Though Nat Cole, Sam Cooke, and Marvin Gaye all had preacher fathers, none of those fathers were famous. None of them had national reputations or recording careers. Aretha’s dad—the Reverend C. L. Franklin—had all that and then some. He was a towering figure in the history of black America, a social activist and progressive theologian who stood beside his close friend Martin Luther King Jr. as a national civil rights leader. His fame, though, came from a remarkable rhetorical talent married to the excitement of hot rhythmic music.
The great blues singer Bobby “Blue” Bland told me about his early memories of seeing C. L. Franklin preach at the New Salem Baptist Church in Memphis.
“Couldn’t have been older than eleven or twelve when Mama and them took me to hear this new preacher man everyone was talking about. This was the early forties. We hadn’t moved to Memphis yet but we’d go there on the weekend, one of the principal reasons being church. I liked church ’cause of the exciting spirit of the music, but when the preachers got to preaching, I’d get bored and fidgety. But here comes this man with a voice like a singer. In fact, he did sing before he started into preaching—and that got my attention right off. Can’t tell you what hymn he sang, but his voice was strong. I sat right up and my mind didn’t wander anywhere. He grabbed my attention and kept it. When he started into the preaching part, I stayed with him. Wasn’t his words that got me—I couldn’t tell you what he talked on that day, couldn’t tell you what any of it meant, but it was the way he talked. He talked like he was singing. He talked music. The thing that really got me, though, was this squall-like sound he made to emphasize a certain word. He’d catch the word in his mouth, let it roll around and squeeze it with his tongue. When it popped on out, it exploded, and the ladies started waving and shouting. I liked all that. I started popping and shouting too. That next week I asked Mama when we were going back to Memphis to church.
“‘Since when you so keen on church?’ Mama asked.
“‘I like that preacher,’ I said.
“‘Reverend Franklin?’ she asked.
“‘Well, if he’s the one who sings when he preaches, that’s the one I like.’
“‘He’s sure enough the one,’ said Mama.
“Sometimes we’d go to East Trigg Missionary, where, according to Mama, the pastor W. Herbert Brewster was Reverend Franklin’s teacher. There were two powerful voices in that church—Queen Anderson and J. Robert Bradley—who were about the baddest gospel singers you’d ever wanna hear. I know Reverend Franklin loved them because sometimes he’d show up at East Trigg for the late service after he was done preaching at New Salem. He’d sit there on the first row taking notes during Brewster’s sermons. Then he’d be up on his feet shouting and waving when Queen Anderson and Bradley started into singing.
“Wasn’t long after that when I started fooling with singing myself. I liked whatever was on the radio, especially those first things Nat Cole did with his trio. Naturally I liked the blues singers like Roy Brown, the jump singers like Louis Jordan, and the ballad singers like Billy Eckstine, but, brother, the man who really shaped me was Reverend Franklin.
“Years later, when I started driving for B.B. King, it turned out B. felt the same way about Reverend Franklin. By then, Reverend had gone from Memphis to Buffalo to Detroit, where me and B. would go to the New Bethel Church to see him.”
“I sat under his sermons for many years,” B.B. King told me. “I’d like to say that he was the bluesman’s preacher because he’d come to the clubs to see us, but that wouldn’t be fair. Frank—that’s what his friends called him—was everyone’s preacher. Because those sermons he recorded were selling in the same little stores as our blues records, we also looked at him as a fellow artist. He was one of us. Unlike other men of the cloth, he never called our music devilish—and we loved him for that. But he did more than that. He let us know that he admired what we were doing. He called us true artists and had no qualms about telling the world just how he felt. That made us feel like royalty.”
The fact that Reverend was a liberal—even a radical—in the severely conservative black church culture shaped Aretha’s story on every level. To take on that culture required an unusually strong character and conviction. Reverend had both.
“He possessed rhetorical genius,” said Jesse Jackson, who preached at C.L.’s funeral in 1984. In the discussion I had with him in 2008, Jackson described his mentor as the model of the modern black preacher. “He not only infused his messages with great poetry and startling metaphors, but he imparted significant social meaning, pointing out that, as children of God, we were no more or less beloved than any other people. C.L. preached the say-it-loud-I’m-black-and-I’m-proud message generations before James Brown. Along with Dr. King, he was far ahead on the curve of civil rights. He was an assertive intellectual, not an apologist, a beacon of strength and hope for the millions of the transplants who’d come from the South in the forties and fifties to find work in the great industrial cities of the North.”
