Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin (9 page)

No doubt, “Today I Sing the Blues” captured the real Aretha. When she signed with Atlantic later in the decade and recorded the
Soul ’69
album, she refashioned it to fit in the “Dr. Feelgood” mode, but the alteration was slight. The original was right to begin with. What wasn’t right, though, was the rest of Aretha’s first record. The material is uneven, the arrangements weak. Only when Aretha settles in on piano and belts blues variations like “Right Now” and “Maybe I’m a Fool” does she take command.

“Those are the songs,” said Hammond, “that worked the best for me. My original notion was to do an entire record of such songs. Aretha and her dad said they were excited to work with me because I had worked with Count Basie and Billie Holiday. I saw her in that great timeless tradition. But when we got into the planning stage, they started saying how important it was that the record
get airplay. They wanted singles—and they wanted a hit. That’s how we wound up doing ‘Sweet Lover,’ an innocuous tune they thought would hit with the teen market. The same thing applied to ‘Love Is the Only Thing.’ The musicians I hired for the session—Ray Bryant, Osie Johnson, and Milton Hinton—were among the most experienced in New York and could adapt to any style. At our studio on Thirtieth Street, they did their best coping with the inferior material. At first, Aretha and her dad thought adding a trombone—the wonderful Tyree Glenn—on certain tracks would sound too old-fashioned, but I finally convinced them otherwise. I also didn’t think that including ‘Over the Rainbow’ was appropriate. But the Franklins were adamant. They said they wanted to reach a wider audience and thought paying tribute to Judy Garland was the way to do it. I capitulated.

“I suggested ‘It Ain’t Necessarily So’ from Gershwin’s masterful
Porgy and Bess
. George Gershwin deeply understood the blues idiom and, together with his brother Ira’s witty lyrics, wrote sterling vehicles for black voices. I was a bit worried that the story, which questioned the literal truth of the Bible with a wink and a nod, might be problematical. But Reverend Franklin had not the least concern. He told me how much he admired the Gershwins. He also said that, when it came to scriptural analysis, he opposed literalism. I was most impressed with the reverend’s erudition and liberal theology.

“We had disagreements, though, when it came to his strong suggestion that we include a gospel song. I’m a passionate fan of gospel. I brought Sister Rosetta Tharpe and the Golden Gate Quartet to Carnegie Hall back in 1938. There’s no music for which I have greater appreciation. At the same time, I didn’t feel that sticking in a single gospel number would help the cohesiveness of this first record. Reverend Franklin disagreed. We discussed it at length and he and Aretha came up with what they considered a compromise—a song called ‘Are You Sure’ from the Broadway musical
The Unsinkable Molly Brown.
The song had somewhat of a spiritual message. Reverend Franklin saw it as white-friendly. I
thought it was anemic. I wanted something much closer to what Aretha had been singing in church, but, again, I was outvoted.

“When we were through recording and listened to the playbacks in the studio, Aretha and her father could not have been more pleased. Their goal was to cover all the bases. My goal was to capture the essence of this remarkable young talent. With the exception of a few songs, I’m afraid I didn’t do that. Yet the reviews were generally excellent, and ‘Today I Sing the Blues’ and ‘Won’t Be Long’ reached the top ten of the rhythm-and-blues
Billboard
chart. They didn’t enjoy tremendous sales, but they did garner airplay. In that regard, the record, for all my reservations, was seen as a semi-success.”

The recording sessions began in August of 1960 and continued, off and on, for six months. Hammond explained that was due to the dispute over material.

“The company wanted to release two singles before the album was complete,” he said. “ ‘Love Is the Only Thing’ came out and didn’t perform. Then we released ‘Today I Sing the Blues.’ ”

Billboard
gave each of the singles three stars. The reviewer called the first “a smartly styled blues by the gal in dual track. Fine gospel-type piano is heard in the backing. She can catch some spins with jazz-oriented effort.” Of the second,
Billboard
wrote, “A slow rhythm blues chant with gal backed in okay style by guitar, piano and bass. The artist has talent and should be watched.”

For the third and fourth singles, “Won’t Be Long” and “Right Now,” released in time for Christmas 1960,
Billboard
was equally generous: “Young blues thrush Aretha Franklin comes through in solid style on her second outing for the label. She handles the swinging ‘Won’t Be Long’ with a sure vocal touch and does a fine job on the flip as well. Strong wax.”

