Letra de Amazing Grace

At the time Aretha Franklin spoke with Charles L. Sanders for Ebony in her Manhattan apartment, she had already recorded the hits that would keep her in designer gowns and extravagant hats for life. The interview would have been around the summer of 1971; there’s a reference to her upcoming album Young, Gifted and Black, which she had finished recording in February of that year. Franklin briefly mentioned her plans for Amazing Grace, saying that she was “real excited” about the gospel recording and that “it’s going to be done with James Cleveland and we’ll record it in a church with a real good choir.” Franklin also seems to be thinking about the era’s social movements. The article begins with Sanders noticing that the singer’s bookshelf includes The Negro Handbook, Frantz Fanon’s A Dying Colonialism and “that far out Eros and Civilization by Angela Davis’ old professor, Dr. Herbert Marcuse.” As usual, Franklin said little, but the article does point to how she had reinvented herself since 1966.

When Dobkin wrote about Franklin’s move to Atlantic from Columbia in I Never Loved a Man the Way I Loved You, he attests that, despite portrayals to the contrary, Wexler did not just take her back to church when she signed to his company. He adds what made her early Atlantic records command the wide audience that alluded her earlier: “The novelty of Aretha’s first Atlantic releases, the element that pushed her into the popular-music stratosphere was not gospel fervor (though that certainly helped). It was sex.”1 Possibly, but that’s not quite the whole story, and one could also counter that a reason why Franklin’s church followers did not abandon her was that she didn’t ooze sexuality to the extent of, say, Marvin Gaye. And she usually didn’t mix up two different concepts of love as strangely as her male Detroit counterpart did when he trailed off “Let’s Get It On” with his own context for the word “Sanctified.” She chose a different role.

After all, it wasn’t just sensuality that put Franklin’s version of Otis Redding’s “Respect” in Jet’s Soul Brothers Top 20 poll, and awarded her a citation from Dr. Marin Luther King, Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership convention in the summer of 1967.2Whether Franklin asked for it or not, she became a cultural heroine in a way that set her apart from such aggressively sexual predecessors as Dinah Washington. By 1971, the empowerment that “Respect” and “Think” embodied turned even more overt in her blazing rendition of Nina Simone’s “Young, Gifted and Black.” She also started to front a working band that sounded at home backing her in New York and Miami studios, the epicenter of San Francisco’s rock scene, and, ultimately, the church where she, and most of that group, began. It’s the sort of skilled and sympathetic unit that would be the vehicle for any musical advances. Her songs became longer, and stretched out over new, different and often free-flowing rhythms: she achieved the sense of liberation that her voice always demanded. That Franklin was also delving deeper, and more openly, into gospel fervor at that time wasn’t paradoxical.

Much of what’s been written about Franklin during this period points toward a newfound sense of confidence, albeit one mixed with an aura of mystery that lasts to this day.3 As the ’60s concluded, she ended her marriage and professional connection to Ted White. For whatever reason, Franklin avoided the recording studios for several months at a time between 1968–1970, much to Wexler’s chagrin. When she did show up, the results were hits that defined the times (“Think,” “I Say a Little Prayer” from Aretha Now in mid-1968) or are reminders that she still could have been a prominent jazz vocalist (the mis-titled Soul ’69). She also delved into the Sanctified rhythms and call-and-response vocals on her composition “Spirit in the Dark,” the title track of her summer 1970 album. The lyrics picked up from Wilson Pickett’s exhortations to dance and some nursery rhymes, but the title itself comes straight from Sanctified churches’ belief in feeling the holy spirit — and one could speculate if the “dark” suggests a negative (troubled times) or positive (pigmentation).4 With piano lines and crescendos sounding as strong as her voice, the beat is the most direct line to a storefront church that she had recorded for Atlantic up to that point. Despite such exuberance, her muted comments about it are oblique.

“Well, it’s true that I have to really feel a song before I’ll deal with it, and just about every song I do is based on an experience I’ve had or an experience that someone I know has gone through,” Franklin told Sanders in Ebony. “‘Spirit in the Dark’? Hmmmh ... that’s one I’d rather not talk about. It’s very, very personal and I don’t want to get into it right now.”