“I saw Aretha’s daddy as one of the few preachers powerful enough to dispel that old myth that says gospel and blues are mortal enemies,” James Cleveland told me. “He had the courage to say that they actually go together as proud parts of our heritage as a people.”
The creative tension between secular and sacred music is one of the enduring mysteries of African American culture. For those raised in the church, the bias against reconciling the spirit and the flesh runs deep. Singers praising God on a Sunday morning while using those same artistic passions—rhythms and riffs—to extol sensual pleasures on a Saturday night have faced angry rebuke.
In Jewish culture, a similar story is told in The Jazz Singer, the first talkie, a groundbreaking film released in 1927 in which Al Jolson plays Jakie Rabinowitz, son of a cantor—a singer of sacred songs. The boy defies his ultrareligious dad by singing popular songs and leaving the synagogue for the stage.
Ironically, Reverend C. L. Franklin was, along with his daughter Aretha, an Al Jolson enthusiast. And doubly ironic is the fact that it was Franklin, a pure product of the black church, who defied this strict separation of gospel and jazzy blues.
In the twentieth century, the sacred/secular split begins with Thomas A. Dorsey, the former barrelhouse pianist known as Georgia Tom, who invented modern black gospel music in the thirties by infusing blues into songs of worship. His first hit, “Precious Lord, Take My Hand,” was sung by his student Mahalia Jackson at the funeral of Martin Luther King Jr. Aretha sang it countless times. Yet the black church community was slow to warm to Dorsey’s music. They considered it too jazzy. Even when it was adopted into the repertory, old-timers complained that it was tainted with fleshly harmonies.
The Jazz Singer archetype—the singer caught between the church and the world—persisted in the black community throughout the forties and fifties. The Jazz Singer dramas vary but are linked by the same essential story line: a terrible tension between singing for God and singing for sex.
Superstition in the black community ran deep.
Remembering the death of Jesse Belvin in Arkansas in 1962, Ray Charles told me, “Jesse used to talk about how he directed the choir in some church in LA. His people warned him about leaving the church. But, like most of us, Jesse had stars in his eyes. When he started singing R-and-B, you could hear the church in his voice. He was the cat who wrote ‘Earth Angel.’ That always felt like a religious song to me. Well, when Jesse and his old lady were killed in a car wreck, folks started talking much shit. They said he was dead because he’d left the church. They were sure that God was punishing him. A lot of church singers were plain scared to cross over to the pop side, including Mahalia. Not me. When I caught hell for turning gospel songs into R-and-B, I couldn’t have cared less. I don’t believe in no superstitions. Besides, I knew why Jesse was killed. His driver had been my driver first. I’d fired that guy for drinking and falling asleep at the wheel. He’s the cat who killed Jesse and Jesse’s wife. God didn’t have shit to do with it.”
The shooting death of Sam Cooke, murdered by a female hotel manager in Los Angeles in 1964, sent shock waves through the gospel/blues community.
“I remember my dad saying one word to me after we learned that Sam was shot,” said Marvin Gaye. “He said, ‘See?’
“‘See what?’ I asked.
“‘See what happens when you displease God.’
“I didn’t argue,” Marvin continued. “You couldn’t argue with my father. But he was one of the ministers who thought if you sang the devil’s music, you wound up going down with the devil himself. I like to tell myself that I don’t have that attitude—that I’m liberated from the old way of thinking. In the deepest part of me, though, those thoughts are there. To survive this world, I’m pretty sure that one day I’ll have to follow Saint Francis and devote myself to singing for the birds and the God who created them.”
“One of the most astounding things about C.L.,” said James Cleveland, “is that although his liberal attitudes about music seem like they should be coming from someone educated in the North, he was a farm boy from the Deep South.”
Born January 22, 1915, in rural Mississippi to sharecroppers, Franklin was raised by his mother, Rachel, who would, in turn, raise Aretha. Big Mama, as the family called her, was the prominent maternal figure in Aretha’s life. C.L.’s dad disappeared when the boy was four.
“According to Big Mama,” Aretha’s baby sister, Carolyn, told me, “Daddy had the voice of a grown man when he was only ten. They saw him as prophetic. As a preteen, he was already delivering sermons.”