According to Dunstan Prial, Hammond’s biographer, the producer wrote Aretha’s manager that “Won’t Be Long” had sold forty thousand copies and was on its way to becoming a major hit. But that prediction didn’t prove true. It peaked at number seven on the
R&B charts and did not cross over into pop territory. At best, it was a minor hit.

“It languished because Aretha did not show up for several interviews and press events,” Hammond told me. “She refused to promote it properly. I don’t know what her problems were, but she had a habit of missing important dates. I suspect she withdrew into a kind of depressive state. I think she had real challenges in the area of mood management.”

Before the album was released, in February of 1961, Jo King had already booked Aretha into the Village Vanguard, perhaps the most hallowed of all New York jazz clubs.

Aretha has told interviewers about her initial opportunity to play the Apollo. She said she chose the Vanguard instead because of the jazz venue’s enormous prestige.

Hammond had a different memory. He told me that Aretha simply didn’t show up for her appearance at the Apollo. She also missed several studio and club dates, all without explanation.

“Sometimes she’d say she had a sore throat,” said Hammond, “but most of the time she offered no excuses.”

Dunstan Prial quoted from a letter that Hammond sent to Aretha after she had missed the date at the Apollo as well as an engagement at New York’s Village Gate: “If you don’t straighten up soon you will be a legend in the business and not one of the nice ones.”

In her book, Aretha does not discuss any friction with Hammond. Her attention seemed to be on the development of a jazz base before R&B. As Ray Charles once said, “Prove yourself as a real jazz artist, and everything else will follow. Jazz is the hardest thing we do. Sing jazz right and the critics gotta respect you.”

And yet, according to three eyewitness reports, Aretha didn’t perform a true jazz set.

In October 1960,
Billboard
wrote, “When Aretha Franklin sat at the piano and sang the blues, the audience at the Village Vanguard in Greenwich Village erupted into applause. The gal singer,
who has had one single disk so far on the Columbia label, has a fine strong voice that bears emotional fruit when it is channeled into the material she knows and feels best. Miss Franklin’s New York singing debut was a marked success when she relaxed and sang such blues material as ‘Love Is the Only Thing’ and ‘Won’t Be Long.’

“Aretha Franklin was accompanied by a fine trio under the direction of pianist Ellis Larkin, with Floyd William Jr. on drums and Major Holley on bass.”

Major Holley told me, “We were surprised how she kept mixing the material. She wanted Ray Bryant to play the gig but he wasn’t available, so I suggested Ellis Larkin. There’s no better jazz piano player. For years he worked with Ella. When I told that to Aretha, she grew excited and during rehearsals had us work standards that Ella had sung—‘I Thought About You,’ ‘A Foggy Day,’ ‘I’ve Got a Crush on You.’ Aretha sang them magnificently. But a day or so before we opened, she decided to sing the songs she’d been working on for her album. The blues tunes were great, but the novelty songs—I guess she thought they’d be hits—seemed beneath her. She also insisted on including Broadway songs. It all felt sort of disconnected to me.”

“The first time I caught Aretha,” said Carmen McRae, the great jazz singer, “was at the Vanguard in the early sixties. My knowledge of gospel is limited so I hadn’t heard of her or her father. But Max Gordon, who owns the Vanguard, pulled my coat to her. He said she was gonna be the next Dinah.

“She blew me away—I’ll say that for starters. I leaned over to Max and said, ‘You’re right. She does have Dinah Washington chops.’ She sang the shit outta some blues and put a hurting on ‘Ain’t Necessarily So’ that I thought was just perfect. The one thing she lacked, though, was taste in material. She sang some seriously stupid shit. Maybe she was looking for a teen hit, but she did at least four or five songs that were crap. At the same time, she took a corny song like ‘Hello, Young Lovers’ and turned it inside out. It
had been a long time since I’d heard a singer express so much emotion in her voice. After her first set, Max introduced me, and, given how emotionally she sang, I expected her to have a supercharged emotional personality like Dinah. Instead, she was the shyest thing I’ve ever met. Would hardly look me in the eye. Didn’t say more than two words. I mean, this bitch gave
bashful
a new meaning. Anyway, I didn’t give her any advice because she didn’t ask for any, but I knew goddamn well that, no matter how good she was—and she was absolutely wonderful—she’d have to make up her mind whether she wanted to be Della Reese, Dinah Washington, or Sarah Vaughan. I also had a feeling she wouldn’t have minded being Leslie Uggams or Diahann Carroll. I remember thinking that if she didn’t figure out who she was—and quick—she was gonna get lost in the weeds of the music biz. And I can testify that those weeds are awfully fuckin’ dense.”

