Aretha Franklin and Her Peers Would Be Disappointed And Horrified
Mutterings And Murmurs . Songs For The Apocalypse
Bits from WikiWiki –
Aretha Louise Franklin – March 25, 1942 – August 16, 2018) was an American singer, songwriter and pianist. She was known as the ‘Queen of Soul’. The now pointless and disgraced Rolling Stone Magazine twice named her as the greatest singer of all time. With global sales of over 75 million records, Franklin is one of the world’s best-selling and most respected music artists.
As a child, Franklin was noticed for her gospel singing at New Bethel Baptist Church in Detroit, Michigan, where her father C.L. Franklin was a minister. At the age of 18, she was signed as a recording artist for Columbia Records While her career did not immediately flourish, Franklin found acclaim and commercial success once she signed with Atlantic Records in 1966. She recorded acclaimed albums such as I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love you (1967), Lady Soul (1968), Spirit in the Dark (1970), Young, Gifted and Black (1972), Amazing Grace (1972), and Sparkle (1976). Franklin left Atlantic in 1979 and signed with Arista Records. Her success continued with the albums Jump To It (1982), Who’s Zoomin Who? (1985), Aretha (1986) and A Rose Is Still a Rose (1998).
Franklin recorded 112 charted singles on the US Billboard charts, including 73 Hot 100 entries, 17 top-ten pop singles, 100 R&B entries and 20 number-one R&B singles. Her best-known hits include; I Never Loved a Man(The Way I Loved You), Respect, (You Make Me Feel Like)A Natural Woman, Chain of Fools, Think, I Say a Little Prayer, Ain’t No Way, Call Me, Don’t Play that Song(You Lied), Spanish Harlem, Rock Steady, Day Dreaming, Until You Come Back To Me, Something He can feel, Jump to It, Freeway of Love, and Who’s Zoomin Who.
Franklin received numerous honors and awards (when awards and honors were somewhat genuine) throughout her career. She won 18 Grammy Awards (out of 44 nominations). She was also awarded the National Medal of Arts and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 1987, she became the first female artist to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Her other inductions include the UK Music Hall of Fame in 2005, the Gospel Music Hall of Fame in 2012, and posthumously the National women’s Hall of Fame in 2020. In 2019, the Pulitzer Prize jury awarded her a posthumous special citation. “for her indelible contribution to American music and culture for more than five decades”.
And then there were other inconvenient truths that describe her as an exploited and abused young talent who was taken advantage of by men :
Bits From an article by Jule Miller for Vanity Fair :
Aretha gave birth to her first child, a son she named Clarence, two months before her 13th birthday. Aretha never publicly shared the identity of Clarence’s father, but Aretha’s brother and manager Cecil told Ritz that the father was “just a guy [Aretha] knew from school…she wasn’t all that interested in him and I don’t think he had any deep interest in her.” Aretha said in From These Roots that the pregnancy was uneventful—and Cecil said Aretha’s father (the good pastor) wasn’t particularly furious. “He understood these things happen,” Cecil told Ritz before explaining that Aretha’s father gathered his children after the announcement to warn them about the consequences of sex. (There are also rumors that the good reverend C.L. was the father of her first child).
After Aretha had the baby, C.L. allowed his daughter to drop out of school. But instead of letting Aretha stay home to take care of the child—that responsibility fell to Aretha’s paternal grandmother—C.L. recruited his daughter to begin traveling with him and his gospel group on the road. (there was money to be made)
As C.L.’s biographer, Nick Salvatore, wrote in Singing in a Strange Land, “C.L.’s inclusion of his daughter, a vulnerable woman-child, on the tour all but demanded that she grow up fast. In that intensely emotional, sexually charged adult context, she was at once a starstruck kid, a mother still discovering the meaning of those emotions, and an attractive female with a young teenager’s profoundly uneven self-confidence…her very presence unavoidably exposed her to experiences well beyond her years.” According to Ritz, Aretha told him that when she was 12, she went back to then 23-year-old Sam Cooke’s motel room with him.
When Aretha was 14, she became pregnant again—eventually having a second son that she named Eddie. Like Clarence, Eddie was also given Aretha’s last name and raised primarily by Aretha’s grandmother. In her memoir, Aretha said her preacher father was fine with this pregnancy too—a point that Aretha’s brother Cecil refuted to Ritz. “It’s enough to say he wasn’t at all happy and he made his unhappiness quite clear.”
In Respect, the pregnancies are handled vaguely—in an early scene, when Aretha is still a child, about 10 years old, a male family friend enters her bedroom at night and closes the door behind him. In a later scene, the adult Aretha has two sons. Tommy and Wilson told Vanity Fair that they were “following Aretha’s lead” in terms of the vagueness around the paternity of her first son.