“Big Mama worshipped her son,” said Aretha’s brother Cecil. “She used to talk about how he was years ahead of the other kids when it came to reading. She’d talk about how the nearest town with a library was thirty miles away, and how they had to ride a horse-drawn wagon to get there. By the time he was thirteen, he had read novels by Charles Dickens and Nathaniel Hawthorne and could name the books of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation—not only name them, but write commentaries on them. In deep backwoods Mississippi, he was considered a phenomenon, a wonder child.”
At fourteen, C.L. experienced what he called “my born-again baptism” in the Sunflower River. Despite not completing grade school, at eighteen he was preaching on a circuit of churches from Cleveland to Clarksdale, Mississippi. Before turning twenty-one, he enrolled at Greenville Industrial College, an unaccredited Afro-Baptist school surrounded by sharecropper plantations.
“I had lived and worked in Greenville,” said B.B. King. “That’s part of the reason Frank and I got along so well. We knew the territory of each other’s upbringings. We had both been treated like dogs and called dirty niggers. We had both witnessed lynchings. Yet our mamas taught us to believe in a God of justice.
“Frank told me that his college had taught him to believe every word of the Bible. You had to read it literally. He told me that when he challenged one of the teachers by mentioning the theories of Charles Darwin, the teacher slapped him across his face. But even then, Frank understood that, although there’s deep truth in the Bible, there’s also poetry, and that all poetry is open to interpretation.”
“Daddy’s college was all about Booker T. Washington’s go-slow accommodation approach to the racial question,” said C.L.’s son, Cecil. “Washington stressed technical colleges for blacks while W.E.B. DuBois, his adversary, argued for a liberal arts education that would increase our ability to think deeply and critically. Ironically, in spite of his fundamentalist indoctrination at Greenville Industrial, Daddy ultimately rejected fundamentalism. In sentiment and philosophy, he was closer to DuBois than Washington. His deep intellectual curiosity led him to read with not only his heart, but his head. He swam against the cultural tide of his times and, by the natural force of his native intelligence, became a progressive. Daddy loved the Lord as passionately as any fundamentalist, but he understood that God’s word was often not self-explanatory. God’s word required informed and loving explanation on the part of man.”
By age nineteen, C.L. was married to Alene Gaines. By twenty-one, he had divorced Alene and married Barbara Siggers, who had a young son, Vaughn. When C.L. was twenty-three, Barbara gave birth to their first child, Erma Vernice. By then they were living in Memphis, where, at age twenty-four, Reverend preached his first sermon at the New Salem Baptist Church, where Bobby Bland first heard him. That was 1939. Barbara and C.L.’s son, Cecil, was born in 1940.
That same year Franklin fathered another child, not with Barbara but with Mildred Jennings, who was twelve years old when she became pregnant with C.L.’s daughter Carol Allan. The scandal was kept secret from his other children until he sat them down in 1958 and revealed the truth to them.
On March 25, 1942, Aretha Louise, named after his father’s two sisters, was born in Memphis at 406 Lucy Avenue to C. L. Franklin and his wife, Barbara.
C.L. made his first foray into the media world in Memphis in the early forties. He hosted his own radio show, The Shadow of the Cross, whose mission, according to C.L., was “to offer hymns of inspiration, messages to unify the Negroes of the Mid-South, assuage racial animus, and acquaint white listeners with the Negro’s loyalty and accomplishments.” It was in Memphis where he began crafting his most famous sermon—“The Eagle Stirreth the Nest.” Eighty years after Franklin employed the graphic and highly complex metaphor, the sermon is included in several academic anthologies of literature, is taught in colleges, and remains one of the essential texts of African American history.
In 1944, the family moved to Buffalo, New York, where C.L. preached at the Friendship Baptist Church. That same year, the last of the four Franklin/Siggers children—Carolyn Ann—was born.
As a media presence, C.L. grew increasingly comfortable. In Buffalo he became the first black preacher to utilize radio. According to his biographer Nick Salvatore, “Franklin’s ‘Voice of Friendship’ program highlighted religious worship (including at times a brief sermon by C.L.), gospel music, and commentary on current events.”