Carmen saw the situation accurately. Excited to be in New York, excited by the jazz scene, the Broadway scene, the R&B scene, and the pop-music scene, Aretha went in different directions at once.

“If, in the beginning, she had hit big as a mainstream artist, she and I would have never worked together,” said Jerry Wexler. “She would have been thrilled to have a Nancy Wilson–style career.”

Wilson, discovered in Ohio by Cannonball Adderley, came to New York and signed with Capitol Records in 1960, the same year Aretha signed with Columbia. Her first single, “Guess Who I Saw Today,” an exquisitely articulated musical short story, was a huge hit and catapulted Nancy into the front ranks of cabaret/nightclub/concert-hall jazz chanteuses.

On the other side of the ledger, Mary Wells signed with Motown that very same year—1960—and took off shortly after with hits like “Bye Bye Baby.” Ironically, it was Aretha’s onetime neighbor and her brother’s best friend Smokey Robinson whose productions and songs—“Two Lovers,” “You Beat Me to the Punch,” “My Guy”—formed the foundation of Motown’s unprecedented success. They
were teen ditties, comparable to Aretha’s “Sweet Lover” and “Love Is the Only Thing” from her debut Columbia album.

When you listen to early Aretha side by side with early Mary Wells and early Nancy Wilson, the differences are obvious. Nancy’s “Guess Who I Saw Today” is an exercise in the high art of jazz storytelling; the arrangement is a paragon of understatement. Mary was working with brilliant material, and her sound, with Smokey’s help, was sculpted with great subtlety.

Unlike Wilson’s work with Smokey, Aretha’s work with Hammond resulted in poor sales. Aretha was understandably frustrated. She expected major crossover play and was disappointed when that didn’t happen. She was convinced that Columbia had failed to promote her properly. They had stressed her R&B material like “Today I Sing the Blues” at the expense of her pop material. She didn’t see herself in a position to challenge the marketing department. That was her manager’s job. It was especially frustrating because everywhere she looked, she saw black singers crossing over to the white market.

It was 1960, the year of Chubby Checker’s “Twist” and Ray Charles’s “Georgia on My Mind.” Sam Cooke hit with “Chain Gang,” Jackie Wilson with “Doggin’ Around,” and Dinah Washington and Brook Benton with “A Rockin’ Good Way.” The Shirelles had “Tonight’s the Night,” and the Drifters “Save the Last Dance for Me.”

Aretha was correct; left and right, black music was crossing over. When I asked her whether she thought that the production and material might have been impediments to that crossover, she replied adamantly, “Not in the least. I have never compromised my material. Even then, I knew a good song from a bad one. And if Hammond, one of the legends of the business, didn’t know how to produce a record, who does? No, the fault was with promotion. The head of Columbia was a famous executive named Goddard Lieberson. He was the big boss and supposedly very close to Mahalia. He was the executive who could approve the ad budgets and make sure you received the media attention required to sell records. But in all my years at his label, I never as much as met the man. He
never bothered to come to the studio when I was recording or even call me to say that he liked what I was doing. I was simply neglected in favor of bigger Columbia stars, like Percy Faith and Guy Mitchell. Soon after I signed, Andy Williams and Barbra Streisand came to the label. They were given major marketing budgets. I wasn’t.”

Hammond disputed that. “When Aretha signed with us,” he said, “we saw her as an across-the-board star. I don’t believe she ever suffered from neglect in any area. In my long career, I’ve known few artists who, having failed to achieve commercial success, didn’t blame it on the record company. It’s the oldest story in the music business.”

In February of 1961, as John F. Kennedy settled in at the White House, Aretha’s debut album was released. Despite the introduction of one of the most compelling voices of modern times, Aretha made only a small splash. Her secular career had begun with uncertainty.

Her personal life was also less than sanguine. She was dating several men in New York but missed her babies, who were being raised by Big Mama.

“Aretha was committed to New York,” said Carolyn, “but I think the fact that Daddy would always be anchored in Detroit bothered her. She would have greatly preferred that he find a church in New York and move there so she could have him nearby. Aretha’s one of those women who needed and wanted a strong man. She’s changed over the years, but in those first years, when she was aiming at stardom, it was very important for her to have a man by her side and help her choose the right direction.”