On Aretha Franklin’s birthday, revisit David Remnick on the Queen of Soul’s central place in American music and spirit.
The cool cat wept, King had marvelled. When I e-mailed President Obama about Aretha Franklin and that night, he wasn’t reticent in his reply. “Nobody embodies more fully the connection between the African-American spiritual, the blues, R. & B., rock and roll—the way that hardship and sorrow were transformed into something full of beauty and vitality and hope,” he wrote back, through his press secretary. “American history wells up when Aretha sings.
When C. L. Franklin was around fifteen, he experienced a vision: he saw a single plank on the wall of his house engulfed in flames. “A voice spoke to me from behind the plank,” he told the ethnomusicologist Jeff Todd Titon, “and said something like ‘Go and preach the gospel to all the nations.’ ” By the time he was eighteen, he was a circuit rider, an itinerant preacher hitchhiking from church to church.
In those days, New Bethel was on Hastings Street, the spine of Paradise Valley, which was the center of the black community. Detroit had swelled with black migrants from the South, and Hastings Street was dense with churches and black-run beauty salons, barbershops, funeral homes; around the corner from New Bethel was the Flame Show Bar and Lee’s Sensation. Franklin was, in the phrase of one of his congregants, “stinky sharp.
As a girl, Aretha took it all in: Sunday mornings and the nights before. She was thoroughly absorbed in the church life of New Bethel and in the cultural life of her living room, which, at times, seemed to represent the epicenter and genealogy of African-American music. Sitting on the stairs, she watched Art Tatum and Nat Cole play the piano. Oscar Peterson, Duke Ellington, Della Reese, Ella Fitzgerald, Billy Eckstine, and Lionel Hampton came to visit.
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