During the summer of 1945, when C.L. was thirty, his big moment arrived at the National Baptist Convention. The Michigan Chronicle reported that his thunderous sermon, taken from 2 Corinthians 5:1–2, “almost paralyzed the convention with logic and history and thought.” The scripture itself—“For we know that if our earthly house, this tent, is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens”—proved ironic. The forcefulness of its message led to a new earthly church home for Franklin. His fiery delivery caught the attention of the elders of Detroit’s New Bethel Baptist, who, when their pastor Horatio Coleman resigned, invited C.L. to lead their congregation. Starting in the summer of 1946, when Aretha was four, her family moved to Detroit, where, in the early fifties, Reverend C. L. Franklin became a national star.
Idealization is a fascinating phenomenon that I came to better understand when, while collaborating with Aretha on her autobiography, From These Roots, I saw Minnelli on Minnelli, the Broadway show where Liza sang songs associated with the movies of her dad, director Vincent Minnelli. She reminisced about how Vincent and her mother, Judy Garland, met on the set of Meet Me in St. Louis. Anyone remotely familiar with the Garland/Minnelli marriage knows that it was stormy from the start and ended in bitter divorce. But Liza didn’t tell that story. She painted a portrait of an idyllic parental relationship that led to Liza’s idyllic life. In reimagining her childhood as a privileged daughter of two deliriously happy people, Liza created a fairy tale that swept away the pain of a traumatic past.
In From These Roots, Aretha speaks of her two sisters, Erma and Carolyn, and her two brothers, Cecil and Vaughn. She does not disclose that Vaughn was her mom’s son by another man. Neither does she mention Carol Allan, the daughter born to her father and the teenage Mildred Jennings. She clings to the myth that, while they were together, her parents enjoyed an idyllic relationship.
In the dedication of her book, Aretha wrote, “I dedicate my book to my parents, Reverend C. L. Franklin and Barbara Siggers, who came together in love and marital bliss and out of this union came I, Aretha.”
Aretha was vague about the exact moment when her Mississippi-born mother took her son Vaughn and left her husband and four other children to move back to Buffalo in 1948.
Big sister Erma, ten years old at the time, remembered the event well. “We were devastated,” she said. “Mother was an extraordinary woman, extremely beautiful and bright. Her singing voice was angelic. I believe she could have been a vocal star. She also played piano. She worked as a nurse’s aide, and, even though Daddy had a good salary from the church, I felt that she wanted to be independent. Maybe that was the source of the problem. I really don’t know. I do know that my parents’ relationship was stormy and that my father had a violent temper. I never saw him strike her but we were all very conscious of not inciting Daddy’s wrath. I’d also be lying if I didn’t admit that we certainly knew about my father’s reputation as a ladies’ man. We saw how women in church literally threw themselves at him. After I became older, I saw for myself that he availed himself of many of those women. That didn’t make us love him any less. That’s just who he was.
“Mother moving to Buffalo might have been her idea or his—I’m not sure. She may well have been afraid of him or she may well have grown tired of sharing him with other ladies. I must say, though, that my parents handled the situation maturely. She assured us that she would always be our mother and we could visit her whenever we wanted. And we did. Buffalo is only two hundred miles from Detroit and we went to see Mother all the time.”
In discussing her mother, Aretha railed against the notion that Barbara had, in fact, abandoned her family. She called that rumor a vicious lie. In discussing her mom, she remembered the woman as loving and caring in every way. In Aretha’s view, her mother would be the last person in the world to desert her children.
And yet the myth of Barbara Siggers’s desertion continued. As recently as 2012, Anthony Heilbut, a prominent scholar of gospel music, wrote in his otherwise brilliant The Fan Who Knew Too Much, “Barbara left home when Aretha was ten and died a few years later without seeing her children again.” In fact, Aretha was six when her mother moved back to Buffalo in 1948, and, according to all four of the Franklin siblings I interviewed, they visited her on a regular basis.
“My father was a different kind of man,” Aretha’s big brother Cecil Franklin told me when we spoke in the mid-1980s. “His loyalty was essentially to God, his children, and his congregation. He was never going to be a one-woman man. In contrast, Mother was certainly a one-man woman. She was totally devoted to him and did not like sharing him with the world. During those visits to Buffalo, I know she wanted us to permanently move in with her, but that wasn’t going to happen. Not only were we a handful, but she didn’t have the funds to raise five children. Dad did. All sorts of women from church were more than willing to look after us—plus we had Big Mama, who ran our household with an iron fist. It was highly unconventional in those days for a father to assume custody of his children after a marital breakup, but C. L. Franklin was a highly unconventional man.”