It also wasn’t the only gospel-shaped song that she recorded back then. Rainey played bass on her 1971 single, “Spanish Harlem,” and refers its “cross between an eighth-note feel and a shuffle.”

“That’s the gospel, Pentecostal feel where you’re really trying to nail what the groove is,” Rainey added. “If you want to write it down for somebody, you can’t. You just have to sort of listen to it and feel it. But in playing with her, she brought out another energy. It’s a kind of feel that’s not descriptive. I always try, but it’s very difficult.”

Her performances were also infrequent, although when she appeared onstage in the spring of 1970, Franklin expressed ambitious plans, especially an ongoing involvement with traditional church music. Her intentions included bringing gospel to Broadway with her sister Carolyn, and a television special in Israel to be called “Aretha in the Holy Land.”5 When Franklin performed at the Las Vegas International Hotel on June 8, 1970 (her first concert in almost a year), she included Albertina Walker and The Caravans on the bill and would continue touring with this group into the following year. She also insisted on the hotel hiring an all-black ensemble for the show, which must have been an audacious request for this historically segregated city.6

Franklin’s refocus on gospel intertwined with early 1970’s cultural discourse. For someone growing up in C. L. Franklin’s family, the black consciousness movement of that era was not a jolt. Much of the organizational force behind the civil rights movement was built, and debated, within black churches, and the institutions’ music and musicians have always been there. In particular, when Aretha Franklin was a child, she would’ve seen her father chastise the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for not doing enough to organize Detroit’s African American communities, and witnessed his equally daring support of the young Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. She and Mahalia Jackson remained alongside King, and Franklin sang “Precious Lord, Take My Hand” at his funeral.

In the post-King era, Franklin’s cultural embrace became more public and took on an artistic dimension. In her memoirs, she states that much of this came from her new boyfriend, Ken Cunningham. He’s described in terms of the Black Arts Movement, which was burgeoning not far from their New York home, and included Nikki Giovanni. Franklin mentions Cunningham’s plans for a black-owned fashion business, the New Breeders, which would feature African-inspired clothes. When I asked Giovanni how much Franklin’s thinking at this time reflected the Black Aesthetic concept — as articulated by herself and such other writers as Larry Neal — she simply replied, “Aretha was the black aesthetic.”

“Daddy had been preaching black pride for decades, and we as a people had rediscovered how beautiful black truly was and were echoing, ‘Say it loud, I’m black and I’m proud.’” Franklin told Ritz. “Wolf [Ken Cunningham] and I embodied that pride. I stopped shaving my eyebrows and using pencils and went back to a natural look with a much lighter touch. I lost weight and wore my hair in an Afro; I began to appreciate myself as a beautiful black woman.”7

Just as explicitly, she recorded Simone’s “Young, Gifted and Black” in August 1970. The song’s message, written by a Methodist minister’s granddaughter who Franklin admired, speaks for itself. Franklin also leads a pulpit-influenced call-and-response with her gospel-rooted back-up singers, The Sweet Inspirations. The changes in her group at that time proved equally crucial. Rainey and guitarist Cornell Dupree played on this song, and Purdie worked on half the other tracks of Franklin’s album of the same name. While Franklin had top sidemen throughout her earlier Atlantic sessions, this new core rhythm section essentially became a working band. All three had played alongside the dynamic Texas-bred, New York-based saxophonist King Curtis in the mid ’60s. Curtis, a favorite of Franklin and Wexler, didn’t so much straddle the borders among r&b, rock, and hard bop, but annihilated the gates. They also shared early experiences in the black church, albeit Purdie and Rainey more than Dupree. The other keyboardists on the Young, Gifted and Black album — Cleveland’s protégé Billy Preston and Donny Hathaway — had also been immersed in similar religious backgrounds. If the principles of pride, strength, and mutual respect were hallmarks of the Black Arts Movement and African American spirituality, this group lived it, according to Purdie: