. Beginning at a young age, they also have to work very hard. That distinguishes them from other kids. They know they’re special. All that rigorous traveling, all those performances, all that money they’re making for their parents or their sponsors—it all makes them feel that they deserve any treat that comes their way.”

“I know I didn’t develop in no natural way like no average kid,” said Etta James. “I didn’t go through the usual growing-up stages. One day I was a child, the next day a grown woman. It was strange, and it no doubt fucked me up. I’m sure it fucked up Aretha too. We were thrown into a world of too much excitement where we were overstimulated way too soon.”

Jerry Wexler, a scholar of African American music as well as a celebrated producer, had his own analysis of gospel music and the gospel singers’ lifestyle. He and I had a running dialogue on this subject for decades.

“It’s all suppressed sexuality,” said Wexler, a committed atheist. “They call it Holy Spirit, but it’s really libidinous. Gospel music isn’t simply more animated and emotional than secular, it’s sexier.”

I disagreed with Jerry—and still do.

Archbishop Carl Bean, with whom I cowrote
I Was Born This Way
, his autobiography, is the product of the gospel circuit. A
protégé of Professor Alex Bradford, Bean is founder and prelate of the national Unity Fellowship of Christ Church.

“The truth of gospel music is in the moment,” he explained. “The extraordinary energy of that moment is the manifestation of God. The nature of the moment—its overwhelming power—is too great to be attributed to man. Man is the vehicle. God is the fuel. If you listen carefully to the singing and the music, if you open your heart to what is being said, you realize that no human being could conjure forth such spirit. It matters not if, after the service, the singers celebrate in a worldly fashion. For in the moment—in the service, in the praise and worship of a mighty God—there is complete and absolute sincerity. I know for a fact that Reverend C. L. Franklin loved the Lord with all his heart. I can say the same about Reverend James Cleveland and sister Aretha Franklin. That all these people—like you, like me, like everyone—displayed human frailties has nothing to do with the authenticity of their witness. Their art form, whether in a sermon or a song, are testimonies to the everlasting glory of God.”

When I asked Aretha’s siblings whether they had ever gone through a crisis of faith, they all had the same answer: “Never.”

“As a family,” said Erma, “we faced many challenges. We fought and fell out among ourselves many times. But faith was never an issue. Each of us have an abiding faith in the living God.”

As far as I’m concerned, Archbishop Bean put the matter to rest when he said, “Does the rampant promiscuity associated with the gospel circuit undercut the authenticity of our holy message? Of course not. If that were the case, then virtually every holy message expressed through human beings would be invalidated, since every human is a deeply flawed vessel. Men far wiser than I have said, ‘You can trust the message without trusting the messenger.’ God speaks through man, and man, in virtually every cultural setting, is a mess.”

“Aretha is a mess,” said Reverend James Cleveland, using the colloquial expression in a positive light. He laughed when he said it.
“When she was starting out on the road with her daddy, he tried his best to rein her in. But she was pretty and quietly flirtatious and possessed a voice that everyone loved, especially the men. Given the circumstances, Frank was a good father. I know he tried his best. He certainly took care of his children. But he was an unorthodox man on every level, and you’d have to believe that his children would be unorthodox as well. Parents often say, ‘Do what I say, not what I do.’ But children wind up imitating their folks’ actions, not their words. In the case of Reverend C. L. Franklin and his talented children—and especially Aretha, the most talented of all—they did just that.”

In
From These Roots
, Aretha was not reluctant to discuss her first crushes. They were many. She freely listed her puppy loves—starting with Gordon Blasingame in Buffalo—in extremely romantic terms. Aretha always became most explicit when she was discussing the physical beauty of men and the lure of certain foods. She described her introduction to the bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich, for instance, in ecstatic terms.

When the subject of Sam Cooke came up, though, the terms changed. Her voice grew excited. She described seeing him when his gospel group sang at New Bethel—and how he drove the church girls crazy. She also proudly stated that Sam and her dad were close friends.

Aretha was twelve and Sam was twenty-three when, in her own account, she went to his motel room in Atlanta. When her father learned they were together, he banged on the door. When the Staple Singers passed by, he asked them whether his daughter was in there with Sam. They played dumb. Aretha claimed nothing happened that day. And even though she admitted to visiting him in his hotel room in New York some time later, she also insisted that their relationship remained platonic.

“That’s not what Sam told me,” said Johnnie Taylor, the great soul singer who performed in the Highway QC’s, the gospel group begun by Sam. “Sam said that he enjoyed a lot more than Aretha’s voice. But I didn’t need to hear that from Sam. When I was on the
gospel circuit and played the same cities as Reverend Franklin and Aretha, I saw it for myself. She looked to be very shy and she didn’t talk all that much. But when it came to partying, she was ready to go.”

“We were precocious children,” said Erma, who joined the gospel circuit with her sister and dad when she was fifteen and Aretha was twelve. “We did things far ahead of other people our age. Living in an adult world let us break through the boundaries of childhood at an early age. Our father disapproved—he was a strict parent—but our father could not exert total control over us. In the cities where he traveled, his schedule was hectic. In addition to preparing for the service, he was speaking to newspaper and magazine reporters. If there was a gospel radio station in town, he was interviewed. Then he was always reading his books—politics, poetry, theology. Keeping track of his energetic and curious daughters was next to impossible. We got away with a lot.”

The subjects of sex and sibling rivalry are intricately related in Aretha’s life. Carolyn, whose preference was for women, told me how Aretha and Erma would often fight over the same man.

“I remember them coming off the road and squabbling over some guy,” said Carolyn. “Aretha was convinced he had a crush on her, and Erma was convinced Aretha was trying to steal him. Both my sisters are strong personalities with strong attitude. They can be headstrong and arrogant. And neither likes to back down. Intellectually, Erma might be sharper, but Ree is no slouch. Musically, no one can touch Aretha, but Erma is a fine singer. Erma is much more the extrovert. Socially she was ahead of Ree. She was far more comfortable speaking with people. Aretha had a fear of people she didn’t know.”

From the observations of her siblings and of witnesses like James Cleveland, Ruth Bowen, and Etta James, the picture of the prepubescent comes into focus: Traumatized by the departure and sudden death of her mother, devastated by the departure of Lola
Moore, heartbroken that her father refused to make Clara Ward her mother, she found herself in the spiritually charged, sexually overcharged culture of Holy Ghost music-making where, night after night, the excitement reached fever pitch. That she probably became sexually active at twelve or thirteen is neither surprising nor unusual. Preteens and teens act out in a variety of ways. Aretha’s way was sex. The sexually permissive atmosphere in which she grew up did nothing to discourage her. Yet at the very moment she was discovering grown-up sex, she was also being recorded as a grown-up singer of sacred song.

In those first examples of her voice, we hear something more than a child transforming into a woman. We hear a miracle.