“Looking back at the whole situation,” said Carolyn Franklin, Aretha’s baby sister, “I think Mother’s move impacted Aretha more than anyone. At the time I was barely four and less conscious of what was happening. Aretha was a severely shy and withdrawn child who was especially close to her mother. Erma, Cecil, and I were much more daring and independent. Aretha and I shared a room, and after Mother left I saw her cry her eyes out for days at a time. I remember comforting her, my big sister, by telling her how much fun it would be to visit Buffalo. Days before those trips to see Mother, Aretha would have her little bag packed and be ready to go. The highlight of the visits would be the toy nurse’s kit Mother gave us.”
Aretha had specific memories about modeling herself after a nurse’s aide like her mother. She spoke about how her mom instructed her to care for patients and how she joyfully went to Buffalo General Hospital to watch her mother work. She remembered her mother as a faultlessly patient woman who neither scolded nor said a bad word about anyone, including the Reverend C. L. Franklin. In short, she saw her mother as a saint.
Her memories were also specific when it came to her mother’s house in Buffalo on Lythe Street in a tree-lined neighborhood called Cold Springs. She recounted the furnishings: the blue-and-silver velvet chairs, the fancy couches, the upright piano. She and her mom sang together. Those were the times Aretha cherished most. Because the house was small, she and Erma slept next door at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Dan Pitman. Mrs. Pitman taught Aretha to crochet, a skill she cultivated throughout her life.
“During those trips to Buffalo,” Erma remembered, “we were introduced to a gentleman, Trustee Young. I presumed he was Mother’s boyfriend. We loved riding in his big car. Sometimes he’d take us to Niagara Falls.”
“As much as Aretha adored our father,” said Cecil, “she would have been thrilled to live with Mother. If she hadn’t been so wary of displeasing our dad, I’m sure she would have asked him. But that question would never be posed. Dad made it clear that wasn’t an option. So every time we had to leave Buffalo and return to Detroit, it broke Aretha’s little heart. Dad did everything in his power to make Ree feel secure, but I know insecurity invaded her spirit at an early age. For all that she has achieved in her life, I think that basic insecurity has never left her. In fact, I believe it defines her—that and her soaring talent.”
“Onstage and in the studio no one is more confident,” Carolyn told me, “but offstage it’s been a different story. She’s changed a lot over the years, but if she acts extremely assertive now, I believe it’s to overcompensate for her doubts. It sounds crazy that someone as gifted as my sister Aretha would harbor doubts, but she does. That came as a direct result of a challenging childhood.”
The Aretha I began working with seemed anything but insecure. That’s why I was surprised to reread the interviews I’d done with her siblings a decade earlier. Because Erma, Cecil, and Carolyn were all in agreement, I had no reason to doubt them. Aretha had been an insecure little girl.
Ruth Bowen, her booking agent, helped me understand.
“I’ve known Aretha ever since she was a little girl,” she told me. “I met her through her daddy, whom I called Frank. Frank was great friends with Dinah Washington, my first major client. Dinah was not only her father’s girlfriend for a minute, at one point she was also Ted White’s girlfriend, the man who became Aretha’s first husband. Ted and I were close. But don’t let me get ahead of myself, honey. Let me tell you about the kind of child Aretha was. She was a traumatized child—that’s who she was. It’s one thing to have your mama move out of the house for reasons you don’t understand. But it’s another to have your mama die of a heart attack as a young woman. Aretha was ten when that happened. And it happened just like that—no preparation, no warning. Frank told me that he was afraid that Aretha wouldn’t ever recover, that she was unable to talk for weeks. She crawled into a shell and didn’t come out until many years later. What brought her, of course, was the music. Without the music I’m not sure Aretha would have ever found her way out of the shell.”
In From These Roots Aretha devotes less than a page to the death of her mother. She simply recounts that her father called the four children into the kitchen and said that Barbara had died of a heart attack. She assures the reader that her father could not have been more understanding. In her account, there is no attempt to process the pain because, according to Aretha, pain is a most private concern.