Aretha Franklin sang as if she was talking to you — and about you, writes Bonnie Greer

Iconic figure: Aretha Franklin in the late Sixties, at the height of the civil rights unrest edition 17/07/2018, pg 14
Everett/REX/Shutterstock
Bonnie Greer17 August 2018

Aretha Franklin always fashioned dreams. It is a mistake to see her singing as just “earthy” or “gritty” or “real”. It was, of course, but that was just the surface, and a rather trivial one. With the kind of voice that she had, with its top notes full of yearning, she could, on a deeper level, induce a state in which it was possible to see something better.

No matter what she sang.

There are singers who can barely hold a note in the conventional sense, who sound as if a song might be trying to get away from them. There are singers whose technical prowess and ability are all that they are and this is pleasant in itself. There are those singers who are the equivalent of meat and two veg but we like them because we trust them. They sound like we do in our own heads, on a good day.

And then there is Aretha Franklin.

She was such an emotionally powerful singer that it is said that she could even throw her back-up band off its groove. This is an amazing feat because the Queen of Soul worked with only the best. Like many black singers on the touring circuit in the old days, when all manner of nefarious and unscrupulous things could happen in a segregated landscape with little recourse to the law, Aretha took her money up front and in cash.

Aretha Franklin - In pictures

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Out of an emotionally shattered childhood and youth, during which she lost her mother and bore two children herself before she was out of her teens, she worked relentlessly on the gospel touring circuit with her famous preacher-father, the Rev C L Franklin. Her father got her a record deal and managed her for a time, too.

Too early she knew life. She knew what it gave, and what it took away.

Former President Barack Obama tweeted: “Aretha helped define the American experience. In her voice, we could feel our history, all of it and in every shade — our power and our pain, our darkness and our light, our quest for redemption and our hard-won respect. May the Queen of Soul rest in eternal peace.”

Aretha Franklin's last performance

Donald Trump said he knew her well adding that: “She worked for me on numerous occasions.”

The Queen Of Soul would have laughed at that. She was employed. But she worked for no one. Only the music, and maybe for God.

There is an Aretha Franklin and an Aretha Franklin recording for everyone. That is the beauty and the greatness of the woman.

Bonnie Greer (Graham Jepson )
Graham Jepson

For me, that song is Say A Little Prayer. It was released in 1968, a tumultuous and ugly year in many ways: Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated within months of one another; the police, in my hometown Chicago, ran riot over innocent anti-war protestors at the Democratic National Convention; there were urban uprisings in the black community; there was poverty, there was Vietnam.

But 1968 was also the true middle of the Sixties. It was the beginning of the part that was the phenomenon of it. By then, for a black girl like me, growing up on Chicago’s South Side and going to sleep to the sound of a train whistle ringing in the distance as the Illinois Central powered through a few streets away, the “Swinging Sixties” existed only in magazines, at the cosmetic counter and on 45 records.

In 1968, London had become for me a mecca of coolness and beauty. It was Carnaby Street and freedom. In 1968, Aretha released Say A Little Prayer, a song first recorded by Dionne Warwick, and written by the great team of Burt Bacharach and Hal David.

"Say A Little Prayer sounded like the London in my mind — a city where it was possible to live and be free"

In Miss Warwick’s version there were the brass and the horns, the usual New York sound of the great Bacharach. This version was a massive success in America. But Aretha recorded another version, mainly with her piano and a chorus and she sang as if she was talking directly to you and about you. Hidden within her voice was something that felt like a dream to me, something about a city where it was possible to go and live and be free. Her version of Say A Little Prayer sounded like the London in my mind.

It is no surprise to me that it was Aretha’s version, and not Miss Warwick’s, that became a big success here in the UK. Having been a Londoner now for half my life, I understand its appeal on this side of the pond. Like London, it is what jazz musicians call “straight ahead.” No gloss.

Aretha Franklin’s musical intelligence; her linking that intelligence to justice, to peace; to the rights of women and everyone, combined to make her a one-off. The great rock organist Billy Preston once said that she was the best singer that America ever produced and maybe this is true. Not only because of her fine voice; her great natural musicality; her ability to make a song her own and then give it to you, but also because she hid from us.

She never allowed us to know who she really was. But who she really was included being the woman who offered to stand bail for black activist and feminist Angela Davis in 1971, a time when “Black Lives Matter” was put to the sword, and when Davis faced prison for revolutionary activity. Aretha explained that she knew what it was like not to be free and that everyone needed to be free. Who she really was, too, was a normal woman who struggled with love and her weight and the need to be pretty.

It is said that we can hear music in the womb, that we come out singing inside of ourselves, not crying. We know, too, that the last sense to die is the sense of hearing, so that we can hear music at the very end, and know it, too.

The life of Aretha Franklin has come to an end. And another is beginning to be. It is her immortality.

  • Bonnie Greer is a playwright and author.