“The specificity [of who impregnated] her doesn’t matter as much as what it did, in terms of trauma, and children not being able to provide consent,” said Wilson. Added Tommy, “All victims of abuse should get to share their own stories of abuse on their own timeline and terms.”
Her First Marriage
According to Ritz, Aretha first saw Ted White at a party inside her family’s home in 1954 when she was 12. When the singer and single mother was in her late teens, she married White and appointed him as her manager in spite of her father’s protestations. Etta James explained to Ritz, “Ted was supposed to be the slickest pimp in Detroit. When I learned that Aretha married him, I wasn’t surprised. A lot of the big-time singers who we idolized as girls…had pimps for boyfriends and managers…Part of the lure of pimps was that they got us paid. They protected us. They also beat us up.”
In a 1968 cover story, Time portrayed Aretha as being a larger-than-life performer who could command any stage, but who skulked behind the scenes. “I’ve been hurt—hurt bad,” the magazine cryptically quoted her as saying. The story continued:
“…last year…Aretha’s husband, Ted White, roughed her up in public at Atlanta’s Regency Hyatt House Hotel. It was not the first such incident. White, 37, a former dabbler in Detroit real estate and a street-corner wheeler-dealer, has come a long way since he married Aretha and took over the management of her career. Sighs Mahalia Jackson: ‘I don’t think she’s happy. Somebody else is making her sing the blues.’ But Aretha says nothing, and others can only speculate on the significance of her singing lyrics like these:
“I don’t know why I let you do these things to me;
“My friends keep telling me that you ain’t no good,
“But oh, they don’t know that I’d leave you if I could…
“I ain’t never loved a man the way that I love you.”
Franklin’s brother Cecil told Ritz that White “was a violent cat whose violence only got worse. I felt like Aretha was singing ‘Respect’ to Ted, but it hardly made any difference. He kept slapping her around and didn’t care who saw him do it.”
“You could compare the Aretha/Ted situation with Ike and Tina,” Etta James told Ritz. “Ike made Tina, no doubt about it. He developed her talent. He showed her what it meant to be a performer. He got her famous. Of course, Ted White was not a performer, but he was savvy about the world.”
As Aretha became more miserable in her marriage, she allegedly looked to alcohol to numb her pain. It surprised her agent Ruth Bowen, who told Ritz:
“She had a habit of getting loaded before a performance. In no way did that help her singing…Aretha was big on denial. She didn’t want to hear that she had a drinking problem. It didn’t matter how many falls she suffered, how many tickets she got, how many subpar performances she gave due to inebriation. Her talent protected her. Even drunk, she could sing better than ninety-nine out of a hundred singers. Most people couldn’t tell anything was wrong.”
Aretha never publicly acknowledged her alleged battle with alcohol. While other public figures have garnered sympathy from fans by acknowledging their personal obstacles, that was not Aretha’s style.
“She had a tough childhood,” Ritz explained to People in 2018, shortly after the icon’s death. “And early on in her career she was hit by the tabloids…there were stories of her being a victim of domestic violence and she didn’t like that. She didn’t like the image of her being a beaten woman. She loved the blues but she didn’t want to be seen as a tragic blues figure.”
From Howard :
While listening to CKUA radio the other day, I was reminded that March 25 was Aretha Franklin’s birthday. They had just played ‘Freeway of Love’, which was one of her more popular hits in the latter part of her career. I started thinking about all of the other great black female singers from that era, ones that seemed to hold themselves together through careers of noted mistreatment and abuse. They all have their often glossed over stories that reveal little of their personal histories – that made them special and great and often destroyed or diminished them. I had this image of Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Diana Ross, Tina Turner, Etta James, Whitney Houston, Big Mama Thornton, Bessie smith, Dinah Washington, Nina Simone, Dionne Warwick and Mahalia Jackson all having a get together in heaven exchanging stories over drinks they didn’t need and having some laughs and cries. They would look down and shake their heads at the clown show that celebrates itself and products like Lizzo, Ice Spice, Nicki Minaj, Doja Cat, Cardi B, Saweetie, Rico Nasty, Chika, and Kash Doll. No doubt these new twerking, pole dancing icons and idols of excellence in popular culture and humiliation ritual have their own stories behind their ‘success’ but the comparison ends there. Times and tastes change. Music still hath charms but most of it now are pumped out as spells to direct the masses to new levels of depravity – an autotuned, trippy, bump and grind soundtrack to the apocalyse. These brave new ‘voices’ are promoted to celebrate and empower black womanhood. Perhaps the photos and music of the past reflect a simpler time and evoke a nostalgia for what were perceived as periods of innocence – when gifted stars were carefully crafted to conceal the gritty reality of the entertainment industry controlled by greedy men.
One of industry designed to distract the masses from what was really going on.
Kinda like professional sports.
Sis Boom Bah, Rang a Dang a Ding Dong.